I figure it's high time we got down to the very specific and nitty-gritty details of our game production. Now, I might have been working as a game maker for a little over three years (mainly as a hobbyist, before 2021), but I still consider myself a newbie in most areas of production (i.e. I'm not that smart). Nonetheless, I believe in sharing knowledge and elevate everyone, and I hope what I have to share is beneficial to some of you fellow devs out there. Today we'll talk about where we get our textures! Before we begin, one last thing : our current project aims to replicate the look of early Source Engine titles, so we are not too concerned about highest-quality PBR textures. Our priorities were to get textures we could use commercially, in at least 512 or 1024 sizes. Normal maps were optional. That said, let's get to the resources.
Paid Resources
Game Textures : The most expensive resource on this list, and we wouldn't have subscribed to it if we didn't have a production budget. It's a bit overkill for our current goals (it's all beautiful PBR up to 4K textures made for AAA production) but they have some nice Trim textures that really add an oomph to the scenes we are working on, and I am glad we have this resource on hand. Also, since Somewhat Software is a dirt-poor company, we get to pay the lowest subscription tier.
SketchUp Texture Club : For the price of a once-a-year donation of about $14 USD, you get access to a lot of textures, some of them PBR, most of them in the 1K-3K size range. Most new textures added are PBR, but we benefit from their vast back catalogue of simple 1024 textures, and for a very affordable price. It's not always easy to navigate the catalogue to find that texture you saw that one time two days ago, but it is a highly valuable resource for us right now.
Free Resources
DUION : A very generous German dev decided to give away his texture work and model work for free under CC0 license (Public Domain). Some simple basics (and some free 3D models, too). They also let you download the source photos taken to create the textures, if you want to try your hand at making your own textures, but lack photography skills. Not bad at all.
Unsplash : The source for freely-usable high-quality photos from amateurs and professionals alike, Unsplash is an invaluable resource for raw pictures to create some precise textures from. For example, I'm using it to create my own stained glass textures to add to our scenes, and Unsplash has provided plenty of clean shots of church glassworks for me to work off of. Of course, Unsplash asks you to credit the artists of the works you're using (basic decency, if you ask me), and provides the names of the artist in the file name when downloading it, so you don't have to note it down somewhere. Practical.
This is not an exhaustive list of everything we're using, but those are the main resources (especially the paid ones, those two are the only ones we've subscribed to).What are your own go-to resources when making games? Let us know here or on social media, let's spread the knowledge!