Feel free to contact me if you have more questions.
- What program do you use?
Blender to model and also paint. Painting is done in grayscale, in the past I would use a custom tool to dither and palettize the textures.Nowadays I'm just using Photoshop to assign gradient maps instead, or directly paint over the grayscale.- Are your textures hand-painted?
Yes, most of them are. Sometimes I do use pictures for added "texture", or as a brush (for things like fur or chainmail).- What resolution are your textures?
Lately I've been making a lot of 128x128 textures, but will often go for 256x256 too. Sometimes the unwrap will be too awkward or cramped to be painted easily, in that case I'll up the resolution and rearrange the island, but will maintain the same texel density.- Do you have any tutorials / courses?
Nope- Any resources you recommend?
I didn't use any specific resource in my journey, but retrospectively I can point to a few things.In my workflow I paint in grayscale, and palettize / apply colors in the end. Generally, differences in value are easier to perceive than differences in color, so doing value studies ( = practicing painting in grayscale ) has been pretty useful for me.For lowpoly 3D models specifically, things like this Vagrant Story model viewer or this FF9 model viewer could be useful resources.Also check out this pretty neat writeup on the "ps1 lowpoly" styleI also found that practicing with the #256fes challenge (256x256 texture, 256 tris), really helped me learn which things to simplify or cut off.Most useful of all however, has been plain old practice and experimentation.
