2d Textures

Irritant

Some textures I made this week for an Alien Arena CTF level. There are red/blue versions of each that are red/blue. Going for the creepy, rusted out space base look here...Looking at them in IE for the first time, the rust seems a bit oversaturated. I'll have to see how they are in-game, then maybe desaturate those areas some.

MoP

Good work, lots of nice sharpness and texture going on in these.
Couple of things I'd advise though, and things I noticed:

Keep lighting consistent and natural, the pipes in the top left texture look a bit weird because you have a highlight on the underside of the pipe which has the same brightness and colour as the one on the top of the pipe. If you're trying to imply underlighting, keep it subtle (not as bright) and choose a different colour for the lighting.

The rust does look a little oversaturated, yeah.

The texture in the bottom left, there is white highlighting shading around the top of the black circles which is reading very oddly. What's it meant to be implying, that the holes in the wall are jutting out from a gentle curve? I think some sort of metal ring around each black hole would work better to imply they're pipe endings or portholes, rather than just "holes in the wall"...

Don't use pure black with such abandon... use it sparingly, use very dark and fairly saturated colours instead of black, and it might look more natural and less painted. Pure black does not occur very often in real life...

The pipes in the background areas of the top right textures are fairly blurry around the edges, might wanna define those a bit more.

Apart from those, mostly fairly minor points, this is good work. Should work well in a Q2/Q3 style environment. Beware of tiling things with "detail" too often though, walls can often look fake or cluttered because you're using textures with a lot of detail, often simple textures with shapes that don't obviously "repeat" are much better for general use, with more detailed focal points thrown in here and there with textures like these here.

MoP

Mark Dygert

Looks great! I love the creepy magot style wires, gives it a good techno campy alien feel. I have to say you have come a long way since you first started posting keep up the great work!

MoP brought up some great tips about using black. You would be suprised how fast you can go from looking real to looking cartoony if you use too much black. I think you it a good ballance because I think you want a bit of a campy look.

He also hit the nail on the head about tiling. You might want to do a few tiles that don't have this level of detail. Then use these every 4-16 tiles down the wall. They look great on thier own and its always pretty easy to make a texture less detailed so it tiles better

adam

Yah, one thing you should get use to is doing a texture base. Make sure it repeats nicely and can be used as a wall, floor, ceiling, etc. From there add in your additions like piping, covering, etc. It'll give the mapper some good variations when it comes to texturing. For instance, the bottom middle one has a blueish/grey background that could be saved just as it is, with no blood.

MoP's words. Listen to them.

Irritant

Thanks guys Good tips too. I always try to learn as much as possible from this forum, each time I hope to get a little better at it.

I should have mentioned, these are just a few of the textures I'll be using for the level. I have an assortment of base textures, and I think I'll be making some more as well for this level.

The texture at top-middle is a door, so it won't be tiled, guess I shoulda mentioned that too

I see about the black. I'll head that advice. In fact, the wall texture with the four holes, I think that needs something in them, just not sure what yet. (yeah, those are gentle curves there). The other texture with the many holes, those are actually alpha-masked out, so you'll be able to see through them.

Maybe once I get to the point of making the level, I'll post some shots of it here.

Bronco

hey irritant,nice work

I think you could maybe add more variation in depth on those "maggot" pipes..like the pipes that are right at the back of the hole,would be darker than those at the front,you should layer the shade up to represent this and that may make it look more realistic.

john

Rick Stirling

Yup, Bronco nailed it on the depth -the images look very flat. You can push things into the background by not only darkening them, but by LIGHTENING the, also. However, a common technique is using colour variation. A very simple trick to push things away from the viewer is to decrease the saturation and push towards blue.

Recently I've been using images to help, so after a google search, I found this:



There are 4 very visible layers of depth there, each getting less saturated. You can also see in that example than on a huge scale, things get lighter. This is not recommened for smaller indoor textures like the ones you are painting.

Ror painted some stunning textures a few years ago for HH3 - you might want to check these out:

http://www.planetquake.com/polycount/cottages/rorshach/textures/clockwork.htm

killingpeople

just wanted to add that what Rick_Stirling is touching on is termed "atmospheric perspective"

Mojo2k

these are off to a good start, and theres been some good points made about all, my interpatation of the one withthe 4 holes is that its been punched you see that type of hole on a lot of industrial metal, although the useable side usualy used the inside concave slope of the punch,

I have taken to actualy rendering my basemaps for texturing like this out in max, a tip i stole after i saw how awesome and quick cochtls work was here at mythic, just make a square and model the texture loft the pipes and such set up lighting you want, make sure the lighting will tile right, direct lights work prtty good for this
then do a render to texture, you can also use a skylight and advanced lighting, however you want it to look, another bonus of this is that in max 7, you can render off the normal map for that texture, at the same exact time


i know some will think this is cheating rendering out textures, but hey you do what you can do to make stuff look good, and do it in the shortest time possible.

just put together a quick and possibly unreadable tutorial on this method http://boards.polycount.net/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=24101&an=0&page=0#24101

was the final result (before going into photoshop of course

frosty

Nice stuff John, I love this kind of stuff!

Irritant

Cool tutorial Mojo

I had another texture in this set with the "maggoty" wires, that I didn't put up. Might have been the best of the lot, an accerator pad, but I was converting them to .wal format(for the map editor, not the engine), with Wally, and accidently exported over top of the existing .tga, because I was stupid and not paying attention. Of course what that did, is convert the image into a 256 color palette, and while it didn't *completely* trash the texture, it made it a little less pretty. I almost cried. Oh well.