Editing Photo References

[cityy]

I've been messing arround with editing photo references from cgtextures.com lately. I read method's tutorial about editing references and wanted to know if there are any other tutorials about this topic you guys have experience with?!

An example of my attempts:

http://i.imgur.com/7TmhK.jpg

Any thoughts, tips - general advices?

[obsidian]

I'm guessing those pixelly bits are jpg compression artifacts?

Textures should be in dimensions in powers of 2. So 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, etc. pixels. Otherwise they will get resized to fit in texture memory, resulting in worse quality.

The contrast between the lighter and darker browns from left to right is a little too strong and probably won't look very good tiled as the repetition will be very apparent.

There's a bit of a blur running horizontally just a little above half-way of each tile.

I like the rivets and dents though.

[Hipshot]

It's too grainy. Have you used the spatter or grain filter on this?
Can I see the source? Might have used it myself...

[cityy]

This was the source:

http://cgtextures.com/texview_oldstyle. ... 53c2caaa3a

I duplicated the original layer - used noise - colorized it and set layer modus to overlay. Made this 3 times, always with different colors.

[Hipshot]

Yea, I have that in my source folder.
So I have used it, but I don't remember where...

The original texture consists of two sections, do you aim to use only one or two sections yourself?

Edit: I see now that you taken the mid-section of the texture and blended those together... And your way to make them align correctly have created the blur where the edges were to meet.

[Hipshot]

Created this xy-tiling from the texture set that you have used. It's 1024x512, took about 30 min this morning, it's a good beginning of something that can be useful in the future...

[lvlshot]http://www.zfight.com/misc/images/texture_temp.jpg[/lvlshot]

I'll see about writing my process here later this week, if I'm not to tired =)

(Side note: It took me about 5 min to create an exact copy of your texture from scratch).

When creating a texture, what tutorials usually don't say is that you need to take your time and look over details and tiling, copy paste, paint over, etc, it can take a long time... My texture uses no filters, except for a 50% sharpening as a final stage (and ofc color and level correction).

[cityy]

Big thanks Hipshot!

I am really looking forward to it. The texture looks very nice from the screenshot. (:

[cityy]

Do you still want to add your process here Hipshot?

[Hipshot]

Yes. I wrote a text about and have sample images, I just need to post it. Haven't been home that much though, I'll see about doing that this weekend. A bit late, but whatever...

[cityy]

Nice to hear! No problem, just wanted to be sure you didn't forgett it.