i was curious if the textures made by the dev team for enemy territory were all hand drawn, or if there were photo sourced textures also? this is mostly a point of curiousity. so far, almost every single texture i’ve put together for my farm map (particularly the barn) is hand drawn, though there are two or three that i used a photo source on (mostly because the photo had some really cool small details).
also, is it reasonable to assume that if i had drew some textures on paper, instead of in photoshop, and scanned them, that they’d be reasonable quality as long as it was a good scan? i don’ thave a drawing tablet for my computer (sigh), and that would make things miles easier than mousing it (though the optical mouse has pretty good accuracy). i’ve found i have troubles using photoshop to do some of the more minute details, like cracks in concrete, etc., but i’d probably have more luck doing them on paper.
for that matter, are most of the community mappers who make textures photo sourcing or hand drawing? just a point of curiousity.
hand drawn vs. photo sourced
Well, I think most might be “hand-drawn,” if you mean like photoshop and stuff. Although I saw some interesting stuff on TechTV on making your own textures, it’s really not that hard…
some are “hand-made”, while others are photos. generally, for tiled textures, i think hand-made textures are more common, but for things like single doors (in some cases) are photos. just browse through pk3s, you can tell if something is a photo or not.
I’m willing to bet that nearly all of the textures in the game contain elements sourced from photos or scans, even the ones that seem most ‘painted’ at first glance. Conversely, all of the obviously photo-sourced textures will have actually spent more time being manipulated and tweaked in Photoshop than you might expect, so that, for example, they tile properly, have the correct proportions, and have brightness/contrast/saturation levels consistent with the other parts of the same set. If you just take a photo of a brick wall, do a 5 minute tiling job, and slap it on a brush it will invariably look crap. There’s more to making a good photo-sourced texture than that.
It’s usually a good idea to add a bit of grit and grime from an appropriate photo source to painted textures - it’s a quick and easy way of giving them a bit more ‘bite’, and it can really bring the different painted elements of a texture set together well if similar photo grunge is used throughout.
i do most of mine with a photo for reference, like to see the effect i want to achieve in a real world setting, but then i create it from scratch. and yeah, by hand drawn i mean photoshop. i’ve been messing with a technique an artist friend of mine uses in paintings she does, overpainting. it achieves some interesting affects- you can get the more real world affect in the colors you prefer. of course you can do that with color swaps or a color layer too 
i’ve been turning out tons of textures lately, and think i would maybe be better as a texture artist than a mapper, heh
The best results use both techniques, you use photos for you base material then you add details in photoshop.
This isn’t the same sort of texture found in et but;
For this texture I used 4-5 metal photos blended together in all sorts of ways to get a good metal base I could work off of then I added everything else by hand in photoshop.
You can get some good results this way.