Texture Practice

I posted a piece that is wip in another thread but should have posted here as this isn't really finished. I have just been adding without a plan so it seems a bit mismatched to me but got some practice at least.

Feedback appreciated.

you might want to look into some more detailed base textures as right now the textures look kinda flat over all. other than that the shding looks pretty nice. some of the highlights could be a little more done but that isnt necessity as much as my preference

It looks like the phone was intentionally sabotaged ( & melted) through abuse of the console on the right.
Twas no accident. Such abuse implies that at least one crew member has fatal intentions.

'I' am not a texture artwork expert, but almost certainly, someone else (that crew member) might suggest that a plan is usually very important.

@lostclimate - thanks for the detailed feedback. Good points. I'll rework the textures -or maybe I'll just start again. I made the mistake of introducing color early and I think too much of the detail was in the color layers. I think I am going to practice in grayscale for a while until it pops then I'll work on color. Otherwise I'm jumping back and forth too much and missing some basics.

@testDummy - hah, sounds about right though the phone was a failure. I was trying to recreate a steel military phone I saw on the net. Of course I did it in another file, then the sizes didn't match and when I resized it here it looked wonky. My efforts to fix it just 'melted the phone' so that was a total waste of time. I added a link on my sites link pages/reference to the phone site by the way. Cool old, vintage and classic phones with images big enough to provide some reference.

I wouldn't put all these details in one texture.

Also, I think that you should strictly make a difference between characteristics of the surface - which should be in the texture, and its alpha channel - and assets or objects, bigger edges and more prominent forms - which should definitely IMO formed within a 3D modeling tool to get a realistic height map and normal map.
And for the glossyness - not sure whether this is the right word - you should draw an alphamap.

If you wanna achieve the realistic first person shooter a-like look you should definitely go that way.

If you want to achieve more cartoony and painted style, then you should avoid the hard edges, and add more color to everything.

@Pappenheimer - thanks for the detailed response. I guess perhaps I'll download Google SketchUp or something similar as I haven't touched 3D since school. I'm working on my Photoshop skills but I guess studios probably all use 3D at some point in the process rather than faking it. Thanks.

that, or have sprites for the details like the phones and such, and you can emulate them by just layering the phones on top, and to see just the texture make the phone invis, or to see just the sprite, make the wall invis.

How do you like this:
insert more bumpmaps and lightning.
It looks really cool in an actual level.

I've taken some close looks at Warhammer, especially the city of Altdorf and there were a lot of places where the team could have gotten away with a well design, bump-mapped texture but they instead modeled the detail.

Example, half timbering on the higher parts of houses. On close inspection, it was 3d, but given that you couldn't really tell unless you looked for it, they could have gotten away with a texture.

It all really depends how detailed you want to go I guess.