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Posted

One for all you talented 2D Mapcorians.

Whilst I have been mapping for donkey's years now across all sorts of engines and apps, I've never really invested much (any) time in getting my 2D skills up to the level where I can knock out acceptable texures to use on my creations. Mainly I guess 'cause I have always had someone far more talented than myself to do the job for me.

Anyways as part of trying to get better at creating my own 2D stuff I am thinking of investing in a wacom tab. However, I would like to know do you folks think this is either

  • An essential bit of kit,

    or

    Nice to have/pretty useful but not entirely essential.

To quantify a bit, I am only really interested in making environment textures and textures for my models, not any digital painting or other of that kind of creative malarky.

So whatya think folks, is it worth the £200 or should I just put the cash towards a bigger fatter monitor?

Posted

Its nice to have but not essential if youre not a hardcore texture guy. Specially photo sourced textures dont really need a wacom.

And youre better of buying a 80£ a6 wacom to start with and see how it goes. It might seem small but its more than good enough for your average use.

Posted

I agree with Hourences. I bought a wacom intuos A5 last year and it's really nice, but I've honestly not had a lot of time to use it. More often than not I tend to just use the mouse for bog standard photoshop stuff (like textures). When I do use it to paint highlights and other free flowing stuff, it's great, but it is non-essential unless you spend a lot of time in PS doing stuff that really needs pressure sensitivity & free flowing lines.

Posted

I've bought a Graphire Classic 4 (A6) a year ago and it fits my expectations... I don't draw stuff, it just makes things easier with textures, nothing that can't be done without but faster and more fun.

I'm atm looking at Blender 2.43 with the new Sculpting System, a Wacom is highly recommendable for such programs.

btw, the Graphire Classic 4 costs about 80€.

Posted

I have fallen in love with my Wacom Intuos3 A5 USB PTZ-630G, which has turned out to be really handy for doing paint deformation stuff in max. Having a non-pressure sensitive tool like a regular mouse for such a job just feels wierd after having used a Wacom.

So my point is just that a digitizer can also be useful outside PS.

Posted

It really depends on what you want to do with it. Do you want to be able to do more than just tiling photos for your textures?

I used my wacom all the time even before i started making hand drawn textures and always found it essential to give textures a unique touch. It was a great way to eventually start adding hand drawn elements in my texture.

For me it feels more natural to work with than a mouse, and I use it pretty much all of the time now. Not only for texturing, but also scultping. Sculpting tools are becoming essential tools in the nextgen art pipeline, and you cannot do this without a wacom for example. But also just in 3dsmax I am now often working with a wacom as it feels very natural to me..

Personnaly, i think most textures i see by people who only use their mouse are pretty shitty so I would recommend learning the ways of the wacom. It really depends on how good you want to get at it.

Posted

I've never really been able to get used a wacom for the type of work I do. I do use a very high resolution mouse though that I "paint" with.

razer-copperhead-blue_big.jpg

if I was doing something more akin to painting I would probably learn to use one.

Posted

I don't think a tablet will make you a better painter per se - if you can't draw or paint without one, then you still won't be able to draw well, even with a tablet... Or at least that's what I realized after I got an intuos2 a few years ago. It's handy for tracing and such, but in the end it's still just a tool.

Posted

Ok thanks for all the advice folks. Since I am only really concerned with making environment textures, and since many of you guys seem to get great results with just a mouse (I got the same one as you Zaphod) I think I'll just get myself a fat ass new monitor instead.

Lord knows these old eyes could do with a bigger screen.

Cheers everyone.

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