Tips for texturing for games

On both units I taught this year at Bournemouth University, the single most complex area to grasp for students was texturing. Whereas it was straightforward to teach modellinng, animation and level design principles to undegrads, games texturing is an area where most of them struggled. I've recently come across a very interesting online article at 3D World magazine's website which consists of five top leading artists revealing tricks of the to create quality textures for modern games.

These include understanding channels, quick variant texturing, using Render To Texture efficiently, use of emissive maps, using ambient occlusion maps, Photoshop filters, parallax mapping and indexed colours (amongs others).

This excellent article is well worth checking out and can be found at http://www.3dworldmag.com/page/3dworld?entry=texturing_for_games.