Texture creation

[Stephen Thomas]

Hi there,

 

Could anyone point me in the direction of good tutorials or training dvd for texture creation? That is, if I have a diffuse texture map how do I go about creating a realistic bump map and specular map to go with it? Is there a quick way to achieve this in Photoshop rather than painstakingly overpainting?

 

Also what is the difference between a bump map and a normal bump map? Does the latter apply to unwrapped textures?

[vkirchner]

First let's take a look at the descriptions of the textures.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bump_map

http://freespace.virgin.net/hugo.elias/graphics/x_polybm.htm

 

http://www.bencloward.com/tutorials_normal_maps1.shtml

 

How you achieve the results you are looking for, depends on the software that you have at hand to create the textures. What do you have for manipulate your images, Photoshop, Paintshop, Gimp, etc? What modeling and rendering package do you use?

[vkirchner]

Sorry, I got distracted and did not see that you had photoshop. Old-timers disease!

 

http://www.3dtotal.com/team/Tutorials/leafproject/leaf_1.asp

 

http://www.photoshopcafe.com/tutorials/brick/brick.htm

 

http://www.designspot.net/creativespot/tutorials/t11-painted-stones.php

 

That should get you going, there are many wonderful tutorials used in the gaming industry that you can find at pixelmorgue.com, game-dev.net, and deviantart.com. But I cannot get to them now due to corporate filters.

[Stephen Thomas]

Thanks for taking the time to give such a thorough response Vince! This has been a lot of help especially the leaf tutorial, exactly what I was looking for. I am basically wanting to work with photographs I have taken with my digital camera rather than starting from scratch and create the other maps from the source image in PS to build a realistic and usable texture for use with 3ds max. Your links will get me well on the way, cheers!

[vkirchner]

If your plans are to work with camera images to build your textures, you might want to consider the Kurv Studios Advanced Photoshop video. It takes you through the process of building your textures using multiple photographs for a building facade. The thing that helped me the most from the video is it explained very well the workflow process to creating a good texture along with the actual Photoshop commands. I still struggle with the many Photoshop commands, but I still remember the workflow process he taught, and the tips he mentioned regarding this.

[Stephen Thomas]

Funny you should mention that, as I have just got the Kurv Photoshop Advanced Texturing tutorials after seeing it mentioned in another thread! Just had a quick flick through so far, but looks like a good grounding in Photoshop techniques. I don't really know much more than the basics, so this should help with what I'm looking to do.

[Exellite]

i recently got hold of that advanced texturing tutorial, I must say I was a little disapointed. Whats the Advanced Photoshop 1 like?

 

That leaf tutorial is quite nice, the other 2 I'd say were a bit useless for 3d work as what they make you do is add the shadows and highlihgted areas within photoshop, this is something you definitely DON'T want to do, your 3d setup must add the light itself, which is why you will need to add displacement and spec maps to the scene.

 

1 thing I'm trying to do atm and would love a link to a tutorial for it (as I cant find 1 anywhere), is create a large brick wall of a very old building from 3 or 4 photos of old brick walls. This type of wall:

 

http://www.cgtextures.com/texview.php?id=9848&s=S&PHPSESSID=e586d8d41f798c4a32715e2435d6b96d

 

eg. make them seemlessly blend with eachother to create a nice High Res map, alot of cloneing I'm guessing?

[Stephen Thomas]

It was just the texturing one I got too, and I agree it wasn't quite what I thought it was going to be. Seemed to be a lot of work for a dissapointing end product, although the way he worked with layers and sets was helpful. I got more out of the leaf tutorial in terms of creating the different maps such as diffuse, specular bump etc.

[DennisB]

1 thing I'm trying to do atm and would love a link to a tutorial for it (as I cant find 1 anywhere), is create a large brick wall of a very old building from 3 or 4 photos of old brick walls. This type of wall:

 

http://www.cgtextures.com/texview.php?id=9848&s=S&PHPSESSID=e586d8d41f798c4a32715e2435d6b96d

 

eg. make them seemlessly blend with eachother to create a nice High Res map, alot of cloning I'm guessing?

 

As long as the walls are lit similarly, and uniformly, it's not really a problem. Here's the seamed section of the wall above (see seams.jpg & no seams.jpg below). I've made the wall a tile in other words, and positioned it to display the seams using pattern features found in Painter (v.6 - v.10).

 

Once you can see the seams like this, it's simply a matter of selecting, copying and pasting similar sections over the seams. In this case, I made about 6 simple rectangular selections and pasted them as layers along the seams. I didn't even soften the edges of the layers, which would smooth transitions. I did use a cloning brush to disturb the straight edge where the moss grows along the ground, thereby making it more a function of the wall rather than defining the ground level.

 

In all, it's about 5 minutes work, very quick, very simple. And since you can then clone your layered image (think Image: Duplicate: Merged in PS) and capture the image as a tiling pattern, it's quite easy to test by using it as a fill, but at a smaller size so any objectionable patterns of repetition show up.

 

This is a powerful feature, and it has been around since 1999. I'm not really that much of a 3D modeler, but I find Painter an indispensible tool for working with textures. I'm always surprised that more 3D artists don't know about it. That probably has more to do with Corel's marketing insight and wisdom than anything else, however.

 

Now here's the rub. That just opens the door. Once you have made the wall a tiling pattern, you can paint with it (see wall.jpg). This wall example is just a simple brush stroke, but note how the texture bends as it scales. Well, it can do alot more than that. How about being able to lay down a matching complex alpha with the painted pattern, and making the result a tiling pattern too, simply by chosing to paint it that way, no post processing necessary?

 

Dennis @ DigArts

[Exellite]

wow, thanks alot for that, I shall def give this technique a go.