Working with Textures and Materials - Mastering Blender - page 56

Why GIMP?
Blender's UV/Image Editor has some limited 2D painting functionality, as you will see in Chapter 9, “Composit-
ing with Nodes.” However, it lacks many crucial features necessary to make top-quality realistic textures. Being
able to work with 2D layers as well as control fades and transparency while manipulating photographs is crucial
to constructing good UV textures. For this reason, GIMP is a natural complement to Blender and an indispens-
able tool in any open-source 3D content-creation toolkit.
Acquiring Raw Materials for Texturing
To create realistic, photo-based textures, you must start with raw photographic materials. Numerous resources
are available on the Web for free or as inexpensive stock textures. One of my favorites websites for this is
www.deviantart.com , where you can find a truly dizzying variety of high-quality textures, most of which are
released freely for most uses. The two textures used in this tutorial are from that website. The first is Wojciech
Sadlej's metallic texture shown in Figure 2-13 , which is also included on the website for this topic in the file
metal_texture.jpg . This texture and other excellent textures like it can be downloaded from Wojciech's
deviantART page at http://wojtar-stock.deviantart.com .