I would like to learn how to make aged/dirty/worn textures for my models. Probably in Photoshop? Can anyone point me towards some tutorials? I have little "artistic" experience! Thanks in advance Ed

The best source is tex maps online or on CD. Unless you know how to make photos seamless, I'd stick to those- CG dirt generally doesn't look right.

There are some nice textures on the Carrara content CD - there are some good metals in the TextureWorld set (such as the Stressed Metal lot). You'll see that the bump is simply a grayscale of the texture. Getting a texture to tile seemlessly is not too difficult in Photoshop - you use the Offset filter (under 'Other'). Suppose your picture is 128 pixels square. Then put 64 in the 'Horizontal' and 'Vertical' boxes. Make sure 'Wrap Around' is checked. Click 'OK' and the picture is divided down each middle into four bits and swapped around. All you need to do then is work over the joins with the clone (stamp) tool so that it looks good. Then you can test the tiling by selecting the whole pic, choosing 'Define Pattern' from the edit menu, then with a new (much larger) document Edit>Fill>Use:Pattern. If it looks good you can then use it as a map in C. Hope this helps.

Making seamless textures maps is purely a technical thing. Making good shaders by combining different images and procedural settings requires an artistic eye.

Technical: Just make sure that the T-Maps you use are large enough for your final output size. Do some tests.

Artistic: Don't make the shader from a single texture. Make a different image for the dirt splatters and put that in the highlight channel. Make a map for the reflections. You know what I mean? Real surfaces are made up of many substances, each having different optical properties. Shaders look best when data is different in all the channels so as to simulate the different amounts of highlight, bump, reflection and so on. Study surfaces in the real world. Try to figure out what the properties are that make one surface look different from another.

If you want a decent reference, check out this book: Digital Texturing & Painting.

It's pretty decent, particularly if you're new to making 3D shaders.

If you need more specific info, shoot me an e-mail, I'd be happy to gab your ear off about this sort of stuff. -pix

Attached Link: http://www.doschdesign.com/e_infobase

Scroll down on linked page to see a Texture Aging Tutorial that shows what great lengths some folks go to in order to achieve a realistic look (or at least a very distressed one!). I'm not much of a painter myself so I often try to bring in my wear&tear via photographs (combining multiple photos in photoshop using soft light can be very effective). I try to avoid "seamless" textures because even though the seam doesn't show(assuming the texture was prepared well) there will still be very obvious repeating patterns in the texture. I like to use giant texture maps (such as a high-res digital photo) large enough to cover the whole object without too much stretching. Even if you do use canned textures prepared by others I think it's good to know how to alter them (either in Photoshop or in post or with something like DCG's interesting new Noir plug-in for Carrara) so your work won't look just like everyone else's who happens to have the same texture at their disposal.

http://www.oken3d.com/workshop/creative.html is a good online texturing course that I took a while back. I've attached a picture of a wall that got some hand painting using a tablet in Painter 6 (I'm no artist but I do enjoy hanging out with them!) plus some photos of various distressed walls I took around town (original photos available at http://www.hcstudios.com/goodies.html).

The Texturing & Surfacing - General thread at http://www.cgtalk.com/ has some rather passionate discussions about texturing.

There seem to be at least three camps on texturing: the ones who hand paint every last little gory detail of their texture maps while hunched over their drawing tablet, the ones who run around taking photos of anything and everything and mix things together in photoshop and finally those who do wicked things using strictly procedural textures inside their 3d program (and it seems like Carrara is very good in this department since lots of mixing and nesting can generate some pretty interesting results; Litst's Real World Carrara Metals package sold here at renderosity has some good examples of complex procedural shaders).

To me it's the procedural approach where you really feel like the computer is doing a lot of the work for you but there are those who argue that procedural textures can never get that close to reality (and when done in haste they often look just awful and scream that the art was done on a computer).

www.dvgarage.com has some rather intense information about making things look realistic.

Something I read recently basically said if reality is what you're after then a camera or camcorder will do you just fine. Maybe the value of 3D is being able to put your own spin on things rather than just slavishly trying to make something that looks just like a photo. I think that professional photographers often wait hours or days for just the right light for their shots and in 3D you can whip up just about any kind of lighting scheme whenever you want (and it's interesting to me how many 3d artists like our own Toxe - http://www.eovia.com/carrara/user_proj_car_toxe.jsp - who stress the importance of lighting).

Enough rambling for one post. So far I think texturing is my favorite part of working in 3D (I still find lighting very difficult).

Thanks much everyone. You've given me some great start points on something I'm sure I'll be a looong time mastering. Right now I lean towards simple procedurals and digital photography (something I know at least a little about.) I've also found some good resources right here on Renderosity through the Texturing and Photoshop forums. Ed