Does anyone else here ever have those one or two little things that start to nag at you after a long day of texturing? Mine, for example, is something I call "tile vision," wherein after a few hours of texturing, I start to see the tile patterns in all of my blocks to the point where it's impossible for me to make a block that doesn't appear tiled. Everything just starts to look oddly repetitive and nothing looks smooth anymore, and I can't seem to make a smooth texture because I know it's repeating. I get this "tile vision" especially when working on really common blocks like grass and stone.
So what issues do you run into after a long time of texturing? How do you deal with them? I'm curious to read what other little nagging issues other texture artists go through.
For the tiling thing, I get that too, and then have to fix most of the tiling errors, and then reduce the contrast and/or sharpness of what I would normally have. I recently fixed this with sand using MCpatcher, using random to break up the tiling issues, and then raising the sharpness to compensate.
As for my "woes" I'm probably a bit weirder than most artists, but I'll share 'em anyways.
My biggest one is that I like things to be "realistic", yet I make a 16x pack..... so I actually look up stuff if it's really technical on what it should be before I texture it. For instance, I looked up oak/blue spruce*/birch wood to try and match the colors of the wood grain. Also, wood colors don't actually vary that much, I mean it's like grabbing 10 samples of one color of paint from Lowes. Now they added 2 more wood everythings, and I have yet to do them because I know it's going to be very annoying. The difference here (with planks) is very subtle, yet most artists make it arbitrary and make it more based on the bark than the color of the wood grain, or base it on "stained" wood, yet I try to make it look "natural" which makes it harder. Trying to bring color from real life into 16x16 pixels is also very hard....
Another is that I'm dreading needing to redo stone (to look like actual SOLID natural craggy stone) and all ores, it's possibly the oldest texture currently in my pack but it isn't incredibly bad, I just can't bring myself to do it.
Backface culling bothers me, as do many of the other issues and bugs in 1.7.2 that make is more unsatisfactory to actually play Minecraft. Speaking of updates, small compatibility issues bother me, such as the rename from the "sound" folder to "sounds". I don't just want to switch over and break compatibility for older versions, and I don't want to make my pack 50% bigger either. This also goes for lesser changes, such as different names, or worse, extreme mapping changes with the same name**. If my pack were compressed with .7z instead, including both actually be fine as it would detect that the files were the same. In fact, my pack would be nearly half the size if it were compressed as .7z instead of .zip. .7z is open source, too :/
*blue spruce in place of pine, I just so happened to have had blue spruce trees at my house and cut them down, giving me good samples to look at of not only the bark, but the wood grain itself.
**like a long time ago when the new creative inventory was introduced, "allitems.png" was still used despite that it didn't make any sense at all to do so, and zombies having the canvas size changed TWICE for little reason.
EDIT: I also don't like the plant models, either. It was fine for a few things at first, but now it feels too simple and overused now that Mojang added in flowers that are mostly flat and face upwards, like the daisy. I think I'd rather have a model like that but with a plane in the middle for the "face" of the flower (sort of like the sunflower but 1/2 block high and just facing up. Or you know, some custom way to define that kind of thing.
"I'm an outsider by choice, but not truly.
It’s the unpleasantness of the system that keeps me out.
I’d rather be in, in a good system. That’s where my discontent comes from:
being forced to choose to stay outside.
My advice: Just keep movin’ straight ahead.
Every now and then you find yourself in a different place."
-George Carlin
The tiling thing always gets me, and it's always on the things that I'm most proud of.
I also hate it when I have to texture something that I have no inspiration for; something that doesn't exist IRL, so you can't get reference pics. It's at these points when it's really tempting to just copy another packs ideas, but then you will always know that that texture wasn't really your own.
Another is that I'm dreading needing to redo stone (to look like actual SOLID natural craggy stone) and all ores, it's possibly the oldest texture currently in my pack but it isn't incredibly bad, I just can't bring myself to do it.
I'm working on a new stone texture right now! It's driving me bonkers XD Any time I give it any texture, I pick out all the little tiled details and it looks too repetitive. But once I get rid of those, it looks way too smooth and uniform. >.<
I also hate it when I have to texture something that I have no inspiration for;
I'm so bad about this >.< Since my current pack is 16x, I tend to just use alternate versions of the default when that happens XD I need to work on that.
My biggest problem is when I'm working on a seriously annoying texture that's kicking my ****. If I stare at it too long I can't even tell if it's "good" anymore. I eventually get to a point no matter what I do, it looks like crap. But I'm not even sure if it actually looks like crap or if my brain is just fried from looking at it too long. It's almost like the "creative" part of my brain is on overload and can't process anything.
When that happens I know it's time to stop for a while, usually I'll come back the next day and pick it back up and magically that texture i fooled around with for 3 hours and got no where will all just workout fine in about 15 minutes.
My biggest problem is when I'm working on a seriously annoying texture that's kicking my ****. If I stare at it too long I can't even tell if it's "good" anymore. I eventually get to a point no matter what I do, it looks like crap. But I'm not even sure if it actually looks like crap or if my brain is just fried from looking at it too long. It's almost like the "creative" part of my brain is on overload and can't process anything.
When that happens I know it's time to stop for a while, usually I'll come back the next day and pick it back up and magically that texture i fooled around with for 3 hours and got no where will all just workout fine in about 15 minutes.
That's pretty much exactly my issue with tiling After awhile, everything just looks badly tiled! Except I can never seem to make myself stop and take a rest, and it just turns into a downward spiral.
Colormaps. Especially since mcpatcher completely ignores hardcoded colors.And in 1.7, it's not like you can do the dot-filling method, no, now it has to be a gradient. Of course, all of this would be fine if mcpatcher didn't throw away any and all color overlays.
Colormaps. Especially since mcpatcher completely ignores hardcoded colors.And in 1.7, it's not like you can do the dot-filling method, no, now it has to be a gradient. Of course, all of this would be fine if mcpatcher didn't throw away any and all color overlays.
That's so interesting! I've always found colormaps to be one of my favorite things to make. I guess we all have our ways ^.^ I think MCPatcher is coming out with a new method of making biome palettes soon though, and if you like doing individual pixels and knowing exactly where they affect, you'll probably like the new version a lot better!
Colormaps. Especially since mcpatcher completely ignores hardcoded colors.And in 1.7, it's not like you can do the dot-filling method, no, now it has to be a gradient. Of course, all of this would be fine if mcpatcher didn't throw away any and all color overlays.
This is true. Annoying that if Custom Colors is enabled, water droplets turn gray, even though (as you said) some are hardcoded, and some aren't recolored at all in vanilla and use the texture. Even if there is no custom colors files it still does this. I've mentioned this in the MCpatcher thread with no response.
However, for the colormap I just said screw it and made it 1x1. Seems to work
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"I'm an outsider by choice, but not truly.
It’s the unpleasantness of the system that keeps me out.
I’d rather be in, in a good system. That’s where my discontent comes from:
being forced to choose to stay outside.
My advice: Just keep movin’ straight ahead.
Every now and then you find yourself in a different place."
-George Carlin
Well the one thing that really annoys me about my textures is when they are too monochromatic. It's easy to make a stone texture with varying shades of the same gray, or a log texture with varying shades of the same brown, I often fall into doing this of I've been texturing too long. I have two solutions. The first is if it's a texture that has distinct parts or chunks like cobble or stonebrick, then I make each chunk or brick a slightly different color. The second solution is I apply an impressionist painting technique called broken color. It's kind of hard to explain, google would probably explain it better than I would. So far I've used that technique mostly for my wood planks.
I don't think that's really the point of the colourmaps XD
Well, the documentation seems to be outdated. I tried using a hex code for water droplets, which had no effect, so I had to use a colormap. I didn't want biome-specific droplets anyways (woo, swampwater....), so I did it pretty much to regain the color that wasn't recolored in default.
At that point it's not taking advantage of features, but dealing with regressions, like if CTM broke all of your vanilla textures, or betterskies removed the vanilla skies and replaced them with a black sky.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"I'm an outsider by choice, but not truly.
It’s the unpleasantness of the system that keeps me out.
I’d rather be in, in a good system. That’s where my discontent comes from:
being forced to choose to stay outside.
My advice: Just keep movin’ straight ahead.
Every now and then you find yourself in a different place."
-George Carlin
Sometimes I find myself working on my texture pack into the wee hours of the night. And then, when I finally go to bed, I find myself unable to quiet down my mind. I'll be stuck in a Minecraft mind loop, where I'm going through the mental motions of making a block tile, but it's always mismatched in one way or another. I might even be fidgeting with the blanket, in a strange half asleep, half awake state, and in my mind it somehow has to do with fixing the tiling. Crazy, I know!
It tends to go on until I pass out from pure exhaustion, which is usually shortly before I have to get up for work, LOL.
Sometimes I find myself working on my texture pack into the wee hours of the night. And then, when I finally go to bed, I find myself unable to quiet down my mind. I'll be stuck in a Minecraft mind loop, where I'm going through the mental motions of making a block tile, but it's always mismatched in one way or another. I might even be fidgeting with the blanket, in a strange half asleep, half awake state, and in my mind it somehow has to do with fixing the tiling. Crazy, I know!
It tends to go on until I pass out from pure exhaustion, which is usually shortly before I have to get up for work, LOL.
lol, good to know I'm not the only one who textures in my sleep! Although it has helped me on occasion, if I remember the design well enough to recreate it the next morning.
After a while I just loose all sense of if something looks good or not. It just dissolves into a collection of pixels. That's usually the point where I ask my wife's opinion to get some sense of direction.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Tis far better to be a witty fool than a foolish wit.
For me... I have almost the exact opposite problem of everyone else here.
Usually for me, it's a matter of getting started. For the most part, I have to know in my head what I want to do ahead of time. I can't always just sit down and say "Today I shall make GRASS!" or whatever. If I don't know what I want the end product to look like and I try to sit down I usually open my editor of choice, grab my stylus, and then... go browse Imgur for hours on end.
This is quadruple true for mobs. I NEVER seem to have good mob ideas. This is when I often do just have to sit down and force myself to do the work... and I'm rarely if ever happy with the result. Still, I've yet to hear a lot of complaints so maybe I'm just talented.
Once I get going, though, I usually manage to do it in a fairly efficient way. Yea, dealing with tiling errors is kind of a problem but I've gotten a pretty good system down really helps me to isolate problems quickly and deal with them systematically. It's not always perfect... but it's usually good enough that I don't have to spend more than an hour on the "debugging" phase of texturing.
... I might even be fidgeting with the blanket, in a strange half asleep, half awake state, and in my mind it somehow has to do with fixing the tiling. Crazy, I know! ...
I do that exact same thing!! Sometimes I wake up all the way and get really confused as to why I'm in bed and not texturing
This is quadruple true for mobs. I NEVER seem to have good mob ideas. This is when I often do just have to sit down and force myself to do the work... and I'm rarely if ever happy with the result. Still, I've yet to hear a lot of complaints so maybe I'm just talented.
I never have good ideas for mobs either But I think that's mostly due to the fact that I actually really like most of the default mob textures, it's only the colors that I dislike. So usually I end up just messing with the coloration and keeping the skin itself pretty similar, which I know a lot of people think isn't a good thing to do I'll have to work on that one hehe.
That awkward moment when you make a mistake IRL, and reflexively move to press an imaginary 'undo' hotkey to reverse it....
oh god.. I did that in one of my college classes. I was taking an art class (I'm not an art major, it's just a required core course) and one day we were told to try to replicate a photo she put up on the projector using only black chalk on canvas.
...I can't count the amount of times I had to remind myself "THERE IS NO CTRL+Z YOU IDIOT!!!" every time I made a mistake. lol.
Whats worse is my drawing style is so used to having an "undo" I kept "trying things" without much forethought trying to see what worked, forgetting I can't reverse the process. :/
Mine is personally not being able to create what I envision in my mind. I come up with very cool ideas for textures in my mind, but when I sit down to actually make them, I cannot for the life of me get them to turn out how I imagined them.
So what issues do you run into after a long time of texturing? How do you deal with them? I'm curious to read what other little nagging issues other texture artists go through.
As for my "woes" I'm probably a bit weirder than most artists, but I'll share 'em anyways.
My biggest one is that I like things to be "realistic", yet I make a 16x pack..... so I actually look up stuff if it's really technical on what it should be before I texture it. For instance, I looked up oak/blue spruce*/birch wood to try and match the colors of the wood grain. Also, wood colors don't actually vary that much, I mean it's like grabbing 10 samples of one color of paint from Lowes. Now they added 2 more wood everythings, and I have yet to do them because I know it's going to be very annoying. The difference here (with planks) is very subtle, yet most artists make it arbitrary and make it more based on the bark than the color of the wood grain, or base it on "stained" wood, yet I try to make it look "natural" which makes it harder. Trying to bring color from real life into 16x16 pixels is also very hard....
Another is that I'm dreading needing to redo stone (to look like actual SOLID natural craggy stone) and all ores, it's possibly the oldest texture currently in my pack but it isn't incredibly bad, I just can't bring myself to do it.
Backface culling bothers me, as do many of the other issues and bugs in 1.7.2 that make is more unsatisfactory to actually play Minecraft. Speaking of updates, small compatibility issues bother me, such as the rename from the "sound" folder to "sounds". I don't just want to switch over and break compatibility for older versions, and I don't want to make my pack 50% bigger either. This also goes for lesser changes, such as different names, or worse, extreme mapping changes with the same name**. If my pack were compressed with .7z instead, including both actually be fine as it would detect that the files were the same. In fact, my pack would be nearly half the size if it were compressed as .7z instead of .zip. .7z is open source, too :/
*blue spruce in place of pine, I just so happened to have had blue spruce trees at my house and cut them down, giving me good samples to look at of not only the bark, but the wood grain itself.
**like a long time ago when the new creative inventory was introduced, "allitems.png" was still used despite that it didn't make any sense at all to do so, and zombies having the canvas size changed TWICE for little reason.
EDIT: I also don't like the plant models, either. It was fine for a few things at first, but now it feels too simple and overused now that Mojang added in flowers that are mostly flat and face upwards, like the daisy. I think I'd rather have a model like that but with a plane in the middle for the "face" of the flower (sort of like the sunflower but 1/2 block high and just facing up. Or you know, some custom way to define that kind of thing.
"I'm an outsider by choice, but not truly.
It’s the unpleasantness of the system that keeps me out.
I’d rather be in, in a good system. That’s where my discontent comes from:
being forced to choose to stay outside.
My advice: Just keep movin’ straight ahead.
Every now and then you find yourself in a different place."
-George Carlin
I also hate it when I have to texture something that I have no inspiration for; something that doesn't exist IRL, so you can't get reference pics. It's at these points when it's really tempting to just copy another packs ideas, but then you will always know that that texture wasn't really your own.
I'm working on a new stone texture right now! It's driving me bonkers XD Any time I give it any texture, I pick out all the little tiled details and it looks too repetitive. But once I get rid of those, it looks way too smooth and uniform. >.<
I'm so bad about this >.< Since my current pack is 16x, I tend to just use alternate versions of the default when that happens XD I need to work on that.
When that happens I know it's time to stop for a while, usually I'll come back the next day and pick it back up and magically that texture i fooled around with for 3 hours and got no where will all just workout fine in about 15 minutes.
That's pretty much exactly my issue with tiling After awhile, everything just looks badly tiled! Except I can never seem to make myself stop and take a rest, and it just turns into a downward spiral.
Putting the CENDENT back in transcendent!
That's so interesting! I've always found colormaps to be one of my favorite things to make. I guess we all have our ways ^.^ I think MCPatcher is coming out with a new method of making biome palettes soon though, and if you like doing individual pixels and knowing exactly where they affect, you'll probably like the new version a lot better!
This is true. Annoying that if Custom Colors is enabled, water droplets turn gray, even though (as you said) some are hardcoded, and some aren't recolored at all in vanilla and use the texture. Even if there is no custom colors files it still does this. I've mentioned this in the MCpatcher thread with no response.
However, for the colormap I just said screw it and made it 1x1. Seems to work
"I'm an outsider by choice, but not truly.
It’s the unpleasantness of the system that keeps me out.
I’d rather be in, in a good system. That’s where my discontent comes from:
being forced to choose to stay outside.
My advice: Just keep movin’ straight ahead.
Every now and then you find yourself in a different place."
-George Carlin
Well, the documentation seems to be outdated. I tried using a hex code for water droplets, which had no effect, so I had to use a colormap. I didn't want biome-specific droplets anyways (woo, swampwater....), so I did it pretty much to regain the color that wasn't recolored in default.
At that point it's not taking advantage of features, but dealing with regressions, like if CTM broke all of your vanilla textures, or betterskies removed the vanilla skies and replaced them with a black sky.
"I'm an outsider by choice, but not truly.
It’s the unpleasantness of the system that keeps me out.
I’d rather be in, in a good system. That’s where my discontent comes from:
being forced to choose to stay outside.
My advice: Just keep movin’ straight ahead.
Every now and then you find yourself in a different place."
-George Carlin
It tends to go on until I pass out from pure exhaustion, which is usually shortly before I have to get up for work, LOL.
lol, good to know I'm not the only one who textures in my sleep! Although it has helped me on occasion, if I remember the design well enough to recreate it the next morning.
Usually for me, it's a matter of getting started. For the most part, I have to know in my head what I want to do ahead of time. I can't always just sit down and say "Today I shall make GRASS!" or whatever. If I don't know what I want the end product to look like and I try to sit down I usually open my editor of choice, grab my stylus, and then... go browse Imgur for hours on end.
This is quadruple true for mobs. I NEVER seem to have good mob ideas. This is when I often do just have to sit down and force myself to do the work... and I'm rarely if ever happy with the result. Still, I've yet to hear a lot of complaints so maybe I'm just talented.
Once I get going, though, I usually manage to do it in a fairly efficient way. Yea, dealing with tiling errors is kind of a problem but I've gotten a pretty good system down really helps me to isolate problems quickly and deal with them systematically. It's not always perfect... but it's usually good enough that I don't have to spend more than an hour on the "debugging" phase of texturing.
I do that exact same thing!! Sometimes I wake up all the way and get really confused as to why I'm in bed and not texturing
I never have good ideas for mobs either But I think that's mostly due to the fact that I actually really like most of the default mob textures, it's only the colors that I dislike. So usually I end up just messing with the coloration and keeping the skin itself pretty similar, which I know a lot of people think isn't a good thing to do I'll have to work on that one hehe.
oh god.. I did that in one of my college classes. I was taking an art class (I'm not an art major, it's just a required core course) and one day we were told to try to replicate a photo she put up on the projector using only black chalk on canvas.
...I can't count the amount of times I had to remind myself "THERE IS NO CTRL+Z YOU IDIOT!!!" every time I made a mistake. lol.
Whats worse is my drawing style is so used to having an "undo" I kept "trying things" without much forethought trying to see what worked, forgetting I can't reverse the process. :/