I am at the point that I need some help. Here is a screen shot:

[attachment=18391:testImage.jpg]

The textures look great, but they are not mine (not all of them). I have an idea on how to make them, but each one take so long to make, that I find myself devoting an entire day (or longer) making them. The ones I make aren't even that good.

Does anyone know:

--where I can get a HUGE amount of textures (free and royalty free)

--what (free) software is best for making complex textures

--resources (beyond the sticky's on the forum) to help speed up the process

Does anyone know:
--where I can get a HUGE amount of textures (free and royalty free)

Maybe try Turbosquid. But they might cost something.

I know there are sites out there. But be careful with the Terms of Use.

--what (free) software is best for making complex textures

Free:
GIMP
Paint. Net

Paid:
Photoshop (good, much used program)
Filter Forge (haven't tried) - http://www.filterforge.com/
Substance Designer (haven't tried) - http://www.allegorithmic.com/products/substance-designer

The site cgtextures has lots of good textures. If you don't pay, you can download up to 15MB per day for free, and there are some sizes of texture you can't get, usually the biggest sizes, which are not as useful for games, rather for cg rendering. Usually you can still get the ones around 1024x1024, but bigger than that are the ones you can't get for free. They have pretty cheap memberships as well if you need things bigger and want to lift the daily 15MB limit.

As far as making textures yourself, I recommend you maybe learn to do it yourself. The filters in software like the GIMP help, but sometimes you can get away with 3d renders in Blender as well, though you get mixed results depending on how good you are at producing models.

I don't know off the top of my head, but there are books you can buy that teach how to make textures. There was one that I had checked out from a friend that had some good techniques. Some tricks were to take photos of real world objects and combine them to get other things, using different layering techniques, masking, coloring, and other things in the GIMP or photoshop. You could take a sand texture and cover it with a masked cage or something like it, turning grayish the sand(maybe blurring it too) to maybe get a sort of sci-fi-ish metal. Different ways to combine textures can get good results. You can also use one textures colors turned to only grays to create a layer to recolor the layers below, for example to darken or lighten, to modify saturation, or even to shift hues. This, combined with cloud filters for masks(or other filters as well, or even combinations) can get interesting results too.

I'd advice against trying to find free textures online and trying to make your game look good with them, because:

1) Most sources (even some of what has been listed in this thread) are free for personal use only and there are actually very few that are free for commercial use. So if you're making a commercial game you're more limited than it appears at the first glance.

2) Grabbing textures here and there results in mismatched look. Achieving good looks is much harder this way than with textures ripped from another game or one source that were designed to play together well.

You're probably better off finding a texture artist that has both ideas and skills to make textures for you. I'm sure some will be happy to work for free and many for even a small compensation.

Or you could always become one yourself. The most important thing about that is not which tools you use but knowing that designing (coming up with an idea of how it should look) and making the texture (striving for the end result you are imagining) are two different things and that you might need practice in both of them. But it's way more interesting path to take than outsourcing the design in textures.

If you want to make textures yourself you have couple of alternatives depending on where you're coming from and which style you strive for. You could use anything from photographs to vector art to procedural texture generation to rendering 3D shapes to texture workflow. The usual approach is to just use Photoshop or GIMP with various tools and features to create them from scratch or photos. I actually have a GDnet article about that coming up but I'm not sure I'm motivated to finish it and there are good amount of tutorials out there although scattered.

ShadowFlar3 has a good point. The site cgtextures.com does allow commercial usage, as long as the textures are integrated into the project, and not easily accessible alone. A game is a fine case of this. Many other websites on the other hand indeed don't allow more than personal use.

The other point about the textures fitting together is also valid, but depending on how easily you can either learn or hire someone to do proper art for your specific case, it may be easier to grab the free textures and modify. I think there is enough variety that they can be found and modified to fit well enough for most games, but it won't be as easy as simply downloading them most likely. On the other hand, it may be easier than learning to create the textures yourself, depending on what software you know, how quick you learn, etc....

Hi,

Once you spend a few hundred hours at it, making textures will take a fraction of the time that it did when you began. I am amazed myself at how quickly I can whip together a nice texture for something, sometimes in a matter of minutes, that used to take a lot of hours.

I use GIMP for most things and actually could get by with only using it for 95% of textures, as for rasterized rendered ones. Inkscape is often used by me for vector graphics, some of which are later converted to rasterized JPG, BMP, and so forth. Once you get into designing vector planes in your games, then you will open a whole new level of capability for quality, even if most other surfaces are textures. Eventually, procedural generated surfaces will make your game appearance reach very sophisticated quality level.

In the meantime, continue looking into these things and expanding your knowledge base. I'd focus on layers, including transparent background layers, gradient filters, fonts, and lean toward more Alpha Channel inclusion in your game after a few months, maybe only weeks. Down the road you may use Blender or other software to generate procedural surfaces, sometimes in combination with normal and bump maps. All in due time!

Thanks, all, for the responses. I have GIMP already, but when I first started using it, I decided it was too difficult to use (as compared to Paint.net) so I abandoned it for the other. I have, since this post, been trying it out again. It's not as easy, but I think it will do the job once I get used to the interface......

You are free to use whichever you like, as long as you're comfortable and don't feel limited by the software. I was just mentioning Photoshop and Gimp as popular examples so if you wish to improve on them there are plenty of tutorials. But I'm sure there's some for Paint.NET and other software as well.

The GIMP is similar to Photoshop, but it does have much less of a userbase. Instead of looking for game texture tutorials for the GIMP, look for game texture tutorials for Photoshop and adapt the directions to the other program.

I believe the most important step in getting good looking textures is using the layering of one or more different textures with blending modes to obtain a unique composite. If you don't do this, everything will look soft and artificial.

http://www.psionic3d.co.uk/tutorials/shiphull.html (Written Tutorials - Photoshop)

http://wiki.polycount.com/TexturingTutorials

http://texturing.blogspot.com.br/

http://www.cgsociety.org/index.php/CGSFeatures/CGSFeatureSpecial/the_top_ten_tips_of_texturing