Texture Creation Tutorial and Demonstration

hello and welcome to this tutorial for creating textures I'm narrow I'm not a professional but I've been making textures for a couple of years and a lot of people have asked to see that process if you are one of those people or if you're just generally interested in making textures then I hope that you find this worthwhile the first thing to say if you're considering a texture pack is to make sure that you understand the commitment even if you work at a rate equivalent to a part-time job it could take well over a year to do even a simple game the Internet is littered with abandoned texture projects so make sure that you can devote the time and energy it takes before you add to that pile you should also be prepared to buy hardware I think it's a requirement that you have a drawing tablet and an unnecessary glove I also found it very helpful to upgrade to a color accurate monitor at the very least try to make sure your display is calibrated so that what you see is what's actually there in my experience you don't need to buy top-of-the-line hardware to get good results and you'll be able to use it for years to come on future projects you may also consider getting a subscription to a texture library for reasons I'll get into later you don't want to rely on photos any more than necessary but for the times that you do use one you'll want to have access to a wide selection of quality textures Google Images sucks for this when it comes to software you don't need to use a paid program like Photoshop but before choosing a free program it's worth spending time with all of the options I mainly use because it's intuitive and simple but I'll switch to create it when I need better brush options having multiple programs gives you a lot more flexibility than sticking to just one once you have your hardware and software sorted out you can begin what might be the most important step which is to research your game games are usually made with an art director and concept artist it's establishing a vision for what things should look like a team of artists with different styles and tastes then come together to make a game with one coherent style and that style can be a major part of a games appeal if you come in and change things without any regard for that you're liable to make the game look worse rather than better think of yourself as a member of the staff showing up extremely late for work find as much official artwork as you can and create a library of it for easy reference modern games often include this material on the disc but for older games you might find what you need online or by purchasing art books interviews can also provide a lot of valuable insight into the intended tone of the game you're inevitably going to change the look and feel of the game by retexe during it but as long as you at least try to stick to the original style you will be ahead of half of the texturepacks out there once you're confident that you understand the game well enough you can begin the actual texture work modern games often require special tools for modding but in emulators it couldn't be easier check the box for dumping and all of the textures currently and useful appear in the designated folder keep your texture dumps and project files organized with folders for each specific area it's best to have a plan for progress that limits you to one small room or area at a time since the amount of work can be overwhelming if you take on too much at once the reward of completely finishing a rumor area can also be a major motivator to keep you going it's usually easy to tell which texture is which but if not a quick way to figure out where a texture goes is to use the bucket fill to paint it with a bright color then see where it shows up in the game you can also test how a texture is mapped by using color of lines or numbers to see how the game tiles it most of the time it's pretty straightforward but there are occasional curveballs that won't make any sense it's important to know how the texture works in-game before spending hours adding details to it that won't show up the way you expected you'll need to decide on a target resolution for your packs of the sizes can be consistent throughout the game at this point displays are trending towards 4k and it would be a good idea to set that as your target if you work on a 720p screen and just make textures that look good there a user worth three times their vertical resolution might think the textures are too low res already a quick test I use this to get as close to an object as I can in a windowed view then experiment with the different zooms in my editing program in this case 16x is about one to one with a game on a 1440p screen which tells me that scale should look sharp even this close up this is a metric that a lot of current games don't live up to even at the maximum settings so this is probably a little more resolution that I need which makes me confident that the textures will also hold up well at okay the last thing to decide is which approach to use the ideal way is usually to draw by hand followed by using a photo or stock texture and worst of all is trying to filter the original texture in some way a lot of official remasters have used this technique and it almost always looks like the original textures have just been ineffectively doctored things are changing now that AI upscaling is available but it can be very hit or miss and in my experience doesn't work well with early 3d textures unless you're doing pre-rendered backdrops otherwise I wouldn't recommend using AI with anything older than 128 bit systems let's begin with drawing by hand this lamp texture is only a quarter of the full object in the game mirrors the rest I'm going to scale it using no interpolation which might be called nearest neighbor and other programs to preserve the original pixels you should stick to powers of two for your scale and in this case I'm choosing 32x if you're ever in between sizes it's always better to go higher and scale down later if you need to I'm also going to double the canvas size and mirror it so I can see it as it appears in the game this isn't necessary but it's more natural for me to draw without being constrained by canvas edge I'm going to begin by sampling what I consider to be the dominant color of the background and then create a new layer filled with that color I'll then sample the darkest and lightest colors and start applying them with a messy acrylic brush to simulate corroded metal at this point I don't really have a plan and I'm just painting until I start to see rust and until the layer is filled in I'll keep sampling more colors to make sure all of the original palate is represented I should note that I'm recording this after the fact since it would take too long to play it all out in real time so if you're painting along at home try to keep up I'll also switch to black and white and use Gimmes value mode which will darken or lighten according to the color selected I like the way the value brush handles better than the dodge burn tool and I use it on nearly every texture I do I'm zooming out while doing this to make sure that the rust will have enough contrast and consistency from a distance if you only work zoomed in the image can end up looking too flat I'll then start the metal plate on a new layer there are many many reasons to keep details as separate as possible like this it's generally easier to edit with everything on individual layers and it makes short work of variation textures that need details to be added or removed like a winter and spring version of the same object if you draw everything on one layer you're basically screwed I'll once again sample the dominant color I see for the plate then I'll use the rectangle select tool for the first shape with rounding on to prevent the corners from being too sharp I'm interpreting the top to be an oval shape so I'll hold shift and add it with a rectangle tool again but this time with a rounding way up I'll then feather the selection by two pixels of the edges aren't too harsh and once again to fill it with the dominant color I sampled earlier I'll repeat the process of adding darker and lighter values until this layer also looks decently filled in I'll also shade the edge of the plate to suggest some 3d depth I imagine this being a really heavy metal that's not very malleable and that probably shouldn't have sharp edges at this point I'm going to do two things that you should never forget to do while working I'm going to save and then export the original quarter of the texture to see how it looks in the game I can tell right away that it needs another pass or two with a value brush to look rougher so this time I'll go over it with just black I'll now add the lamp layer in by once again using the rounded rectangle tool and feathering it only this time I'm going to fill with one of the darker colors of the lamp I'll then paint the center with white to suggest where the bulb is followed by a pass with a messy acrylic brush to make the glass the cold and foggy I'm not entirely sure I proceed from here so I'll use a reference photo or two as a guide this is where Google Images actually is really useful I'll find an image I'll I can keep it open in another window as I draw I'm not really looking at it and literally recreating it but just glancing at it to get ideas having an image visible like this can influence the way you draw even if you're not paying much attention to it I'll add some faint lines in the same places as the original lamp then shade the edges of these segments with the valley brush to suggest that each section is rounded and has depth as opposed to the whole surface just being one even dome the edge looks too clean so I'll paint over it with some grunge and return to the brass plate to make the border look less flat I'm going to use the value brush again to add a thin highlight to make it seem like the rim is protruding upwards and towards the lamp with the inner rim catching a lot of light and I'll shade the plate around the rim as if it's blocking a little light I'll then add a highlight to the outer edge with the plate bends but instead of using the value brush I'm going to paint normally with a light bluish green color the temple is very dark and lit by a lot of blue light with blue water reflecting it upwards so I think there should be a lot of ambient blue light for this edge to catch I've been sneaking this kind of under lighting into every texture I can as a reference to the concept art but here it makes sense to do anyway I'll keep painting with low opacity until the line seems to be placed correctly using a rougher brush for highlights suggest rougher material a softer brush should make the edge look too clean but I will shrink one down and use it just to define where the very edge is better I'll also add a little blue to the side of the rim around the lamp as well next I'll add the bolts by using the circle select tool and feathering by two again I'll darken the circumference with the salt value brush and then brighten the side facing the lamp since it should be catching a lot of light I'll sample color from the lamp to make sure that the lighting on the bolt matches I'll then bring in the blue again to add a weaker ambient highlight on the opposite side and then shade the area around the bowl to suggest some occlusion again you can see how important the difference in color temperature is for the highlights on the bolt I think it helps sell the idea that this really is a 3d object being lit by different sources I'm interpreting these pixels as holds so I'll use a feathered selection again in darken the interior I'll then go around the rim and rough in a highlight at the edge where the metal bends the bigger this rim is the more gradual the downward slope of the metal will seem to be I'm trying the blue on the edge facing outward and I'll use the yellow for the edge facing towards the lamp maybe the rim around the lamp should be blocking this light but I'm not too worried about it right now I'll now paint the light itself on another new layer with a very soft brush I'll start with pure white at the brightest point totally blowing out the details on the glass then I'll go around the lamp edge with a less opaque yellow giimpse new layer mode results in a blotchy appearance with this kind of transparency so I'm going to switch back to legacy mode the idea here is to add a glow that simulates bloom a little bit to make the lamp seem like it's actually emitting light into a humid room it seems decent but I won't know for sure until I check the other instances of the texture and right away there's a problem with this mapping cutting the texture off abruptly in order to fix this I'll have to get even closer to the original texture comparing the screenshots now I see what resembles a fish design in the rust which probably isn't a coincidence since fish designs appear everywhere in the temple I'll draw this into the wall and add a lot more roughness while I'm at it I'm also seeing the brass plate is a different shape than the one that I drew so I'll create a duplicate of that layer before making any changes to it I'll use the warp tool to quickly bend the plate into the shape I'm seeing now and right away the decision to work on a duplicate pays off because the hole also got stretched in the process I'll use the clone tool to set the original layer as a source and then paint the correct hole back onto the duplicate right away this looks more interesting than the last version and it seems to match the original better the mapping still isn't ideal but it's not as jarring as before and I can live with it at this point amount of things to do with the texture but it's not really done until I've spent some time playing through the area and getting a sense of how it fits in with the other textures hopefully you think it looks better [Music] the obvious appeal of using a photo is that you get a lot of free detail right away without having to do anything but photos come with a lot of problems the main one being that video games are abstracted representations of reality even the most realistic games have some exaggerated elements to give them style putting something that's literally photorealistic into a game can clash with the visuals and look extremely out of place I also think that people are generally more interested in seeing art than a stock photo there's a creative process that makes hand-drawn textures interesting in a way that photos aren't photos are also limited by the lighting and angles they were taken from an image like this has intense sunlight that appears directly overhead and will probably look bad in other lighting conditions with hand-drawn textures you can completely control the lighting and details to match the scene photos may also require more resolution to look decent in this case I'm using one that's 2048 by 2048 which is about as large as I can practically go for a pack like this and yet it's still not enough as soon as the details are blown up enough for pixels and artifacts to show the texture breaks down because the real details no longer appear real with the drawn texture at the same resolution that blown-up effect isn't as bad because the details were never real in the first place every mark is just an abstract representation to trick you into seeing detail if you're going to use an image it should be for something that would take a very long time to draw and in a setting where a photo will make sense and not draw much attention to itself in this case I'm going to use one for the rock floor of one of the boss rooms after upscaling the original texture I'm going to add the photo I've chosen and immediately export it without any alterations I'll often go through several photo candidates like this and choose the one that looks best as a raw export this texture doesn't look too bad and the rocks seem to be about the right size next I'll drag the layer around until I have the best arrangement of rocks I can find l zu mout and check against the original texture until I'm satisfied I'll now work on making the texture seamless by duplicating the layer and dragging it up by exactly the canvas size which in this case is 1,024 pixels I'll take a soft eraser and remove everything but the top edge of this layer while trying my best to seamlessly blend with the rocks beneath in a way that makes sense I'll draw a selection below and cut in order to make sure I've removed any leftover junk the top seam is now fixed so I'll merge this layer down then duplicate it again this time I'm going to drag the duplicate to the right by 1024 and repeat the process this time only leaving the right edge now once again merge this down I want to get rid of the chip in this rock since it might stand out when the texture is tiled so I'll once again duplicate the layer and move it to find a rock I haven't used in my canvas so far I'll then set the clone tool there and paint it over the chip on my seamless layer I'll now crop this layer to the canvas size and use the offset tool to shift it so that the edges are moved to the center they need some more work but there are no bad seams visible there are plenty of other ways of making a texture seamless even has a filter that will do it automatically but it gives pretty terrible results for textures like this next I'm going to adjust the brightness contrast and hue filters to get the image to more closely match the original I'll also start sampling colors from the original texture and paint them in with the color or hue brush modes in addition to that I'm going to shade the outer edges of the stone with a value brush to make them seem a little rounder then do a pass with the color brush again it looks better than last time but there's still a little room for improvement one trick I use on photosystem I a sort of high pass filter to soften the details I'll duplicate my current layer and set its mode to legacy then duplicate that layer leaving me with three copies I'll invert the top one and set its opacity to 50% at this point the invert and original should be equally blending and canceling one another out I'll now move down to the copy layer below and apply a Gaussian blur the higher the blur is the more dramatic the softening will be I usually use around 20 to 30 pixels I'll now merge the duplicated layers together and set the resulting layers mode to overlay the result in this case was pretty extreme so I'll reduce it by dragging the opacity slider down I lost some contrast so I'll create a new layer from visible and keep the original as a backup then I'll up the contrast a little bit with a brightness contrast filter the colors still don't match the original well enough so I'm going to have to do yet another pass yeah shut up this is one of the frustrating things about using a photo you have to try to alter details that are already there to match instead of just drawing them to match in the first place which can sometimes be nearly as time-consuming as drawing from scratch but infinitely less rewarding to boost the contrast further I'm going to go around with a value brush again and darken the seams between rocks and after that I'm going to sample the brightest color from the original and use it to paint new highlights onto a new transparent layer in this way I'm sort of removing some of the contrast from the photo and replacing it with hand-drawn contrast and I can adjust the strength of the new highlights with the layer opacity comparing against the original I can see that there still isn't enough green so I'll go over everything with one final passive color there's a little too much contrast now so this time I'll use the hue/saturation filter to turn up the lightness and saturation at the same time I want the rocks to look wetter so I'm going to add even more to the highlight layer and maybe even some reflections of light coming from nearby stones a lot of this probably isn't physically accurate but I think as long as it makes visual sense it's alright to exaggerate to finish the texture off I'm going to touch up the sloppy seam left when I blended the rock layers at the very beginning which I'm only now noticing looks terrible I made a new layer from visible and amusing the clone tool to bring some dirt from elsewhere into separate the rocks that were blurring together then using the value brush to shade the rocks along the new seam at this point the rocks match up with the originals pretty well and don't stand out too badly as a photo at least not in my opinion so once again we're done for now the results are usually better if you only partially use the visual information from the photo in this case I started with a photo but D saturated it and set the layer mode to overlay this applies the darks and lights to the layer beneath differently depending on the value of that layer I then sampled the dominant color of the original rocks and filled a layer below with it using the value brush mode I painted in some of the details of the original texture onto that fill layer like the horizontal bands the idea is that the texture is a hybrid between a drawing and a photo rather than just a photo alone for another example I drew the corroded metal walls of this temple by hand but found them to be too flat I used a photo of corroded metal as an overlay to add some extra grit but because it's thoroughly blended into the drawing no one would ever recognize it as a photo in general the less of a photo you use the better and if the photo is going to be prominent in the texture then you should always blend some drawing in and try to fight it to look as a little like a photo as possible [Music] for the last demonstration I want to do a texture from a much different area iconic Canyon is a lifeless wasteland that's been abandoned for centuries so right from the start my concern is that the texture show agent decay strongly enough this wall is covered by several different textures so I'm going to join them together and work on them as one to avoid a scene where they meet this poses a small problem since the 16x I decided on earlier for the upper portion is too small for the bottom portion I'm going to have to scale them both by 32x I'll extend the vertical canvas to accommodate the lower wall texture this is a lot easier to do if you haven't already scaled the textures up I'll drop the lower portion exactly into place and then paste in a vaguely similar test photo and export each piece to see how they match up there are no surprises and the resolution looks to be pretty sharp the first step will be creating the outer wall layer which is crumbling away just like the lamp earlier I'll start with a few colors sampled from the original the main difference this time is going to be the brushes used I'm using rust type brushes that are more broken up than the acrylic brush which I'll still use for at least one pass here I'm choosing a brush with slightly smaller particles for the highlights and next I'll use a stone work brush to add some dark and light cracks this is an important point if you choose the default brushes aren't very good and you'll definitely want to download new packs online my drawings tend to come out soft so I'm going to use an unsharp mask at this early stage to make the details more crisp if you know your own weaknesses as an artist then you can try to counter them while you work I'm going to export what I have so far for another test and it seems fine next is going to be the Berk layer underneath I'll sample the darkest color visible on the ground and fill a new layer with it then use a lighter brick color to rough in each brick I'm making the layer transparent so that I can follow the original pattern once they're roughed in a LED highlights to the upper edges and then paint the undersides with the darkest color sampled from the original bricks I'll then use the value brush to shade and more clearly to find the edges of each work I can use the test photo from earlier as a reference but I'm not seeing anything I want to take from it I'll give the bricks a pass with the stonework brush as well which I'm loading with even more of the colors from the original bricks after this I'll define where the very edges of the bricks are with some thinner highlights next I'm going to add a happy little tree and he's gonna live right there the next step is going to be to cut away the upper layer to reveal these bricks the best way to do that is to use the layer masks that the changes can be easily adjusted I'm going to right click the layer and add a white layer mask if I paint black on this mask it will remove the layer without actually erasing it so I can easily put anything back by just painting with white again using the mask I'm going to paint along the edges of the original layer and remove material from roughly the same places next I'm going to shade the downward facing edges and lighten the upper edges to give it a little depth and I'll paint a shadow layer beneath to push the depth even further [Music] for the bands of paint on the upper layer I'm going to do a couple of passes with a hue saturation and value modes in order to match the original color now I'll export it to see how it looks and it's not very good I overdid it on the depth which is fine it's normal to have a back and forth with lots of adjustments I'm going to paint some of the top layer back in by using white on the mask layer so that the wall doesn't cut off so abruptly then I'll cut even more of the wall away elsewhere the goal is to make the distinction between the wall and bricks less jarring I need to get the window in place before going any further with the other layers so I'll roughen and shade the bricks in the same way as the background layer I'll use a circular selection to draw up in a black layer beneath for the bars I'll use a rectangle select tool to fill each bar on a separate layer then I'll shade them with a value brush I'll use a variety of other brushes to make the wood look old and damaged and finally I'll make a new layer for the shadow cast by the window bricks and export the textures to test again the results are better but the pattern still looks awkward I'm going to partially undo the shading I added earlier to reduce the depth without making it look too flat I'll also continue removing more of the wall and adding some of it back in using the mask layer the window will also get some more polish including another bit of under lighting on the horizontal bar as for the window itself it isn't entirely clear if the original texture is meant to suggest glass or not but given how dilapidated the building is I don't think glass should be intact instead I'll try to paint in a faint view of the opposite wall I'll use the clone tool to paint in the upper wall on a new layer then I'll change its temperature to a cooler hue and darken it in I want to try a Gaussian blur on this layer to make it seem as if it's at a different focal plane than the window weather effects like this will work in the actual game as hit or miss finally the shadow layer I drew for the upper wall is going to be replaced with a more precise one generated by a plug-in on a duplicate of the wall layer I'm choosing to apply the mask permanently so the plug-in can react to the masked area text outliner as a black border around everything in the layer so it will give me a shadow for every piece of debris at once I'll drag it downward by a few pixels to resemble a cast shadow then reduced the opacity until it looks right this should help prevent the upper wall from getting lost in the brick layer while adding some depth in a more natural-looking way I think it looks okay now and some of the very worst seams have been reduced these are the basic methods have used to cradle the textures have done so far there may be better ways of doing some of these things but this is what works for me the most important things I've learned are to save absolutely everything and keep it all well organized use separate layers as often as possible draw from scratch as often as possible and spend a lot of time thinking about what the materials and lighting should be like especially considering the game's lower in art style and don't worry if your texture looks like junk for most of the time that you work on it textures often only come together and look right in the final stages it is important that you have a plan though not necessarily for the moment-to-moment marks but for the way that you divide the work up and how you approach each layer one of the most important things you can do is post your work somewhere and open yourself up to criticism if you care about your project you should consider it a favor when someone tells you when something looks bad and the last thing I want to say is that while you should try to stay faithful to the original textures you shouldn't consider them sacred there may be opportunities to improve things by doing something new but if you do deviate from the original you should be able to defend your choice and have a good explanation for doing so and with that the demonstrations are done let's see how everybody did this lamp is from Pingel I think the colors could match the original a little bit more and it's getting a little unbalanced on the right side this wall comes from Dorian I think the colors are off again also this isn't the right aspect ratio you've got the critical details there but I'd like to see a little bit more in this region this wall from Itchy is very nice and detailed but I'm not seeing the bricks underneath and finally we have these rocks from Abe not what I was looking for Abe thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: Nerrel

Views: 168,815

Keywords: texture, drawing, art, tutorial, guide, demonstration, GIMP, Krita, brushes, emulator, video game, mod, tablet, digital art, majora's mask, zelda

Id: YVgmAjAG7Xc

Length: 27min 14sec (1634 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 25 2019