Texturing Hint and Tips

[InsanitySorrow]

Texturing Hints and Tips

Doing any sort of Texture or image editing in Photoshop or GIMP can be hard, sometimes even tricky. But there are always little things you can do to make things more easier for yourself or others, so many extra features for both pieces of software that sometimes get overlooked by newcomers and even more experience users at times.

This thread is for all the Hints and Tips you have that you may have used yourself, read about or just thought would be ncie to share with others. Remember this thread is for BOTH Photoshop and GIMP so please state which piece of software your hint or tip is for.

To aid users with seeing what application your hint or tip is for, your should colour code your notice like so:

[Photoshop]

[GIMP]

[Paint.Net]

[Any Package]

[InsanitySorrow]

[GIMP]

Using Layers

Layers are a handy thing to know about when editing an image or texture when you want to edit only select parts. The layers window allows you to copy/cut sections of the original texture to a new layer which can then be hidden from view while you work on the main image itself, it works for editing just the selected piece too. All you need to do when finished is to merge the layers when finished.

Layers Window:

[greenwarden]

This thread looks to be very helpful for me- I have a lot of fun playing with GIMP and I think I learn something new every time I do, but I could use some info about the various selection tools- rectangular and ellipse select are self-explanatory, but what tool is best for selecting irregular shapes? Scissors, fuzzy or free?

Example: I am trying my hand at retexturing a shirt, specifically, the collar. I want to isolate the collar from the rest of the texture- when I choose Color select, it also grabs the rest of the shirt, so no go there. When I choose fuzzy, it grabs much more than I need, and yet ignores many bits inside the collar (fabric highlights/shadows, etc). The scissors select tool- I've had limited success using it. After establishing all of the connection points and hitting enter to verify my choice, sometimes it "takes" and sometimes it does not. Which leaves the free select tool- and I am 100% rubbish at outlining stuff with my mouse, so the precise edges of the collar cannot be captured.

Any assistance you can provide will be much appreciated.

[InsanitySorrow]

[GIMP]

I think the tool to use depends on your skill or preference. I use the free tool when trying to select irregular shapes, but sometimes it can be tricky using it even with a steady hand.

One tool I have used but to be honest not a great deal is the Foreground select tool. It works a bit like the scissor tool where you select the connection points. The main difference is it highlights the background red and your selection blue so you know the exact area of selection, from there its easy to copy or cut out the selection. I would suggest using this in combination with the Layers Tip above, that way you can revert any changes by simply hiding the changed layer

[DarkRider]

[GIMP]

The best way I've found from my own experience is to select unusual shapes I've found is to plot a path around the section you want to isolate using the Path Tool. It's a bit like connect the dots, but once you've plotted a path around your piece click the button "Selection From Path" and your path will turn into a selection outline.

[greenwarden]

Thanks a bunch, you two. I just gave the Path Tool a go, and I think that approach has a lot of potential for me. Now to try the Foreground select tool!

[RedDragonDreamer]

[Photoshop] / [GIMP]

Through much practice and fiddling with settings I have found that using the Gaussian Blur on ones normal maps after they have been made makes a vastly good improvement ( even more so than a high resolution pic to use as a texture ) particulary so with tiles.

The texture winds up being much clearer and not much blur up close.

It doesn't suit painting textures but artitech type bricks tiles things like that it gives superb finishing touchup.

My guess reason for this is, although normal maps can make highly detailed maps of a texture, the game for whatever reason can't handle such high detail so one much 'blur' the normal map a bit for the high detail to look as good as it is supposed to.

Well it's only a guess and I'm rambling now so hope this helps someone.

I also have had a fiddle with layers. I have found it is surprising simple to add snow to a existing vanilla house through this. This is kinda universal I used both GIMP and Paint.NET - both free programs. Anyways I loaded up the original texture then I clicked on add new layer, then I loaded up a pic of a snow covered roof and used the magic wand to only select the snow. Next I unticked the background so only my new layer on the original texture was visable and I copied the snow selection and then pasted it to my new layer and then reticked the original texture background and well now it was looking good, so I tried adding it in niftscope and then I was like, OH NOOOS the Snow didn't match up properly! So what did I do to fix it, I reloaded it into GIMP and I selected the wonderful handy tool, make seamless, and I did this with the .dds and it's normalmap and well it looks a right treat, I was very happy.

Hope this ramble helps

[InsanitySorrow]

[Photoshop] / [GIMP]

Making a black/dark colour

Making a black or dark colour is easy enough, simply use the brightness/contrast bar. But to make things a little easier on yourself try desaturating the image first.

In Photoshop the shortcut is CTRL+SHIFT+U

Armor Texturing

A tip for armor texturing(though will work on any texture) is to duplicate the main texture and make a new layer with it, then remove everything you don't want. This will leave the section you want to modify, repeat this for the other areas you want to edit. Just be sure to keep an untouched copy of the texture as the background for the parts you don't want to alter, that way you won't be missing any parts of the texture when you save.

[StarX]

[Photoshop]

I think the "Cloning stamp"-tool deserves some attention in Photoshop. It's a very powerful tool for applying textures in a very controlable way. This tool can be extremely useful sometimes when you need exactly the same textures for certain parts. As I don't know Gimp I'm not sure it has a similar tool.

[InsanitySorrow]

[Any package]

When saving icons for Oblivion you can either use DXT3 or DXT5, some use no compression at all. The main thing is it needs to support alpha. Also when saving your icon if you choose to create MipMaps this will save you from having to create Menus5- and Menus80 versions of your icons, which are needed for the different texture sizes in-game.

One thing to note here is that the CS does not like MipMaps, but just ignore any complaints it gives, the icons will be 100% fine in-game.

[Siouliusn]

Thanks for that tips Insanity, 'till now I 've always made .dds without mipmap because of that message ^^'

(I'll save some time from now thanks to you)

[InsanitySorrow]

You're welcome

[Kiwi-Hawk]

Kia Ora

[Photoshop]

I'm real green at this so if somebody with more skill wants to edit and make a tutorial outta this thats fine.

I wanted to make an ingame map of tamriel for the Tamrial Worldspace Projet that had the mountains etc, not

just a flat plain.

1/ I patched together all the landscape .dds files in the correct order, thery are the generated 60.00.96.32.dds

getting them in order means the match at joins

2/ I do same for the _fn.dds files these are the blueish normalmaps

you need to touch up and do what ever other stuff you wish to the texture, names, labels etc can be added here or better yet a seperate layer (easyer to edit)

Copy the texture and paste as a layer over the normalmap (make 2 layers)

Select one layer and filter to multiply, slecet the second layer and filter to colour

you now should have a map image with all the landscape mountains, vallies and terrain of your world landscape.

Keep in mind any changes or edits will damge you landscape so edit only the texture and repaste you layers, you can (I think) get away with colour balance, stauration and the like

of the layers but once merged you need come back to your psd to make changes,. this is maybe why names lables etc would be better as a layer but you still cant edit thos on merged

image.

You can probley do this in Gimp too but I never have and don't know filtering in Gimp or like tools

Edit:

apon thinking a little TES4LODGen will help with steps 1 and 2 making joining much easyer

Edited May 22, 2011 by Kiwi-Hawk