Creating new textures

([GORE]Hallelujah) #1

Need an urgent advice, plz.

I’ve borrowed a digital camera for a couple of days to shoot some impressive
walls/bricks/wood/columns/ceilings in a WW2 style. All this eye candy will only be available for 1 or 2 days (then I’m moving away from where I’m currently staying).

The prob is that I’m absolutely newbie in that, and got no idea of:

  1. what format (jpg, tga, tif … ?) to shoot them in
  2. with/without a flash?
  3. any other recommendations?

Please provide some sort of a newbiesh quick-start-fool-proof-3-step guide (if at all possible) so that I can some day enjoy those new textures (which I will undoubtedly share with the community) in-game :wink:

Thx in advance.

(Shaderman) #2

I never made textures myself but read this in sock’s readme to his great map POM some days ago (I hope it’s ok to share this here):

Digital photography

The textures had to be photo sourced as the map architecture was going
to be natural organic structures. I spent a good couple of weeks driving
around to various locations taking pictures and I certainly got my fair
share of dodgy looks! Taking close up pictures of plants and mud tracks
does look extremely odd to the general public.

On several occasions I had to go back to some locations because of lighting
conditions and the fact I was wearing a dark coloured T-shirt! A lot of the
leafs were taken extremely close up and often the colour of my T-shirt would
wash out or tint the digital image.

All of the leafs and plant objects for the map required alpha layers and
would need to be cut out so they look right. A classic method for this is
to use a blue cloth screen behind objects so that the screen can be selected
quickly and easily in a paint package and deleted. Something I forget about
out from my biology class is that most organic objects are slightly
translucent and will be affected by the colour of the screen behind them.

The best advice I can give after all my ventures into digital photography
is, wear a grey t-shirt and use a white cloth screen. Otherwise you will
end with a lot of tinted images and blue coloured leaves.

(blushing_bride) #3

its also important to take straight photos. So if you take pictures of bricks make sure that the camera is level so that you can tile the texture easily in photoshop. If you take a wonkey picture then you probably wont be able to use it. Also using a flash can create bright patches on a texture that you would have to photoshop out. Make sure the light on the area is even as well. If its a sunny day and you take a picture of a brick wall with a long shadow going halfway across chances are you will not be able to use that photo either due to the shadowed area appearing as a completly different area to the non-shadow area.

(]UBC[ McNite) #4

You also don’t want to go too close to your walls etc. I got the best pics when I took photos of areas 2x1 up to 5x3 meters large. Use highest quality settings in your camera and especially hightest resolution. You can always turn down the resolution in Photoshop afterwards.
And, yes, flash proved to spoil pics. I suggest you rather take them a bit dark and brighten them up in photoshop. Also avoid surfaces with the sun shining directly on them. The shadows will be too dark and its very difficult to make them good nontiling textures.
When making pics of the floor, dont look through the cam but hold in at head-height with outstretched arm. That way you get a larger pic compared to when you look through the cam.

And, yes, jpeg is best. Safes memory.

([GORE]Hallelujah) #5

[quote=]UBC[ McNite]You also don’t want to go too close to your walls etc. I got the best pics when I took photos of areas 2x1 up to 5x3 meters large. Use highest quality settings in your camera and especially hightest resolution. You can always turn down the resolution in Photoshop afterwards.
And, yes, flash proved to spoil pics. I suggest you rather take them a bit dark and brighten them up in photoshop. Also avoid surfaces with the sun shining directly on them. The shadows will be too dark and its very difficult to make them good nontiling textures.
When making pics of the floor, dont look through the cam but hold in at head-height with outstretched arm. That way you get a larger pic compared to when you look through the cam.[/quote]Thanks a lot, pals!

Any thoughts as to .jpg vs everything else?

(]UBC[ McNite) #6

lol I edited while you posted… use jpg

(Mr_Tickles) #7

Ummm, well, sock has advised in the past to use only jpg or tga… jpg is way more efficient at saving space, but tga allows you to keep quality and offers the chance of an alpha channel if you really need it, either way, keep the originals :wink:

(=ds=bart) #8

hi i am trying to .
to make a alpa texture with paint shop pro 7.
bud dont know how to set a texture to alpa channel .
has any one of you a good link to a tut for paint shop pro.

thx in advance
from the land off beer
:drink:

(Mr_Tickles) #9

Yep, search for the topic, there have been many posts on it… you need to go to the adobe site and download a file to revert something back to a version that was in 6. Follow their instructions to install it. Then in the channels window (another tab, instead of the layers). Then click the icon at the bottom to add a new channel, and it will automatically create an alpha channel for you. You have to store these as .tga formats. Have another search to find how to create a good alpha channel.

(thegnat) #10

Paint Shop Pro isn’t from Adobe. Its just an issue with Photoshop 7, that needs the TGA patch. They fixed it since CS, I think.

First google match for alpha-texture tutorials: http://www.axialis.com/tutorials/tutorial-misc002.html
Don’t be so lazy, bart!

(NullZilla) #11

Grab flaming pear’s tesselation filter for photoshop.

It will take any image and perfectly make it for it’s tile-able

(Schaffer) #12

@NullZilla - Flamming Pears filter’s cost cash but are very good. Super Blade Pro (wohooo).

@ds bart - If PSP, once you have made your raw selection, access the selections menu and choose ‘edit selection’. This allows you to paint the selection in gray scale where black removes from selection, white includes in selection and the 250odd shades of grey include in selection with transperancy where the colo[bold]u[/bold]rs close to black have a higher transperancy amount than the colours closer to white.

Depending upon the version of PSP you are running then you can fall into trouble with tga’s. Straight PSP8 is crap so download the patch to psp 8.1. With 8 it will flip the tga upside down and inside up and generally stuff it up for you. How do I know that? the hard way. I contacted Jasc about this and they said there wasn’t a problem.

Wohoo, only a few more days of Uni to go.

(Mr_Tickles) #13

Whoops, thought he said Photoshop, sorry if you went through all that :S

(thegnat) #14

LOL.

No, wasn’t meant like you understood that. Just wanted to clear it up.

(Mr_Tickles) #15

:slight_smile: Good to know…

(natrop) #16

if you created a new texture where do you put it so you can use it in gtk

(]UBC[ McNite) #17

in a new folder inside the textures-folder, for example

/textures/natropstex

(Lock Ness Monster) #18

ok, i am trying to make some textures to and i dont know much about them. I cant download Photoshop cause its to bug and my cruddy dial up cant take it. SO i was wondering, would Coreldraw 12 work in photoshop’s place and how would u go about making textures with it if u can use it instead. I havent really used Corel also so im not to good at it.

(zl1corvette) #19

Why not use the gimp, it’s free and I have found, for my purposes at least, I can do everything I can with photoshop.

(Lock Ness Monster) #20

i dont know how to use GIMP that well