Create high quality textures and materials in 7 steps using Blender and GIMP
Table of contents:
- 0. Introduction, resolution and format of a texture
- 1. Texture photography
- 2a. Advanced perspective and geometry correction
- 2b. Baking in Blender
- 3.Equalizing texture lighting
- 4.Making texture seamless
- 5.Creating Normal and Displacement map
- 6.Brick material in Blender Cycles
- 7.Dealing with texture tiling
Download orginal texture from texturify.com
Example of use
Some program (e.g. Unreal Engine 4) require textures in dimensions being power of 2 e.g. 512x512, 1024x256, 2048x2048. Blender Cycles allows using texture in any dimension, however whenever it's possible, respect the rule. Textures with dimensions being power of 2 are improving performance graphic engines, especially in mipmap process. It's worth to mention while editing, try to keep your texture size bigger with comparision to size of destination texture.
First of all, size of the file doesn't impact RAM or VRAM usage. Texture in JPG, PNG, TARGA or TIFF will use the same amount of memory so avoid lossy format like JPG, unless you want safe some disk space. My recommendation is to use PNG during editing and JPG with 90-100 quality as final texture, unless you are creating textures for realtime engine. Keep in mind that JPG is lossy even with quality equal 100.