im still having trouble with textures. does anyone know of any training vids that are easy to find, follow and not too long. I just don’t have the time anymore to spend searching for hours. thanks.
what kind of texture tutorial do you mean? they all work a bit different imo. (i haven’t used any tutorials, so i am assuming that a glass tutorial would be very different from a cloth tutorial for example. since the way i do them they are different.)
I just need to learn the basics. I was using a tutorial before that was using a diff version or leaving things out. It was very confusing.
Well basic texturing:
First we apply a color map, also called diffuse map. A vague description since there is also a diffuse shading component. These are two different things in blender. To make it more confusing you can also map a texture to diffuse. But a color texture should be mapped to Col. This will simulate the color of the object.
Next some like to apply a bumb map (easy), or normal map (little bit more advanced), this will simulate depth in the material.
There is also a specular component in blenders materials. This can be mapped with a texture aswell. Enable Spec, and ‘No RGB’ buttons to use the textures intensity to define specular areas.
I use these three texture types on most of my models, sometimes changing the specular map to a reflection map, used to calculate reflections.
If you try Yafaray you will see that their method of texturing is different.
I make all of my textures myself.
Cgtextures has thousands of textures, lots of them are tiled and ready to use, and some will require tweaking in an image editor (I use photoshop, but i have used GIMP and it is very powerfull once you get over the weird interface )
There are also a few but solid tutorials on cgtextures.
Here are some must read texturing tutorials:
http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=4678&page=1
http://www.rethinkfx.com/tutorials/realistic-texturing (this is 3ds max, but the general idea can be reproduced in blender)
Feel free to ask more questions