Letting Your Textures Do a Lot of the Work

When I am working on a mesh, and I know that I will be creating several textures that will need to visually work together, I often start with the same base texture. In the above examples I start with a photograph of wood grain and soften it by running the Cutout Filter on it in Photoshop. Cutout turns photographic images into a more graphic image and has the effect of minimizing the contrast , giving a painterly quality to the image. I then add separations in the wood texture to suggest planks or individual boards. Next I copy and paste one of these boards to the top and bottom of my planks and darken them slightly. I repeat this to create the additional cross pieces, finally adding minor details and highlights to the surface to add interest and suggest the surface is weathered.

This technique allows me to build a variety of textures from the same base. Each of the above textures has it origin in my first Cutout wood grain texture. This also assures that there is a cohesive quality to all the textures, making my finished model look more believable.

As I have said before, texture creation is often the most time consuming aspect of 3D model building. The quality of the textures applied to your mesh will determine the quality of the finished product. I often create master versions of each texture at twice the size of the eventual finished file, which is where I do all of my finer details. In this example I have added nicks and scratches to help break up the more linear edges and suggest age. I personally like a more impressionistic approach when I create textures and find they often suggest more detail then is actually there. ~Don