Texture Acquisitions

[LDAsh]

I've been trying to get organised and financially secure enough to buy some decent texture packs for the projects. Well that time has finally come and the team and its projects have already increased in GBs of new textures. This is wonderful because texture resource is a big task for multiple projects that I alone can't possibly take care of along with everything else that needs my attention, so I'm happy to announce ViolaE's acquisition of these new resources.
If you have any suggestions on what resources should be invested in, please post your suggestions here. Keep in mind that any textures should be high-resolution and include decent bumpmaps for use in the Doom3 engine. I've spent many hours looking through packs of low-res single-pass textures, that simply won't do. So, there's still a few hundred dollars to spend in this area. I'm about to buy a big pack of dirty-decals and some graffiti, this will be an important addition especially to Shadowing Hate, where everything looks way too clean and shiny to come off as a realistic urban area. SH's decals have included only about a half-dozen of these decals up until now, so the more the merrier. Once these have been acquired and prepared for use, environments will begin to look a lot more convincing.
After enough textures have been gathered, team finance will go toward hiring some programmers and technical advisors to concentrate on some very important features such as AI. I had a brief chat with one programmer who assured me that everything I want to do with Quake 4 AI is very possible. The AI states, awareness system, tactics and quality, skills and abilities, and other little tricks to bring out a reasonable stealth gameplay system to an otherwise "run and gun"-only Quake 4 setup. I think such features are well worth paying someone to implement, and definitely to make it worth their while as it's all no easy task.
Anyway, the new textures will undoubtedly be showcased very soon.

[LDAsh]

Here's a VERY quick shot (no fine-tuning, no detailing, no polish, no effects, etc.) of the "Arroway Textures One" DVD (http://www.arroway.de) as they turned out in the engine, pretty damn good I must say. These textures are a stark contrast to the dark colourless style I've created myself but suit the project(s) equally and work well with each other. Without a doubt worth every last penny, this set.
[ external image ]
These textures are massive too, 12MP+, so some are ending up in-game here at 4MP and have ridiculous texel scaling but with brilliant detail. That combined with the "detail mapping" just makes for a surface quality that really feels beyond real-time. I'm sure even your crisp 1920x1080 wall-sized displays won't be able to stretch this stuff out, sometimes you need a damn sniper-scope against a wall to start counting texels in this TC.

[KC Clark]

Nice looking stuff they've got there. Maybe I ought to look into them.

[LDAsh]

Welcome to the (ever-so-quiet) forum! Yeah, the Arroway textures are great in my opinion, especially the bumpmaps included, although some don't turn out that wonderful it's for obvious reasons, but most of them have had a lot of time spent on preparing the bumpmaps to make decent normalmaps out of, instead of just hitting the "greyscale" option and selling them off, Arroway seem to understand and care about this aspect.

[KC Clark]

I like CG textures. Totally free texture site.
http://www.cgtextures.com/textures.php
Of course you (or I) will have to "texturize" them, but free is a very good price.
I like this site because they're real-life textures as I'm experimenting with a less rendered/more realistic look for tex. I'll upload some previews (and keep the file small) so you can check them out.

[LDAsh]

Thanks for the link, I'll check it out. Might get very difficult to keep tabs on whose art is getting used in the projects though, so I want to avoid the big main websites where everyone else goes and I'd rather pay money for time-saving assets and aren't already in every other project.

[DeeP]

this is a dream come true in a pinch.
These are nice and free 15 megs a day?! I do see your point -
Anything can be altered to become original
DeeP