An appeal to texture artists

[mothergoose729]

First off I just want to give a massive thank you to all the great modders out there who work so hard to make this game better. Seriously you guys are awesome and what you give back to the community makes skyrim by far the best gaming experience out there. However, as a long time member of the ES gaming scene and a user of texture mods for years now, I got a bit of an axe to grind with texture artists out there. With all due respect and appreciation for all your hardwork, I want to make the distinction now between detail and quality when it comes to textures.

 

So many textures, by the best texture artists out there, just simply use to much black and grey in their art. "More detailed" often means busy, grainy, super stenciled textures that create myriads of dark patterns and lines. It makes the game visually confusing, and personally, sometimes it can even give me a headache. This was true of texture packages by in the morrowind days and it is true of some of the best texture packages in skyrim. So much so that I often choose not to play with textures at all, or I choose which textures I install very selectively.

 

Bethesda textures by contrast tend to be washed out, lacking in detailed, with poorly edges and bland homogeneous colors. Some sharper edging, some more micro details, ect can be a great way to add visual depth to the world. For example, Anarin's "HQ Towns and Villages Mod", in my opinion, are some of most well done textures on skyrim nexus.

 

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/3467

 

Notice his approach to hay thatched roofs in from villages like riverwood. In this case the straw texture pattern is too sharp, to defined, and he softens it wonderfully by making the straw thinner and finer. Instead of making the individual hay pieces stand out even more, he choose to go for a visual effect where they numerous hay pieces seem almost to blend together. The result is that the roofs look thicker, denser, and more straw like. Visually the image is softer and easier to look at.. From a distance and up close the texture is both more detailed and easy on the eyes, it not visually distracting. He also replaces the wooden steps in some of the scaffolding. He adds a lot of grate detail in the form of knots and woodgrain, but he doesn't use only black and grey to create the effect, he uses more subtle darkining and of existing colors so that the wood grains are less visually jarring, and fit more naturally in the existing textures. He has a texture for the sides of homes with wood grain too; most of the detail is in white and lighter gray rather than darker colors, which is both more realistic and much easier on the eyes to look at.

 

One of my favorite textures on all the nexus is some of chris2012's work in "Chris2012s Whiterun HQ Texture Pack"

 

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/114

 

The way he added detail to many of the interior walls through the image of peeling paint. He didn't need to use sharp lines to create the effect, because the colors of the paint naturally contrasted with the colors of the wall underneath creating well defined lines and great consistency, adding a lot of detail without making the texture noisy or busy.

 

A big mistake (I feel) that many textures artists make is to add too many cracks, or dents, or unevenness to surfaces. This is almost always down with black or charcoal colors, and while it might look great in photoshop, it doesn't always look great in game. Adding more detail to the world should make the game feel more natural and immersive, but instead it is often the case that a particularly grainy texture can make the world visually painful and distracting.

 

My message to the modding community is this; when you are adding detail to a texture consider its visual impact from afar. Try and use softer, lighter colors and try and make edge details that are closer to the overall color pallet of the texture. With textures I feel less is often times more. Nailing a specific visual effect is often better than adding a lot of small micro details in an attempt to try and give a texture "texture". Flat washed bethesda textures are no good, but sometimes super grainy and busy ones are not much better.

 

Again a massive thank you to the skyrim modding community for everything you do. My hope here is that by discussing this I can inspire texture artists to make better textures and give people some ideas about what makes good textures good.

[mothergoose729]

bump

[chaospearl]

Unfortunately, I would say that a good percentage of the retex mods out there are simply somebody having taken the textures and applied a Sharpen filter. There are a lot of true texture artists out there, but there are MORE people who think that sharpening the image makes it HD quality. That's where a lot of the super-grainy textures come from. They're artifacts from having taken a normal image and then sharpened and zoomed in, and they look sharp and detailed but they also look very much like a photograph that's been enlarged too far.

[mothergoose729]

Unfortunately, I would say that a good percentage of the retex mods out there are simply somebody having taken the textures and applied a Sharpen filter. There are a lot of true texture artists out there, but there are MORE people who think that sharpening the image makes it HD quality. That's where a lot of the super-grainy textures come from. They're artifacts from having taken a normal image and then sharpened and zoomed in, and they look sharp and detailed but they also look very much like a photograph that's been enlarged too far.

 

I don't see that often in the most popular texture mods, although I don't know much about it. I would agree though that this doesn't create high quality textures. The truly good texture artists out there really stand out when you look at their work subjectively.