Advanced texturing techniques: creating textures from scratch
Most 3D apps come with a pretty good collection of different maps or textures. These textures are great because they are readily available, generally optimized for the software you are using, and ready to be placed on your models. These stock textures allow you to quickly create textured models, yourself and the other 20,000 people who own the same software.
“Canned” textures are nice to start with and can give you some fun results, but professionals and employers are rarely impressed by models that use canned textures; this means that the artist is too lazy to create his own or does not know how to do it. . Either way, canned textures are not the healthiest thing for a portfolio, so learning how to create your own textures becomes quite an important aspect of digital illustrator textures.
Creating procedural textures is a bit more complex than the scope of this book allows, so we’ll focus on how to create bitmap-based textures. As discussed earlier, textures are made up of several channels that contain maps that define how the different characteristics of the texture behave. These maps are figures whose source is quite unimportant. Some artists enjoy creating these figures through some type of drawing program such as Photoshop, Painter, Illustrator, or Freehand.
When looking for a highly stylized image, drawn textures are a great way to stay in control of the style. The other method is to create textures from photos, but sometimes photos simply contain too much visual noise, and sometimes a drawn representation of a photo is needed to simplify a map and make it usable. The actual process of drawing textures is a book unto itself, so we won’t spend a lot of time here, but if you can’t find a stock photo of the texture you need, consider the option to create maps from scratch.



