: I agree, but it's either something close to these textures or nothing at all
: - that much Forrest has made clear. The problem isn't with the textures
: per se, but the process for generating them, starting with a handful of
: designs and adding different appearances on top of them. The process
: Forrest uses to generate textures is automated and quick - he can churn
: out a ton of them this way. The textures that Anaphel made for M:R and
: later for the high res sets for M1, M2 and MI were done painstakingly by
: hand, and it shows. The textures that Scott Brown has been doing for
: Rubicon X are even more painstakingly done, which is why he became bogged
: down and couldn't finish them. Getting a lot of textures out in a hurry
: requires a lot of compromises. Unless you have a team of graphic artists
: available, this is what you get.
Actually I reused a ton of elements when making my textures, especially the M2/Infinty ones. I developed one or two good basic metal texture layers, one or two good stone texture layers, and used them for pretty much every wall texture. I'd rotate, invert, or re-tile to make them look more unique. I used a lot of Photoshop layer effects to get the "geometry" laid in, and would copy pieces or layer styles from one document to another for efficiency.
Also, a lot of the textures are just modified versions of other textures (M1-1-21, M1-1-23, M1-2-04 are all pretty much the same texture slightly altered). The Pfhor textures were the only ones where I really just created everything from scratch, although I added a lot of the scratches, grime etc. to the M1 textures by hand on a texture-by-texture basis.
It was pretty clear once I looked at them that the M2 and Infinity sets used a common "vocabulary" of shapes and textures, with individual textures being distinguished only by color or by having certain elements added or removed from a common "base" texture. Look over the Infinity sets especially, and you'll see that each collection hads about 5 basic textures that are combined to make all of the variations. For example, in the Jjaro set MINF-4-08, 4-11, 4-18, 4-19, and 4-26 are all made from the same pieces, and I probably did all of them in a couple of hours.
There was a point where I was cranking out 9-12 of these a day consistently. You do have to make some sacrifices in quality or variety to get real productivity, but hopefully the sacrifices don't show unless you really look for them.