I'm thinking of building my own texture library
Subtropic Pixel
Posts: 2,388
Hello!
It just occurred to me that I have TONS of textures in my everyday life.
Examples:
Many shirts. T-shirts, dress shirts, casual shirts, and shirts with French cuffs
Many pants. Jeans, dress pants, cargo pants, workout shorts, and more
Suit coats and blazers. My tuxedo coat is one of my favorites.
Paint. My house, inside and out, various colors that I have chosen over the years.
Furniture, musical instruments, my car, my lawn mower, my bright-red garden tiller, my wooden fence, the stucco, brick, and painted wood of my house, the kitchen counters and cabinets, and much more.
It would be a terrible waste to be living my life amongst so many wonderful colors and textures and NEVER take advantage of the opportunity to photograph and catalog some of them, right? So if I wanted to start building a texture catalog for texture-mapping and even bump-mapping, all for eventual use in my artwork, how would I begin?
I'm looking for the basic rules regarding image size, resolution, quality, lighting, and file types. Would not want to waste time and have to redo a lot of work.
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Comments
Here's how it is for just me.
Size/resolution/quality: As big and as much as you can stand, but under 1000 pixels square isn't much good to me personally; and if we're talking fabrics I prefer to put them in a scanner and get 4000 square or so.
If you have a good camera a 2500 by 2500 pic is often big enough. Cloudy days with no flash are best usually. You want the most even lighting and the least glare on surfaces that you can get when it's for texturing. Don't tile things yourself, anyone with a good image editor prefers to do their own and may prefer their output to yours.
CGTEXTURES Is a good model for size but uneven for quality.
Hi and thank you for responding.
You say that you prefer a scanner, but a good quality camera has higher resolution than just about any consumer-level scanner available, yes? Is this because a scanner's lighting is very controlled as opposed to trying to use a flash or other light with a camera?
I can see how glare would mess things up for texturing, because that would complicate specularity issues.
What do you mean not to tile things by myself? I'm not sure I understand this part.
What is "CGTEXTURES"?
Thanks again!
CGTEXTURES is a website where people can get various textures.
I just checked it out. Wow, there are a lot of textures available; this will be a superb resource for me.
But even with that, I still want to make some of my own textures. My garden path probably won't rank up there with Cambodia pics, but I enjoy some of these things and besides that, my pics won't have any limitations as to redistribution. :cheese:
Specularity is one reason; pattern distortion is another. Trying to set up a stand and a table or hold my twitchy hands steady to get a flat enough cloth pic is harder than just sticking cloth in a scanner. Also, for 20 bucks used I got a scanner that can do a 4000 pixel square scan, and you can't get a camera plus memory of decent quality for anywhere near that price; you can capture a larger area of fabric but nowhere near the same detail. If you already have a good camera, a set of good stands, and/or steady hands, maybe you don't need one. ;)
I have a Nikon D7000, which has a maximum resolution of 4,928 × 3,264. So it's pretty close. I have tripods too, so shooting fabrics, walls, and rooftops should produce pretty good results.
Just how close does the camera need to be to the subject?
It really depends on what you plan to do with the materials. If you are going to render full figures or buildings and apply the materials to them, you probably wouldn't need extreme closeups. If you want to render super-tiny items where you can see individual threads, a drop of water on a blade of grass, an insect's eye, etc. you will need extreme closeups that probably wouldn't be useful on larger items (and then you might have to worry about the shadow of the camera itself getting in the way.)
If you plan to tile materials (or make them tileable), then you will probably need to go to great lengths to ensure they are uniform. You might want to take a dozen photos and experiment with them before proceeding. Even things that look completely untiled when you paste two next to each other may have subtle patterns of lighting or differences that become extremely obvious if you, say, tile 10x10 of them.
If you are trying for accuracy on lighting, you should probably read up on that at a photography website (I don't have any suggestions offhand, you'll have to google around, but I know I have stumbled across them in the past.) Note that colors may look fine to your eye, but if you compare the same photo side-by-side taken with different forms of lighting, the differences will be painfully obvious. Generic incandescent lightbulbs will probably make it yellow, some old flourescent bulbs may make it green or red, sunlight will look different than most artificial light, morning/noon/evening sunlight has different colors, etc. You can probably spend anywhere from a little bit through an entire fortune on better lighting setups if you want. However, it may not matter much depending on what you are using them for. For example, if you have a bunch of photos of fabrics, chances are I have no way of knowing what their colors are supposed to be anyway, so it probably won't matter in most cases as long as the lighting isn't terrible. I would guess white would be the most obvious place where it could look wrong. If you are doing recognizable materials that I might personally own or have seen already, or are trying to exactly match something that exists that everybody is familiar with, it might matter more. I've seen some pretty bad colors in snapshots that people take.
If you are using reflective objects, keep in mind what might be showing up in the reflection. You might not want it in there, and might have to do a little work to eliminate undesired reflections or reflected colors. Or you might want several photos of the same object with different reflections to use under different circumstances (blue sky full sun, mix of blue sky and clouds, indoors with one light source, indoors with multiple light sources, nighttime with numerous streetlight light sources, whatever it takes to make satin fabric look like that vs. perfectly flat and featureless, etc.)
For image size, remember you can always reduce the resolution later (although if your images are being referenced from a hundred unknown scene files, that could be problematic, so "reduce" might actually mean "copy and reduce the copy"). However you can't increase it. If you are afraid of loosing it forever, get it at the highest resolution you can stand that doesn't give you other problems. (I did scan some photos at a high resolution once only to find out later that group of photos had a significant and highly negative impact on the time it took to display a list of thumbnails in one application; however I still have the option of reducing them if needed.) Maybe today it doesn't matter, but 20 years from now perhaps your monitor resolution will have gone way up, or perhaps you will want to start printing poster-sized prints, or project your artwork onto a large screen or wall, etc.)
Hello and thank you for all the detail. I skimmed it for now and will read it in more detail later.
A couple days ago, I did go back and look at cgtextures.com again. They definitely have a very comprehensive catalog of textures, mostly easy to find. I also saw that a membership will run close to $80 USD for a full year. Ouch! And I found some of the restrictions to be worded somewhat ambiguously. For sure, more research needed, especially if one is thinking about acquiring textures for use in models to be offered as products.