MAPTEXTURE HELP - Ruste Metal Panel

Tiling

The Absolute Bastard of Map Texture work is making it tile, no... not making it tile, but making it tile unnoticeably. You can spend a whole day perfecting a magnificently decayed metal wall only to see it turn to crap the moment you try to make it repeat without you spotting the same detail points regularily in each texture. It should be noted that in this section I get a little technical and use shortcut keys rather than explain exactly what im doing. I make no apologies, is the only way i can find time to make these texturing tutorials inbetween learning more myself.

 

There ARE a few tricks and cheats I know to make it easier though. The main one is a Filter in Adobe Photoshop.

FILTERS/OTHER/OFFSET - set its horizontal and vertical values to half the size of the image and click the WRAP AROUND tab.
This will show you the edges of your texture in the center. It is then simply a case of getting rid of the seams and blending them together. For this you select the CLONE tool ( joystick ).

ALT + left mouse click on the area you want to COPY FROM then left click on the new area without alt and you'll find you painting with the originally selected part of the texture. Its essentially painting with other parts of the texture and leaving paintbrush work merely for tweaking and for initially setting out masks into which to PASTE INTO other pieces of textures.

[ If your not usuing Photoshop, maybe your a PSP/Painter person.. You can imitate this trick by making a new image twice the originals horizontal width and then cutting and pasting 2 copies of the texture side by side then cloning part of the texture into the center area to make it seamless. When complete repeat process with the Vertical ]

Once you've got the texture repeating you have to bit the bullet and check out what it looks look repeated over a large area.
Flatten your image ( or mask over all of it and copy merged then CTRL + N a new image and CTRL+V paste the merged image into it. Shrink the image by half.

Mask it all , go to EDIT , select DEFINE PATTERN.
CTRL+ N a new image , 1000by1000.
Select the FILL tool, click the CONTENTS tab in its options and choose pattern.
FILL the new 1000 sized image with the pattern.
Shrink it to fill on screen while on FULL SCREEN mode ( press F twice )
then CTRL +/ - to check how obvious the repeating areas are at different zoom sizes.

Go back to the OFFSET tools on the original image and repeat all this till you get it right, takes a while and produces lots of headaches when you have to tile something that is required to tile in both vertical and horizontal , like SYNCWHALES ( arrghh the whales, oh mother the war wound arrghh ) or large open rockfaces or brick walls. Obviously if your making metal plate walls at intended 128by128 for a corridor you need only check the horizontal repeat so closely.

[ If your not usuing Photoshop, maybe your a PSP/Painter person.. You can imitate this trick by making a new image 6 times as big as the original and cutting and pasteing copies of the original texture side by side so you can judge its repeat.]

 

Some CHEATS for tiling..

Good cheats are to indent textures at the edges and turn them into panels. You'll notice ID and Ritual, Rogue , Sierra, Epic etc do that a lot. Its one of the most efficient workarounds. Very easy to do in a number of ways.

Mask whole image, ALT+ left mouse (select and drag) to subtract from the mask 1 pixel at each side.
SELECT menu and choose MODIFY,
contract the mask by 5 for example.
MODIFY then SMOOTH by 4,
CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+I to invert the selection,
SELECT , FEATHER by 1 or 2 (at most) and then CTRL+N a new layer and fill in a dark grey.

Feathering means it will smooth out the gradient from dark grey to the colour of the texture underneath.
You can then put the layer on overlay,softlight or multiply depending on the texture underneath and wahey it's a panel that repeats perfectly and has a visible repeat explained by it being a panel rather than the fact that you're a great big cheat!!

I cheat a lot.

But sometimes its worth just getting your hands dirty. You need to base your decision to cheat or get hands dirty on what texture your making. Futuristic stuff means you cheat all the time. Hence lots of futuristic settings in FPS games instead of realistic settings....

 

'Patience is a Virtue, and Artists are lazy people