Texturing Custom Meshes

[Calibre53]

Hey I'm struggling over texturing my armour meshes, I can never understand how some other modders can create such successful and gorgeous textures without spending a decade on them.

 

Ive read the construction set wiki from front to back, and that recommends painting the texture onto the uv map. Now Ive tried this, and I like to think I'm talented with a pencil and some paper, but painting on photoshop is an entirely new ball game! I moved on to develop my own way which is to find photos/existing textures, lay them out in the .dds file, and bend the uv map around them to get what i want, but this limits me on how complicated my uv maps can be.

 

What on earth is the secret to all these elaborate decorated armour textures? Are all the modders photoshop gurus?

 

Thanks for any replies :P

 

Kahuna_

[Vagrant0]

I'm far from a pro when it comes to creating textures, I often prefer just pulling whole texture sets from vanilla resources, and adjusting the uvw map to fit. And actually, this ends up working quite well in certain cases since the downloads end up being smaller (since they don't need any custom textures).

Is an old example of an armor mesh I made entirely from vanilla resources. (a cookie if anyone can name where all the parts came from)

 

But that doesn't really help you. You want to learn how to make new textures. So why do I mention it? Because the best place to start is understanding how to make the most of a texture by manipulating the mapping. The new mapping method, along with the base texture can also make the process of creating a new texture since you can just go over existing edges, and areas. It will also act as a sort of background which hopefully comes close to the look you are going for. Start out with smaller changes, changing colors, highlights, tints, designs. The custom sign tutorial on the wiki might be something to try since it deals with this sort of basing.

 

As for having a selection of textures and materials available, if you have the hard drive space, you might just want to extract all the standard Oblivion textures. Some of the folders, like clutter, can be a good place to shop for various textures. The bonus is that those textures end up matching, or atleast looking similar to textures already in game. Just bring the texture into photoshop, import, crop and manipulate it to the right size, and then add shadows, highlights, and blends. Make use of layers, this isn't MS paint. From the start, create a black mask layer based on the exported UV map (you may need to expand used areas slightly) that will go over everything (so you know what areas are in use). Then very time you want to add in a different texture, make a new layer below the mask. Every time you want to change anything about that area, make another layer, and do all your drawing on that one. By using various brush shapes and settings, you can achieve some fairly good effects.

 

http://209.85.48.8/252/133/upload/p2019631.jpg

Is a texture I made quite awhile ago. The handle was made by bringing in the wood grain, then making a number of overlays to get the thatch pattern adjusted. The blade started out as just a green/black fill which had layers of shadows and highlights painted over it. I started out with a white band along the edges I knew were blades, then used smaller brushes, blending, sharpening to create a sort of ground, tarnished look. Then used another layer over that to blend it to the dark color of the blade. The end texture was made using more than 17 different layers, although it isn't a very complicated texture.

[Calibre53]

Ok cheers Vagrant0, previously I had always been using photo textures and altering the meshes uv map to texture the item, but I tried using your multilayering technique in The GIMP and although it hasnt saved any time, in fact it probably took longer, it meant that my texture looks exactly how I imagined it to look when I started the project, and now I can see the scope for new techniques. There is still a lot of freehand painting to do though, and I'm still shocked at how other texturers manage to decorate their meshes with gold leaf patterns etc.

[Vagrant0]

Ok cheers Vagrant0, previously I had always been using photo textures and altering the meshes uv map to texture the item, but I tried using your multilayering technique in The GIMP and although it hasnt saved any time, in fact it probably took longer, it meant that my texture looks exactly how I imagined it to look when I started the project, and now I can see the scope for new techniques. There is still a lot of freehand painting to do though, and I'm still shocked at how other texturers manage to decorate their meshes with gold leaf patterns etc.

Texturing takes time if you want it to look good. There is no way around it if you aren't just doing copy and paste everywhere from someone else's work. And doing that only ends up pissing off others, or having lawyers contact you over copyright infringement. However, the more you do it, and the more you become familiar with the methods, the less time it will take. Good texture artists know how to combine existing textures they can use with good painting skills. If you're looking for an easy and quick answer for making good textures, there isn't one, if there were there would be alot more people doing retextures.