Any texturing tips out there?

[Khet]

Alright, so I know how to texture, but not HOW to texture if you get what I mean. There's done of awesome armor/weapon/any other mods out there with not only custom meshes but incredible textures too. My skills in photoshop are in Photomanipulation so I DO know my way around... but I can't for the life of me ever create a decent texture. In fact, I have a sword I made in blender but it's just using a very, very simple texture (read: pure gray) but I can't find any tips/tutorials on how to texture say a realistic looking metal or even a decent hilt-wrapping. I mean, this stuff can't be drawn and colored by hand... is it?

[DavidWhitefang]

Hey Khet,

 

Since you already know how to texture... It just takes practice. You can combine real photos, enhanced photos, and strictly your own work... but there is not an easy answer for a way to achieve the exact look you are after. You will have to experiment and learn. How you map your uv, and the way you paint your vertices will affect your final product also.

[SickleYield]

Except for a couple of very simple painted textures made from occlusion bakes from Blender, mine are all photosources plus extensive tweaking and filters. (I take a lot of my own pics for this purpose now, but CGTextures is a GREAT place for these.) I use the GIMP.

 

Have you UV mapped your sword and exported the UV to work with? That helps. Doing an ambient occlusion bake in Blender can also give you a set of decent shadows to work with (Oblivion doesn't do realistic shadows on character garments so they're usually faked with the texture). This is in the Bake panel and you'll need to make sure there is a blank base texture from the UV screen first. After the bake render finishes you can do an image save from that same screen.

 

AlienSlof paints her textures from scratch, but I have yet to see another modder do that with anything like her amazing results. I know I'm not even close. ;)

 

I'm available for PM consultation as well, btw.

[SavageArtistry]

I know I've only done a couple of face textures for Oblivion (Gothic Breton & Dremora Kin use textures that I made originally for my own mod) but I used to do a lot of texturing for Vampire the Masquerade: Redemption so I feel I'm qualified to give my 2¢.

 

For things I have difficulty in painting, such as lips and irises, I generally will use heavily edited photo resources. In this case, the lips I got from a royalty free site at www.imageafter.com.

 

It also pays to use photos as references for what you are trying to paint. In the case of swords, there's a multitude of colors actually present when painting a simple steel-colored blade - gray certainly, but there's also darker shades for shadows and nearly white areas for shine. In the case of really shiny objects, there's even less blending going on of the highlight colors. An example of an old VtM skin I made, with its reference.

[Khet]

Wow, I can't believe I never thought of using the actual photos I'm so used to working with. As for the UV mapping, I tried but I can't really get it to work. All the vertices on the UV map are clumped together into one giant mass no matter what option I choose. Does Blender just not work for Uv mapping? Here's an example of what I'm getting and what the UV is SUPPOSED to look like (mind you, this is the map without the hilt or crossguard)

 

http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f80/Bakohryu/BlenderUV.jpg

 

I've looked at countless tutorials for UV mapping and short of 'redrawing' the entire thing myself by manually positioning each point I'm at a loss....

[SickleYield]

Not work? :lol: Blender is an incredibly powerful UV tool. There just aren't many good tutorials for it. I don't usually write them now because I've always gotten more negative than positive feedback when I go to the trouble.

 

You have to draw seams where you want the texture edges to be. If you want the edge of the blade to be the edge of the texture, you would select a line of verts up the side and press ctrl+e and choose "mark seam." You can also more easily select a long line of verts (not on the bent end, probably) by choosing one at each end and w+alt+7.

 

Then select all the verts by pressing a, press U and unwrap again. You can make lines that are not quite straight on the UV become straight by selecting them and pressing w,2. Rotate and scale commands work on groups of verts in the UV screen just like in edit mode.

 

If you had a standard flat blade - again, the bent end makes this impossible - you could use the project from view option that comes up when you press u; I use that on sword blades or other flat items sometimes when it's okay for both sides to be identical.

[Khet]

Ach, and see, none of the UVmapping tuts for Blender I've found really explained something like that. They all pretty much said "hit u and unwrap and there you go!" then again my searching skills could probably use a few more level ups.

 

I guess my final question would be how to see the uv in photoshop. I mean, you can't really paint onto the UV in blender can you? (basic colors, so I mean like color the blade a pure red, the hilt a pure green, the crossguard orange.. so you can see the difference in the parts)

[SickleYield]

Blender has a texture paint function but I've never really learned to use it - it's a bit of a PITA. You can switch to that mode (same as you would with edit or object mode) and paint with left mouse if you want.

 

The UV screen has a "save uv face layout" option under one of the dialogues. Alternately, you can open the mesh in NifSkope (the nif has to be exported for this) and right-click on the nitrishape, then choose textures and the save UV option under that. Either of these will let you save a UV template wherever you want so you can use it as a PS or GIMP layer.

[ihateregisteringeverywhere]

Another thing you might be interested in is how to make the blade "shiny". You see even if you use a photo for the blade it just won't be that. The trick is doing the blade dark gray - almost black, giving it a nice normal map - some irregularities, scratches and things like that, the alpha chanel of your normal map contains the specular map, it's grayscale and white=super shiny, black=not shiny at all, so I suggest making it quite bright and darken the places with scratches etc - after exporting your model into a nif you have to assign a Enviromental map to it. That will give your blade a nice reflection - which is what shiny is, right?

 

This is how you do it: Find your NiMaterialProperty, rename it from Default to EnvMap2 and change your material's properties to Ambient and difuse: black; Specular and Emissive: white. Then go to your NiTexturingProperpty and set your ApplyMode to APPLY_HIGHLIGH. That's it, mission acomplished.

[Khet]

Hmm, now how would I assign different levels of shine to different parts of the weapon? Of course the blade would be very shiny, but then the hilt wouldn't be as shiny as the blade since it's not metal, nor is it polished like the blade would be. Would I just do that under the alpha channel, making the parts I want to be duller, black? Or at least a very dark grey?