Quote Originally Posted by Zack's Crotch View Post
I've created tons of textures for oblivion mods, and while I probably haven't made as many as is on the characters of ffx , It doesn't take very long to make textures. I had no idea about handpainted though, all mine were done in photoshop, then mounted using other programs

I was under the impression that this was going to be along the lines of jak and daxter hd, with just the character textures really increased and the rest just smoothed or sharpened with new colors.
If they are doing a full hd remake and adding new meshes, yes it will take a long time, because meshes are a pain in the ass to create, but if it is just updated textures, the actual art part shouldn't take too long.

Unless they are actually hand painting them, I would like to see where you came up with that.
Wait, do you think texturing just involves some basic Photoshop manipulation of photos? Because if so, you couldn't be further from the truth. There's one thing to slap in some bad photo images on to a mesh and call it a day, to actually making something professional.

Even when it comes to say, for example, realistic rocks and cliffsides the process is usually that they sculpt it all in ZBrush and then hand-digital paint texture, tone and colour, then bake it on to the mesh (usually they just re-topologize the extremely high polygonal mesh) with light information (in the end you usually end up with normal maps, diffuse maps, specular maps, glow maps, etc.). There are ways to use photo manipulation, but it's also a long process and the results are generally too generic to bother these days.

Throughout the entirety of the Final Fantasy series, they've always used this method. Even during the more realistic pre-rendered cinematics. Even during the latest installments such as XIII and XIV. X especially is completely hand-digitally painted (beautifully done), chances are they have all the textures in much high resolutions as master files (like 2048x2048) but if they plan on adding normal mapping or they want things changed in the textures then it's going to take them a long time.

Go read up on the Polycount and CGTalk forums if you want to find out more about how the professionals actually work.