Texture « Effects « Maya Tutorials

Now I will be working in Photoshop, I should first say that for a good texture, you need a good UV map with a minimum amount of stretching.

Even with Seam Correction on and the projection settings adjusted, Maya's mapping tools almost always require some manual tweaking in order to achieve an acceptable set of UV coordinates. By selecting the head model and opening the texture view window (Panels > Panel > Texture View), we can more easily identify the problem spots.

This tutorial is aimed at providing solutions to go around several limitations inherent to Maya's « convert to file texture » command, rayDiffuse's rayBake or Mental Ray's own « convert to file texture ». Not being the author of either of these utilities (obviously) I've no way to « fix » them, but I managed to find several workarounds.

Here's the original wall texture which I wanted to turn into something in style of Silent Hill series. Ofcourse, as always I picked up a reference from www.environment-textures.com -best source for textures IMO. Point of this tutorial/walkthrough is to let know about blending modes and that You should really try using them. I mostly used on that wall “overlay” blending. Rest of them are also really usefull, like Soft/Hard Light or Multiply, there's no sense in describing each, the best way is to test it yourself.

I want to show here my technique for making seamless textures for games, also how to create normal and specular maps. To not waste too much time on talkin I'll start explaining asap. I'm using Photoshop 7.0, so tutorial is mostly for PS users but other applications offer really simmilar tools.

In order to do this, the artist must picture an imaginary lighting algorithm in their head. Picture the imagined detail, and then choose a lighting model, then you would paint the surface as if it was being lit by that imaginary model. There are two primary lighting models used in painting color maps. The first is the GI (global illumination) also called occlusion lighting. It simulates lighting coming from all directions, and surfaces only shadowing when they come into close proximity of another object. Good examples of games that use this lighting model are the final fantasy games and lineage. The other lighting model is to imagine specific light sources, one point, two point, or more. The artist paints the planes of imagined geometry that face these imaginary lights lighter, and the edges that face away darker. Using colored imaginary lights can further help the illusion, as all faces that face imaginary light one are white, and those that face imaginary light two are red, etc. Games that use this model are Blood Rayne 2, and Dark Age of Camelot. Most games fall somewhere in between these two models.