{"id":745,"date":"2015-08-13T22:50:14","date_gmt":"2015-08-14T05:50:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/?p=745"},"modified":"2015-08-27T23:19:17","modified_gmt":"2015-08-28T06:19:17","slug":"texturing-part-1-finding-textures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/texturing-part-1-finding-textures\/","title":{"rendered":"Texturing: Part 1 \u2013 Finding Textures"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cWhere do you get your textures?\u201d is something I\u2019m asked from time to time. I have a huge stock of textures for modding and graphic design. I used to scour Google Image Search for hours, then have to check the copyright permissions on every image I found. It\u2019s frustrating finding the perfect image only to find you have to shell out ten dollars for it or make do with something else. In the end I\u2019ve found it better to make them myself whenever I can. There is a lot to it however, which is why this post will come in several parts.<\/p>\n

Building a solid texture library will take some strain off finding them every time you start a project. I started my library with a free download of low resolution textures, which are no longer good enough to use even in my hobby work, but it gave me a solid foundation to learn from. It came with folders filled with tiling metal, stone, wood, leather, cloth, water, and so on. It taught me how to value a simple textures that don\u2019t out-shout the content they\u2019re meant to compliment, which I\u2019ll talk about in Part 3: The Big Picture<\/a>. It also taught me how to kludge a handful of lesser textures together in Photoshop into something serviceable, which I\u2019ll cover more in Part 2: Making Textures<\/a>. But mostly it taught me what to look for as I roam with my camera \u2013 a texturer\u2019s best friend.<\/p>\n

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Even a semi-decent camera is enough to get started. I would love a professional camera with a macro lens, but I can\u2019t afford one so I make do with a simple snapshot camera I got for less than a hundred dollars. I also have a tripod, which I don\u2019t carry around with me, but use at home to minimize blur when I take photos of small objects like buttons or bits of plant matter I\u2019ve dragged inside so I can photograph them against a matte background. The matte background makes it easier to crop the object out of the photo, which can be as simple as a sheet of black or white paper laid out on a table. If you want to get fancy, you can even pull the sheet up so it covers the back of the object as well \u2013 in case you need to photograph it head on instead of top down. You can even get fancy with your arrangements and make photo collages you can use as the design itself, but I prefer doing all that in post production.<\/p>\n

I take most of my photos while I\u2019m out. You never know when you\u2019ll run into interesting bricks, or bark, or wooden beams. I make whole field trips to capture bits of raw nature in digital form. I enlist friends and family for their collections of interesting things. My mother quilts and my father blows glass, among many discarded hobbies that produced their own sets of well-worn tools and trinkets. I also have my own collection, a set of jewellery tools and metal sheets. I have a huge photo collection of scratched metal and rust, and through my journeys, acquired textures of wood, bark, rocks, water, and tons of plants. You can collect floor tile samples or fabric swatches. There\u2019s a whole world out there to gather through your lens and turn into art.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve found taking photos for textures is completely different than your regular snapshots though. So here are some photography tips for texturers:<\/p>\n