Just wondering where people stand with regards to hand-painted head/body textures vs. photo-based ones and hi-res vs. standard-res textures. Unless you're doing really close-up shots, does it make much of a difference in terms of the overall quality of the rendered image? Are the hi-res textures more trouble than they're worth (as far as a lot of crashing, etc.)? Just want to get other people's take on the issue. I'm not advocating one over the other.

I prefer the photorealistic like Steffy`s Noa and Asia.Another one i use very often is carly from dalinise(looks almost photorealistic) And if i dont want to make a very closeup i prefer the ones with lower resolution. The one with higher resolution crashes my computer(1,2gig Athlon,378 mb) or i use it without bumbmaps for the body.

I don't have any of those hyper-super-photorealistic textures like StefyZZ's textures... but I think people are silly to neglect the handpainted textures. For example samildanach's handpainted textures are true works of art! They render beautifully and won't make your computer go down on its knees. If I wanted 100% photorealism, I'd take photography as my hobby ;-) (well okay, I do have some great photorealistic textures like Syyd's Kane and I love them... but that doesn't mean I'd think any less of handpainted ones)

Hard to say... I find myself using handpainted textures more often than photo-based ones... (Shari by Eowyn, is a staple... THANKS Eowyn!). It may be my luck, but I find that I have to mess with lighting a lot with photobased textures to get them to look just right, sometimes they look splotchy, and I get frustrated and either give up, or switch to something else... but then I've seen INCREDIBLE work dones with photorealistic textures... so again, hard to say... YAY I was so NOT helpful... ;)

I like both photo-based and hand-painted. I tend to use high res but I have 512 megs of ram and I don't tend to use much for props other than clothes. I imagine if I wanted to do more scene type pictures I'd have to use lower res for my computer to be able to handle it.

I have to agree with everyone. It just depends, most of the time I prefer photo-realistic ones, because I tend to do close up's of my figures. But, handpainted ones can be just dandy, too- Only, I personally hate it when the maps are nothing but just noise patterns- And often times the photo-realistic ones have these ugly flash reflections, etc, that make it pretty hard to render from angles other than that which the photos were taken from, etc (jmho)- I usually don't have too many problems with my sys. crashing (Intel 750mhz, 396 MB RAM) but, I'm really careful at just what all I have going on at the same time, etc, and I'm patient ;)

Thanks for your opinions everyone. I use a mixture of both photo-based (for the eyes) & hand- painted (for everything else for my characters & was just wondering if there was a preference.

Gotta agree with Eowyn on one point, Samildanach's textures rock...Diabolique is incredible. Im getting in to some more handpainted stuff now myself, but I think HeadCEA mentioned close ups, and at times, the photo reals are great. I like them all really.