Solving Hard Visual Problems

When you spend a good chunk of your day making texture maps, you get excited about solving really hard visual problems. Mud, Water, and Snow are all really hard when you paint images mapped to 3D objects that need to look real in the game. These samples are from Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis by Codemasters, one of the many contracts I worked on while running Cubicle Arts.  

By today’s standards, these are pretty remedial issues to solve, generative Ai would make simple work out of these types of visual issues in seconds, Substance Painter would blow through the problem with a button click. But, back in the day, young whippersnapper, these were issues men had to solve with brute force!