Digitally Painted Textures: Fossils From The Past

The pics below I “drew” or painted in Photoshop. They were all for a Level built for Unreal Tournament. If you don’t remember that game, you are too young to be my friend.

Back in the day, about 20 years ago in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I was what was called a “Texture Artist”. Texture Artists were strange critters that made images that were eventually plastered all over the innards of games and multimedia projects. We usually got to work with lower polygon environments and work tirelessly to turn blocks into garbage cans and piles of angular polygons into creatures and hallways. Photoshop was the tool of choice, but this wasn’t the Photoshop of today, back then we were happy to have layers and color pickers to work with. None of this Ai generated artwork for us, No! you have to make your own dirt and bricks.

Unreal Tournament was the precursor to the Unreal Engine, which is one of the two main game engines on the market. If you’ve been looking through the blog, you’ll see I’m still involved with both the Unity and Unreal engines from time to time.

And if none of that makes sense, then you are probably here for the custom Hot Wheels 🙂

These pics are from a different era, when all game textures had to be painted in a digital program like Photoshop or Painter. These days, a whole bunch of other tools will make most of the textures you see in games procedural, meaning the textures can “res up” for 4K and other formats. Procedural textures existed in 3D programs like Maya or 3DSMAX for years before moving into the video game industry. Programs like Substance had made it so you probably wouldn’t create textures like these any longer for today’s modern video games or VR experiences…but they were a thing once upon a time.