very realistic textures??

[erilaz]

The graphics card does not help you get realistic textures, unless you're talking about game-specific shaders.

All life-like surfacing is a combination of well painted textures, shaders and lighting. The graphics card is merely a display, it doesn't help your final output.

I've also moved this to the appropriate forum.

[mister3d]

hi, fellow cg artist, im a lightwaver and i was wondering if you want real life like textures , does it depend on the graphics card your computer has or the way you render and color your textures,, i want to get those star wars graphics.. is it a mixture of both??
thanks

A powerful graphics card for 3d like Geforce Quadro series will give you a better speed in viewports, better antialiasing in viewports (but not in rendering), so it will give you more comfortable conditions for the working process.
A powerful processor will give you a faster rendering times, but still, a lot depends from your knowledge of your renderer, and knowledge of optimisations will give you more then a fast processor.

If you want realistic textures, you can buy texture libraries or to make on your own with a digital camera, which is a good choice too, because today's cameras give you high-res stills for reasonable money.
But if you want realistic surfaces, not just textures:
first you should always unwrap everything and not to use procedural textures, even if it's boring;
prepare color textures first, and then derive from it bump and reflection textures, so this is should be a minimum. Sure, there can be other textures like a glass transparency etc. The point is to refuse from "ideal" look which gives out that this is cg. Usually you make your surfaces dirty, with a lot of imperfections on 3 basic levels minimum: color, bump and reflection. So dirt helps you to "sell" the image and to make it believable that this is real.
From another point you may ask if it's possible to create a realistic scene without dirt? An architectural visualisation uses mostly procedural textures, because their goal is to show a brand-new buildings, flats etc, so dirt and imperfections are unacceptable. But still they look realistic. It is made with a good gi lighting and use of shaders, and the first value you should recreate is a reflection, which may be from absolutely clear mirror-like to a very glossy, and a glossy takes longer to visualise but in a real life you meet glossy reflections much more often then mirror-like.
So in my understanding creating surfaces for movies is a combimation of architectural visualisation accuaracy+imperfect textures with a lot of layers, i.e.for specular, reflection, bump etc, as against today's games, which I would say a low-end cg, because many features are unavailable for realtime yet.

To make the surface look realistic you also need to gather reference photos to compare, and gathering references is one very important thing you should use:for concept design, for textures, for shaders, for lighting.

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