Can I Use My Dig. Camera To Collect Textures?

[Maximius]

I just bought a little digital camera and I was wondering what I have to do to collect textures for eventual use in modelling. I'm sure its more involved than just snapping a few close ups of a brick wall, or is it? Philly has lots of good old buildings and such.

[OrbWeaver]

It depends how far you want to go. Taking closeups of textures on a cloudy day is all you really need to do by way of photography, but they will obviously require some processing before they can be used in-game.

[Maximius]

It depends how far you want to go. Taking closeups of textures on a cloudy day is all you really need to do by way of photography, but they will obviously require some processing before they can be used in-game.

 

 

Ok, so if i can take some clear, not to brightly lit up photos of walls, brickface, wood, rusted metals, clean metal, whatever, it could probably be used to make a texture with some processing. Cool, Ill keep at my collecting. thanks for info.

[PinkDot]

Just make sure, that they're made at decent resolution (nowadays it's 1600x1200 or higher) with low or none compresion. And the things like bricks (or other things with horizontal and vertical lines) should be taken from some distance with small zoom - that will prevent 'fish eye' distortion.

 

Also make sure that the surface is evenly lit.

 

Then all you have to do in Photoshop (or similar program) is to make them tileable - crop the square, offset texture, so the seams are clear in the middle of the picture, and using mostly Clone tool (or any other you like) make the seams invisible.

 

You can also adjust some colour, brightness and contrast correction to achieve desired effect.

 

----

Higher level of texture creation is mixing several textures to get some more interesting materials, dirt, scratches etc....

[Maximius]

thanks for the info, ill try it out

[demagogue]

I want to do this in NYC as well.

What about normalmapping (3d info)? Is it important (or how important is it) that this be made along with the hi-res photo?

 

I read one insteresting tut where a guy was creating a normal map by taking 3 different pictures of the same surface with a flashlight lighting it at different directions, then colorizing each one and superimposing them. It looked like a good idea, but for relatively small objects you can set up inside; it doesn't look very convienent to do on outside walls.

 

Are you guys hoping to have normalmaps with the textures, and what is the best way to make them? (I saw on Doom3 you could do it with Maya if nothing else.) Actually I just saw a tutorial on there on "creating bump maps with images" that looks better for this job than going all out with a 3D app. ( http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic...p=107690#107690 )

 

Also, the tutorial on Doom3 World for making textures, Part 1 anyway, is down. Anyone have a copy of this?

Edited October 16, 2006 by sparhawk