About texturing

[WhiteGuardian]

Hi guys.
I'm newbie in 3d area. A few days ago my friend ask me a question about texturing in 3d. The question like this "Do 3d artist around the world should using texture stcck or real texture for creating/texturing their texture map? Or they still manually using painting program such as Photoshop/Painter to make their texture map?"

In my opinion and actually i have 2d basic, i believe artist prefer to create the texture map manually, but for some reason/condition maybe cause running out of time (deadline), so they using the texture stock that can be found/download from internet.

Please give me some opinion or feedback, so i can tell my friend about that or maybe i can invite my friend to read this thread

Thx before :)

[ShadyD]

I think you mean Photosourcing.
Some artist are really good at it, they can make super realistic textures.

Me, I like handpainting, even though i'm not really good at it, I get allot more satisfaction knowing I made it from scratch.

[carcass]

it depends on style and artistic preference. If they are going for a realistic looking game, usually photo is used and blended with other photos. Half Life 2 used a lot of photo compositing in their textures. It is difficult to make photos look natural on a model, most of the time it just looks like a photo slapped on. I personally prefer hand painting textures, and in all the games I've worked on, part of the art direction was to NOT use photos. With normal maps defining most of the form on a model nowadays, getting photos to have the flat diffuse color needed takes a lot of Photoshop work.