What are hand-painted textures?

Textures are not always created by software. Sometimes they have to be drawn by hand.

In this article we will explain what hand-drawn textures are, and what their main problems and advantages are. We will also discuss how relevant they are in modern game making.

Read on - it will be interesting!

What is hand-paint?

Hand-painting is the first texture creation technique to appear with the transition of games from 2D to 3D. It is used to create the illusion of volume with lighting using painted textures, as well as setting colour and material.

Before that, hand-painting was very, very popular. Do you remember Warcraft 3?

Of course you do!

Well, the vast majority of the textures in that game were hand-painted. We conclude that this approach to texture creation was relevant before.

But what is it now?

Relevance of hand-painted textures in the game industry

Frankly speaking, the relevance of this style in modern projects is under a big, no - huge question. The reasons for the decline in popularity can be found in the following factors:

• The high price of a specialist who can model and draw well at the same time.
  
• Such specialists are much rarer, and as a result there is not always the necessary number of artists to create a project.
  
• Creating PBR textures is much faster and easier due to their procedural nature.
  
• PBR texturing takes less time to learn than hand-painting.
  
• Major studios are focusing on Unreal Engine and PBR.
  

By the way, on our website you can download a huge collection of PBR textures for use in your projects. You can use them in 3ds Max, Blender, Arnold, Vray, Corona, Cinema 4D, Substance Painter, Unity, UE and many other applications. All this is completely free and without registration!

Now we will back to what is relevant. Thus, when you think about it, there are only a few projects with such graphics that have been released recently - Ruined King, the Borderlands series (partially, just shading) and Northgard. Of course, there are hundreds more games in this style on the

Asian market, but this is the exception rather than the rule. This style is simply historically rooted there.

Advantages of hand-painted textures

You might think that this approach to texturing is completely useless today. But it isn't. In fact, it still retains its main advantage - unique styling. If you want to achieve a unique style in your game project, there is probably no better way to do it than by using hand-painted textures.

And yes, hand-painted textures are a great budget saver. A small studio or even a single indie developer will not have enough money to create a AAA-level project, so the visuals of a finished title should be much simpler. To tighten the quality of models with a low number of polygons can then be compensated with all the same hand-drawn textures, which is very serious.

On our site you can find both PBR and handmade textures. And as we said, you can do it all for free! Also, if you need something else for your game, you can easily find it in our hub. Assets, references, blueprints, add-ons and even various guides on how to use it all.