Textures and more textures

Had some downtime late this evening and completed my search for textures. At first, I was of the opinion of hiring an artist to make a bunch of textures that I would need. What kind? Run down metal, wood, concrete and other surfaces that be good for a post-apocalyptic setting.

Then I talked to another indie developer, one that actually has games published and makes a living doing so. He said he never makes his own textures or rarely buys them, there are a ton of free texture websites out there.

Ok, so I went to searching around and I found the mecca of texture sites. It's a page with a bunch of links to texture websites. Some links are broken, some websites no longer exist, etc. I went through them one by one and found a good dozen sites with lots of free, detailed textures to use. http://freetexturesite.blogspot.com/ is the site.

I now have close to 20 bookmarks of sites that have various textures, lots of them, thousands of them. So it stands to reason why should I spend hundreds or more dollars on textures when there are so many available. Since I'm a artist newb, I found a tutorial on using Gimp to making textures seamless. I can see spending a day hunting through these websites and having a lot of high quality, usable textures that will be perfect for a RPG. Good stuff!