Questions about texturing

[Bek]

Often real photo's are used as a base to create different images. Sculpting programs like Zbrush also allow you to paint colour information from a texture (usually a photograph) directly onto models where 1 polygon is essentially a pixel. This lets you easily paint models using images, mixing matching and melting different images together. (For example you might texture a shield or something using different photos of wood grain and metal for different parts)

Creating textures from scratch is a brilliant skill though which helps with creation of lots of things. A few pluses I can think of the top of my head for doing so: Easy to make variants, don't have to find the material in real life, will probably be made tileable, don't have to worry about copyrights if you make it.. things like that.

Also it's not like they can just take a photo of something and that's the job done. It's actually kinda hard to get a good photo to use as a base because it has to be fairly even with the lighting, needs to be a front on shot etc.