The Joy of Tex (turing)
As a do-it-yourselfer game developer, about half of my 20-hour venture (sadly, it WILL take more than a week to get to 20 hours) is devoted to generating content. I do have help for some some of the more visible elements and 2D art, but a lot of my effort is still put into making my own visuals look good. Which is no small trick - I'm not very good.

I've been getting the hang of Blender over many moons of off-and-on effort. I'm still no expert at it, but I can get some halfway useable geometry out of it much of the time. But my crucial challenge is texturing. My respect for artists skilled at 3D modeling has gone up significantly since my first attempt to slap some photographed texture onto the side of a cube and call it an apartment building. There is a lot of art and science in the process, and while it might not be quite as technical as programming, it's still a technically intensive process as well as an artistic one.

And I've learned that UV Unwrapping is your friend.

Since neither touched-up photographs nor my poor attempts at hand-drawn textures (read: Stick Figures with scribbles) are completely adequate for what I'll be working on, I've had to get some help.

The first was a very awesome book called "The Dark Side of Game Texturing," by David Franson. The emphasis in this book is on using photographic references and procedural texturing techniques in Photoship to construct game textures. Lots of layering images, using beveling and burning tools. and so forth. He doesn't go into too much detail about the actual process of applying the textures to models - mainly the creation of the textures themselves. If you are a rank beginner (like me), this book will be a very helpful resource.

Unfortunately, I use "Poor Man's Photoshop," The Gimp. Almost everything that Franson talks about in his book is doable in Gimp, but I had to spend a lot of time translating his Photoshop instructions into Gimp-ese. I still don't know if its possible to do an "inner bevel" in Gimp (probably through an external plug-in), but I've been able to do about everything else in the book, though I had to guess at the equivalent settings in Gimp.

Another little tool I've been delighted with is Genetica, a seamless texture generator that is in the indie price range (the standard license is only $130). It was particularly interesting to me in that it takes most of the steps and tricks in The Dark Side of Game Texturing and automates them into a node-based operation. It's almost like the high-tech, digital equivalent of spray paint art, but it works very well.

For example, I needed something that looked a little like textured siding where the paint had gradually eroded. I found a preset that sorta resembled the right texture I wanted (with the noise generation and so forth), which I played with to give it the right kind of "feel". Then I found a node that resembled the overlayed siding, and played with beveling and depth levels to get me something that vaguely related what I had in mind. Not bad for ten minutes' work with a tool I am just barely learning to use!

All textures are created to be fully seamless - meaning they tile effortlessly. And unlike photographic base textures, they tend not to have blemishes or noticeable patterns that can draw the eye to the repetition in the scene (there's another tool I bought some time back called the "Seamless Texture Generator" which helps with making seamless textures from photo references).

When you create a texture or pattern, you can also add it to the list of presets to use it as a base for another texture - again with full control on down the pipeline. The program keeps track of the primitives elements used to create the texture, not the texture itself, so if some point down the line you want, say, the base color to be black instead of steel-gray, or you want to add some little bit of green weeds poking up through the cracked cement between the tiles, you can change it.

Here's kind of an example of it in action for one of the pre-sets that has a round air vent with warning stripes on either side.

Here's the primitives to create the basic vent:

And this is then layered into with another texture and masks to create the tile:


Which is now close to the finished product on the left of the "lab," ready to be rendered out at any resolution.

Anyway, I don't know if it's a huge boost to my productivity, but its fun to play with. But it really does seem like an easy way to produce a TON of nice-looking base textures, useable as-is, or dirtied up by hand in Photoshop or The Gimp to give it a bit more character.

While the examples I used here are man-made, it also makes good rock, alien skin, lava, and even fur.

(Vaguely) related whazzis:
* Sucking Slightly less
* Raising a Barn
* Learning to Draw!

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Labels: game art, productivity

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:05 AM (Permalink)