Game Texture Brief

In this brief I will have to texture a whole game environment. I have the 3D model of the environment ready made. Firstly I decided to do some research into the types of textures I would need for this environment and got my ideas and put them all together in a mood-board.

Now I have a rough idea of the textures needed I can now look for textures to use. The first thing I am going to texture are the columns. In the brief it says that the columns "are covered in hieroglyphics" So I searched for hieroglyphics and found this image.

However as we can see the image is slightly off centre and so to attempt to alter this I imported the photo into Photoshop and selected the whole image (Ctrl + A) then when to edit > transform > perspective.





Now this allows me to manipulate the image to make it seem strait and once I have done that I can then export the image and open up the 3D environment and start to texture.









Ok so now I am in 3Ds Max and I am going to select the first column and I can isolate this object by selecting the red light bulb at the bottom of the 3Ds Max interface. This makes it easier to work with specific areas and / or objects.

Now if I open the material editor I can import my hieroglyphics texture and then I can applie it to the selected object which in this case is the first column.

Now as you can see the=is texture wraps around the column fine but I am going to experiment with different texture wrapping techniques to find the best one. So to do that I need to add the modifier UVW Map to the textured column.

Now as you can see part of the texture is distorted. This is because the texture wrap style selected is planar. So instead I am going to change the texture wrap style to cylindrical.

Now the image is even more distorted but using the wired oval shape we are able to rotate the texture the right way. however this wont work unless you select gizmo under the UVW modifier. Once it is the right way  up, in the roll down bar you can select "fit" under Alignment and it will fit the texture correctly.


































Now if I select the isolate toggle again we can view the whole environment again but now with a textured column. (to get rid of the wire frame press F4)

Now I am going to quickly repeat this process for the other five columns.

I now have all the columns textured and now i am going to do the same texture for the cylindrical slabs that are supporting the columns, however i have changed the parameters of the U tile so that it has smaller hieroglyphics them the columns so it looks a little different. Now although it still looks quite similar it has a slight effect on the overall look of the scene or environment.

Now I am going to texture the ground and so to do this I will have to create a texture that I can repeat over and over again so that it can cover the whole ground. to do this I am going to create a seamless texture, a seamless texture is just a image that has been manipulated to that if you were to have two of the images and place them side by side (repeat the image) you would not be able to see the line where on image ends and the other starts. So to do this I first went and found an image to manipulate and I have opened it in Photoshop. 

Now to make this a seamless texture I will first select and area of the image which is 1024 x 1024 (Pixels). A very simple way of selecting a specific area size is to select the marquee tool by pressing the hot key M and then under its options at the top select "Fixed Size" under style and change the size to the desired size which in my case is 1024 x 1024 (pixels). 

Now once I have changed these settings if I click on the image a dotted box will appear with the specified parameters, this can then be moved about till the area you wish to keep is in the box. Once you have done this simply go to "image" and then "Crop" and this will give me the final image I will be making seamless. now to actually make this seamless i have to place the inside pixels on the outside so that it will flow together. To do this is go to "Filter" and the select "offset" now a menu will pop up and we will need to change the two sliders to half of what our original image is so my image is 1024 x 1024 so these sliders will have to be laced at 512 x 512.

This Basically splits the image into 4 and flips each section so that the pixels that are on the inside are now on the out meaning that if you lay them side by side there should not be a distinct seam. However it will at first look like this. 

This now means that I will have to edit this image so that the sand looks more realistic and flows together from each section. One of the more simple ways I can do this is to get the clone stamp tool and selecting an area that i wish to repeat by pressing Alt + Left click and then simply using it as a brush however be sure not to alter any of the pixels that boarder the image even the part where you can see the section line. you have to alter as close as you can without altering the boarder. so once this process is done I have ended up with my final image. 

Now that I have a good looking texture I can save it as a JPEG and open up our 3D model in 3Ds Max. Now as I did before with the columns I am going to open the material editor and select an new sphere and name it "Ground". I am then going to import my bitmap (image) and then apply it to the selected object. It will be blurry and distorted and so I am going to add the UVW Map modifier onto the selected model. I then messed around with the different wrapping techniques and found one that suited my ground as it did not distort the texture. However close up doesn't look very good and so I am going to repeat the seamless texture a couple of times using the U and V tile parameters in the roll down bar which should hopefully make my texture a bit clearer. 

And here is a image of the scene rendered so far. 

Basic Texturing

So first of all i opened a pre made cube and selected the material editor, you need to hold down left click to access a drop down menu and then you need to select the first one, a window will then pop up which will be your material editor.

Then i selected the first sphere and re-named it to crate, this is just simply for ease of use when working with lots of materials. I then selected the object that i wanted to actually texture so i selected the cube and then a clicked the grey box next to the diffuse colour. 

Next a menu will show and i simply selected bit map and then a windows menu pops up and i selected the texture that i wanted to apply to the model. so then the texture is imported to the material editor but does not show up, to get it to show on the object you simply select "assign to material" and then the "show shaded material in view port"  

I then selected the second sphere to add the next texture and this time i am going to texture the floor and simply repeated the same process but this time i obviously selected a different texture (black and white checked texture for a tiled floor)

Now however these tiles are to large and so i am going to add a modifier to the floor named UVW Map,

Then i went to the parameters in the roll down bar and changed the U Tile and V tile both from 1 to 5.

After that i then opened Photoshop and imported the crates texture. I am going to alter it so that it is not the exact same texture across the whole box, this will give the box a more realistic look,

As you can see i have added two more panels to the top and bottom of the box and i have also placed text over it.Then to add a little more realism i used the burn tool towards the bottom of the crate to show a bit of shading and fading of colour by simply using the burn tool.

So now i am going back over to 3Ds Max and i am now going to import the new textures that i just created in Photoshop, however this time when i select the third sphere i am not going to keep it as a standard material and instead i am going to change it to a "multi sub object" this is done by selecting where it says standard and selecting multi sub object in the pop up menu.

 Now i have a list from 1 to 10 which i am firstly going to change to 4 as i only have 4 textures i wish to use for this object. So i simply click select number and type in my desired number.

Now by selecting either where it says "none" or "crate side one" it will return me back to the familiar menu where i can select the material again, then when i want to come back to the list of materials that are in this sub object list i simply select "go to parent" and i can select the second texture to import into the list. so now I am going to add all for of my textures into each of the four spaces in the list. However once i have done this and select show shaded material in view port (make sure to do this for all materials in the list before going back to the list view) you can see that not all of my sides are textured or they are not the right texture (in some cases)

To fix this and to select the texture i want for each side individually I simply add the modifier "edit poly" to the cube and then select the sub object "polygon". Now i can select the individual polys (faces) making up my cube, so now if i scroll down the roll down bar and find the subtitle "material ID" i can now set which texture i want to show on my selected poly by changing the number to match the number in the list that has the texture desired linked to. 

So this basically shows that making one of the materials (spheres) a multi sub object it basically creates a hub for you to import all the textures for a single model which you can then link to a number (ID) and then select the poly and link it to the ID giving you more precision and ease of use when texturing bigger and more complex models.


This is a render of the finished and textured crate.