Off Topic a though on photographic textures
a though on photographic textures
4 replies so photographic textures are used in almost all videos game today, but there's no skill involved with it, take a picture, place the picture on the model, and done.... shouldn't this be considered a cheaty way of modeling?
i mean indie devs, and 2d game artists have to make everything by hand, actually putting effort into their textures, but big companies dont even try on textures anymore.
i mean this seems as cheaty as ripping someone elses texture from another game, ripping textures, from the game of life, stealing from earth...
im just wandering why this is, and why they dont make their own "photo realistic textures"
-just me feeling a little philosophical Will anyone translate this for me? Big companies just outsource it, who knows how they make it. DC Admin 
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It's not true that there is no skill involved in making textures from photos. It can actually be pretty hard to fix problems with light and reflections in photos and it's also some work to make them seamless or to mask them properly. Also in almost every new game you have additional textures like bumpmaps etc. which need to be created as well.
It's still simply the best solution if you want to get a realistic look. Why should you try to draw something which looks real when you can simply take a photo of it? It's less work and therefore much cheaper and you'll probably get a more realistic result. ...your probably right, but it still seems like "the lazy way" and i guess your right, it does need a decent cameraman, and a decent artist to make them seamless, but otherwise, it just seems weird... having real life textures on computer generated objects.
i guess motion capture is the same sort of deal, real people, real animations, fake models -but somehow, that just seems more "ok"
one day when PCs are powerful enough, they are almost certainly going to use giant 3d printers to copy real life objects, people, buildings, ect. into games, that way you dont even need to use modelers, or even texturers...
-but that too just seems odd to me. 
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a though on photographic textures