Create a library of designs that reflect both human body
parts and urban environment to reinforce the use of drawing for game design and
its relation with 3d modeling.
The first texture I am going to create for this module will
be grass as it's vastly featured on my landscape idea.
I began with a 512x512px canvas in Adobe Photoshop CS5, my original idea of creating grass was to use
2 or more planes with an alpha mapped texture so that you could see each strand
of grass while not doing too much damage to performance, in fact this is the
best method used for performance, although with the advancing of computers this
is now deemed as low quality.
I instead found a tutorial on creating a single plane of
grass that looks 3d and even reacts with shadows, much like a bump map. all I
had to do was open up Photoshop, create a new document, paint the canvas in a
dull white, filter blur gaussian blur, monochromatic with a high percentage and
it was done, then all there was to do is the same thing but colouring the noise
into a green grass style.
Once this was done I needed to use Vray and 3Ds Max to apply
a displacement texture (using a Vray plugins) to a plane and render using Vray.
Unfortunately I don't yet have Vray installed to test this method with, I will
eventually complete this tutorial but for now I'll move on to my low quality
method.
Once again I began with Photoshop, 512x512 canvas. I painted
individual strands of grass, having them blend together at the bottom of the
canvas, making them seem like a jumbled mess of "wacky waving inflatable
arm flailing tube men" (Seth MacFarlane - Family Guy).
I then added shading by creating a new layer and turning the
opacity down to about 20-30%, covering edges of the blades of grass with black
(with low opacity it causes a shadow effect). I used the shading to help
differentiate the blades of grass near the bottom of the canvas.
After this I merged the two layers and using the transform
tool I pushed the sides of the grass image close together so create a squished
set of grass, this made it look better as now the blades are thinner and
seemingly more defined. I then cloned this image to create several more,
flipping and resizing them to make them fit together without becoming too
obvious that it's the same piece of grass placed together multiple times.
The grass still wasn't looking perfect so I grabbed the
colour of the grass once again, using the ink tool (shortcut is i) and began to
paint small areas and gaps between the images, covering up obvious repetitions
and creating separation points in the grass. (Below is listed by order: Alpha
Map, Diffuse Map, Finished Texture applied to 3D Space.)
After
the grass I decided to continue with the foliage theme by creating a texture
for leaves. I quickly drew outlines of a leaf shape and painted the basic
colour of the leaves (green, with a medium opacity). Designing the leaves left
me with a cartoon like texture, most “from scratch” created textures do, after
colouring in the leaves I deleted the black lines, copied a leaf 3 more times
and transformed them in an attempt to somewhat disguise the fact that they are
all the same leaf. I deleted the white background and saved the image with an
alpha layer.
After this I moved onto the rest of a tree and created a
wood texture, I will have to redo this one with a photograph at a later date
but for now here’s how I’ve done it.
512x512 canvas in Photoshop, choose two colours of brown,
both quite dark, filter, noise, add noise, then add a motion blur and you
should end up with a stretched noise texture. After that add white/black with a
low opacity to create circles for the knots and twist the texture into a swirl
using the liqufy tool.
After this I created a texture for rocks/ a rocky surface, following a very useful set of steps that we covered in our first year of Design for Games I created a bumpy, rock-like surface using simple tools.
I painted the background a dull gray, rendered clouds, added noise, then created an alpha channel and rendered difference clouds and added another noise map, then rendered difference clouds once more. After that all I had to do was add lighting, for this one I added a spotlight for testing.
Next up was wood, I'm not extremely keen on this method but it's what we were taught, the only method we were taught of creating wood in Design for games. So I painted a canvas brown, used filter, render, fibers, filter, blur, motion blur and stretched the fibers so they looked more like streaks.
After that I used the liquify tool to bend parts of the image to create knots within the wood texture, below is the finished texture.
The next texture in my environment list is Metal. I wanted
the enormous tower depicted in my pencil drawings to have a metal structure so
I created a new canvas in Photoshop, 512x512px again. This is a very quick
tutorial that I learned from the 1st year of Design for Games
(Plymouth College of Arts), I painted the canvas black, added 50% noise (filter
> noise > add noise) and then added a motion blur until the noise looked
like scratches. Once the scratches were in I use some custom made Photoshop
brushes (gwip grunge set, found on deviantart.com) and paint lightly across the
texture so far. At this point I think this texture is ready to bump. (below is
the resulting texture)
After this I decided to create and test a texture using metal and wood thinking of what I could use this on I thought it would be useful to create a shield for a character yet to be created.
I began in 3ds max where I quickly mocked up a shield with very low polys (17 or less) I rendered a UVW map and took it into photoshop for editing. I then grabbed a photograph of concrete, turned the opacity down on the UVW map layer to about 40% so I could still see the lines, then I painted the edges of the shield in a light gray and repeated the above method to create a brushed steel style texture. To do the wood I selected all the inner parts of the shield and followed the above texture design. The key here was to gently erase some parts of the texture so that the concrete would begin to show, then paint with a low opacity over the top of the erased parts, this created a rust-like look.
