Any tutorials on making textures from scratch?

[wildgravity]

Hello! I am new to using blender, but have made retextures in th past. i would like to make a brand new texture for a mesh. I know a little bit about it, but I could really use a tutorial, that focuses specifically on how to make brand new textures. aside from SydneyBs tutorialon how to make armor from scratch, im having trouble finding any guidance specifically in regards to making brand new textures for FO3/FNV

Does anyone know of a good tutorial, video, or even just 2009 era blender related texture tutorials? I have the texture info on the nexus wiki open. Where do i begn? Im using GIMP and a legacy editi

Thank you so much in advance

[madmongo]

it's fairly simple, which may be why you aren't finding tutorials about it. You save your image file as a dds file. The image needs to be a power of 2, so 512x512, 1024x1024, 2048x2048, etc. Lower resolution than 512x 512 is ok for certain things, but in general it's going to be too low res for something like armor. You don't want to go above 1024x1024 or maybe 2048x2048 if you feel you have to, since Fallout New Vegas is an old 32 bit game and large textures tend to run the game out of memory fairly quickly and cause it to crash. Some people use 4096x4096 textures, but each texture then is about 32 MB. Put 100 objects with 4096x4096 textures on the screen and that's 3.2 GB of data just for the textures in a game that only supports 2 GB of RAM (double that with the 4 GB patch). So it doesn't take much to run the game out of memory with 4k textures.

 

It's been a while since I installed GIMP, but when I installed it, dds support was an add-on, so you'll need to install that. You will usually want to save the image as DXT3 or DXT5. I always use DXT5 since that format supports the most features. You also want to use the option to generate mipmaps.

 

From a texture point of view, that's pretty much all there is to it.

 

To actually map the texture onto your armor, there are two different approaches that you can take.

 

One is to take the UV map that Blender generates, then create your texture to match it. In other words, use whatever UV mapping technique you want in Blender, then look at the UV map, load up a preliminary texture into Blender, then keep fiddling with the texture to put the arm textures where Blender placed the armor's arms in the UV map, etc. It's usually a bit of an iterative process where you edit your texture, see how it looks in Blender, then edit the texture some more, see how that looks, and keep going like that until you get what you want.

 

The other way to do it is to start with the texture, then change your UV map in Blender to match the texture. So instead of editing the texture, you edit the mesh instead. What I typically do is let Blender create a default UV map, then I go bit by bit through the armor mesh and map that onto the texture to where I really want it to go.

 

Either method works. Either you edit the texture to match the mesh, or you edit the mesh to match the texture.

 

Blender Noob to Pro has a section on UV mapping.

 

Make sure you are using Blender 2.49b. If you are using a different version of Blender, you will run into a whole lot of problems.

[dubiousintent]

There is a Blender package containing all the addons you need linked under the "Programs and Tools" section of the wiki "Getting started creating mods using GECK" article. Then there is the "Blender Mesh Editor" section which has links to other tutorials and 'Tips' from experienced users.

 

-Dubious-

[wildgravity]

hey thank you both so much, this is a great place to start! i'll post questions here if I have any. :)