Tutorial: Next Gen Texture Creation

odium

I did this for our game. Its part of OverDose's SDK. Feel feel to visit the rest of the SDK by using the link at the bottom, its not complete, some of it doesn't work, and most of its in just as poor a state. But its something I've had to do, heh...

Anyways, heres a tutorial on texture creation for next gen games. Its for OverDose, however the exact same things are used in Quake 4 and Doom 3 so I'm sure some of you will find it useful:

http://www.quake2evolved.com/overdose/sdk/making_a_texture.htm

EDIT: Fixed link.

It may not be up to some of your standards, so I'm sorry in advance. But still, its something.

Joao Sapiro

Awesome ! thanks

Asthane

Looks cool, but kind of annoying that while the page is designed to fit visually within an 800x600 width, the code doesn't, and produces scrollbars and offcenter content instead.

odium

Doesn't for me?

EDIT: Nope just got a few people to check in IE and FireFox and its all good? Pic of what you mean? and what res are you in? Anything below 1280x1024 these days is a tad wutuff anyway.

EarthQuake

One very important thing that tutorials like this never really seem to cover(well, yours and the q4 ones atleast) is that you can very easily get nice smooth transitions with your floating geometry, theres really no reason to have super hard edges like that if you dont want to. Having a slightly little softened edge imo always looks better because it will catch some nice specular higlights. You can also vary the softness quite a bit, which can help to get away from that very hard edged "videogamey" quake4 type look.

Doing it this way is especially helpfull if you've got a complicated highres model with lots of nice smooth edges, and you dont want to break the style by having hard floating details on top. Also this isnt limited to just small floating decal type detail too, you can use apply the same theory to connecting differet, complicated parts of gemetry that would otherwise be a very big pain in the ass to match up the meshflow between.

Heres a simple example similar to yours:

coldwolf

EQ That's the sexiest oval I've ever seen

Good tutorial odium, much appreciated. I just had a problem with this:

[ QUOTE ]
1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192
Now you CAN go higher as long as [snip] And you need to use at least THEE of these.

[/ QUOTE ]
It's embarrassing to misspell an all-caps word, imo

Asthane

[ QUOTE ]
Doesn't for me?

EDIT: Nope just got a few people to check in IE and FireFox and its all good? Pic of what you mean? and what res are you in? Anything below 1280x1024 these days is a tad wutuff anyway.

[/ QUOTE ]

It's not a browser issue, in fact, I just checked, you define right at the begining of your HTML:

<font class="small">Code:</font><hr /><pre><table class=allborder cellspacing=0 cellpadding=5 width=1101 align=center border=0></pre><hr />

Though for the hell of it I checked in IE7, Firefox 2, and Opera 9.10, with small window sizes they all behave as would be expected, respecting the table width you set and producing scrollbars (Also offcenter/cutoff material since the content is centered inside that width)

Now, there's nothing wrong with making a page for 1280x1024, though I'd at least support 1024x768. I only question it because the actual content, including the header image, is all packed into a collumn that fits comfortably on an 800x600 screen, so there's really no reason not to make it work properly.

And FYI I run 1600x1200 but routinely view pages at 2x zoom (In Opera) when I'm lazy, especially large tracts of text

malcolm

Hey dude the part where you talk about texture sizes and memory is completely wrong. No game engine renders uncompressed .tga files. Almost everything gets compressed to dxt 1, 3, or 5. So telling artists new to texture creation they should not use 9meg files will confuse them and they'll be making these crap blurry textures to try and keep the file size low. File size doesn't mean anything, we used 16bit .psd files for textures on my last game and one 2048x1024 texture was sometimes 200meg. Doesn't matter gets compressed before it gets rendered.

jgarland

Very cool tutorial. I don't do a lot of environment work myself, but I can see this being useful in other instances, too. I'll be bookmarking this one.

Thanks a lot for all your time and effort that went into creating this.

odium

Ok, heres how I see it:

I see the scrolling at 800x600, and I'll fix that in a tick.
EDIT: While not 100% fixed, its 99% fixed, as in you wont have to scroll at all now if you dont want to just for those extra few pixels. The reason its not 100% fixed is because I was a bumd ass with my background pic, and I cant be arsed to fix it for all of them for the sake of 2 pixels


I also see my typos are still there, also, being fixed.
EDIT: This has also been fixed and re-uploaded.

And lastly I'll update the info on texture sizes and compression.

Ok?

Jaco

Nice! Thanks odium!

odium

Ok its all fixed, and added a glow maps tutorial to boot (As well as a height map one just wont be able to update that until I finish work).

Thanks for the help and input guys.

Mongrelman

Good tut, thanks for it