Procedural Textures vs Image Textures

Support Materials and Textures
1

(Apologies if a similar thread already exists)

Hello,

I’ve been working with blender for quite a while now and have dragged my feet on using downloaded images as textures. I never liked the idea of using other people’s pictures in my projects. However, after about a year of fake looking textures I’d like to know what the best route is when making photo-realistic materials for Blender Cycles.
Say I wanted to make a wood texture, will I have to use image textures(if so then where do I get them?) or can I get away with using procedural texturing.

TL;DR
For photorealistic textures: procedural or image texture?
If I need image textures where can I get them?

Thanks!

John

2

A simple change in the title is the answer:

(some_ammount) * Procedural Textures + (some_ammount) * Image Textures

and this is so variable as the type of project you’re doing. (sometimes you don’t even need one of them, and I can easily imagine not needing anything)

Note: This is not only about aesthetics… it’s also software, hardware, manuseability, etc.