Question about textures in HL2

eoy

I've read through most of the threads on the ns-creation forums and watched some of the textures that have been made, but I have one question:

why are there not any photography used for texturing? Is there any specific reason that everything has to get the sort of cartoonish look? Why not go for real texture photos from the real world? After watching the latest podcast, I'm interested in starting to texture stuff myself to possibly be able to contribute with something to the game, but allthough I have many years of professional workexperience in Photoshop, I've never really done anything close to texturing before so I'm not aware of the general rules and guidelines. If anyone knows some good tutorial or similar, it'd be very usefull <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/wink-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=";)" border="0" alt="wink-fix.gif" />

This is just something I wacked up quickly for this post.. what works/does not work with this texturing attempt?

<img src="http://img261.imageshack.us/img261/9677/texturenl8.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" />

I tried to start from 2D brushing and then apply some of my own photography and blend it in to create a more realworld feeling, while still trying to preserve the style of other ns-textures I've seen before, but I have no clue if I'm really following any set rules and standards...

Kouji_San

Well, from what I've seen/heard (not yet created textures myself so this is an educated guess <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/tounge.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":p" border="0" alt="tounge.gif" /> ). The texture itself should be completly flat, meaning no embossed surfaces or shadow/highlights. If you would use a real life photograph, there is bound to be a 3d effect in there due to shadows/highlights.

For HL2 textures (and more engines), the 3d effect is created using bumpmapping and other surface mapping techniques, which will then be rendered realtime in the engine. This will make it possible to create a dynamic lightmap on the textures with lights comming from any direction.

StixNStonz

1) Make it Tileable. Use the Offset Filter (under 'other'), offset it by half its width and height, and you'll see the seam. Fix that up.

2) Remove the blatant changes in lighting. Many ways of doing this, but i hear the High Pass Filter is the best, just make sure to up the contrast afterwards (it lowers it significantly)

3) Careful for the details that pop out at all. Even the little cracks; if you tiled that texture along a horizontal wall, those cracks would be painful to the eyes. If your texture was as wide as it was high, it may not be as much of an issue, but personally i'd lower the inner shadow of the cracks significantly.

eoy

thank you for the response, I'll play around a bit more and then post the result <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":)" border="0" alt="smile-fix.gif" />

BigD

I haven't done any kind of fancy schmancy texturing yet with bump maps, but I think this is how I'd start:

Personally, for something like your flaky cement, I'd have my detail layer just a big ol'box o'grey. Pure, flat, no detail at all (shade of your choice) grey.

I'd put all the detail into the bump map.

I'd take your texture, make it tileable then duplicate it. One dupe, I'd go around and remove the black areas. On the second dupe, I'd use the black areas to simply figure out which parts closer to me, and which areas are farther from me and make nice gradients between the edges. Sort of thinking that black is low, and white is high, sort of thing.

When I finish up doing that with the second dupe, the whole thing should be smooth gradients. Then I'd overlay the first onto the second for all the little grainy detail and texturing that a person (or at least I) can't draw by hand.

There's no real set rules, but any kind of shading should be done by the bump map. Just keep working on it until it looks good.

One thing I've found is that the more a texture is expected to be tiled (and repeated) the less detail it should have. I mean, look out across a field in most games, it looks like a giant quilt. This is my preference, but I'd rather see it look like one big blob of green. Don't skimp on resolution detail, but that little patch of brown added to one corner of a texture to represent a bit of dirt looks terrible repeated a bajillion times. (An overlay, a special texture on a specific polygon, or a decal could have done that trick much better.) If it isn't repeated through a huge area too much, add more "unique" detail to it.