[textures] how to achieve depths?

hi

im really struggling to make terrain textures, things like grass, mud dirt etc, i want to make photo realistic ones, but everything just turns out looking like carpet like with grass theres no real depth to it, it looks so flat i just dont know how to get it to look right, bear in mind since its a texture it has to tile and cant look repeated:

my usual pants grass:




some top quality professional grass taken from a game, (medal of honor):




I dont know if anyone does this sort of thing around here really, but maybe someone has some idea of how to create something good, also im not using photographs as a base, completely hand made so to speak, obviously using filters. that good grass above might have used a photo as a base, im not sure. any help appreciated,

I'm sure if this will help, but you can take a really fragmented paintbrush, set the color to black, the opacity to a subtle level. Then stroke over spots you see that are dark in the game picture. Sometimes this is a good way to "fake" 3D. I use this technique when making flags and stuff like that.

Hope this helps...

I'd say use a custom brush as well. Don't try any automated/filter techniques for creating good looking grass.

Just go nuts with earthy tones and lots of brush strokes. Create a couple of layers of different textures like that and then blend them together using masking and the "advanced blending" you can get by double clicking on a layer. The two small sliders on the bottom of the advanced blending section have small arrowhead sliders. Hold down your alt key or apple key (depending on what kind of computer you're using) and grab one half of one of the arrows and drag it. That will smoothly blend one layer with another without even need for masking.

Experimentation is pretty much key to doing something like that. Tutorials and filters are nice, but sometimes to get a degree above them, you gotta do it yourself.

interesting stuff, i will try everything thanks very much for your information and help

update:

you know when your using the paintbrush, is there any way to have it so the full colour u picked comes on rather than having to click it loads ? like i have opacity on full, but the paintbrush decides to always make a more transparant colour. hmm or should i use the pencil?

also custom brushes, is there any way to alter the brush sizes or make your own?

found out how to make custom ones, in the manual

The thing is; you need to know how all effects work. It took me months to experiment with each of them, but now it pays off. Making grass in PS is quite simple, but the fact is...do you really know how grass looks like. No, I'm serious. If you know how grass grows, what leaves look like, that you have areas with long and short grass, open spots where you can see the soil etc etc. If you don't have that mental picture in your mind, forget it.

well its not simple, its simple to make untilable repeated looking ones, but not proper textures for games, its hard to explain, it might look ok in ps, but for sometihng like return to castle wolfenstein it often looks crap, and its especially difficult to make it look non repeated,

i have since made several good looking grass, far better than i have ever made, but it still doesnt look good enough in radiant and rtcw, oh well,

Non repetive? Easy. That's what you have the brush for. You can create any brush you want and with a very natural grass brush you make grass in no time. Trust me, it IS that simple

lol if it was that simple then there wouldnt be a handfull of decent texture artists for games, there would be thousands, obviously you have different standards of what good grass is and probably dont quite understand what im talking about, never mind

show me your grass then if its that simple, i wanna see, ive deleted most of mine, could only find this one:




And this looks **** in game