This is a great thread, I have seen some good things I want to try after reading now.
My question is can any one give some tips on going about painting up some good stone textures. I am looking for like worn chiped uneven concrete or stone. I am working on an old tomb and I want to make some really good worn stone textures for it.
When texturing vast terrain, like in MMO’s how does one go about texturing something so large? Does anyone know of any tutorials, examples or even life experience on how texturing is setup technically, and what the artists have to understand before attempting this task? Thanks in advance.
texturing terrain is always a case of using repeating textures on a vertex by vertex level, it fades in and out the texture according to an alpha map or black and white mask for the terrain, white = full
black = nothing
grey = mid
so you set up grass according to a mask for the entire terrain - and dirt - and rock and whatever other layers you may have in there - the more technical aspects of this are handled by the engine - every engine a little different from the other. but thats the basic idea
layers of repeating textures overlapping eachother.
also, in some cases you can also use vertex colors to dictate which texture is used and how strong it is present on the mesh.
I’m loving that info Hyper, thanks…ok, so basically you can mix the dirt and grass with an output of either an alpha map, or by vertex coloring with black and white, if i understand you correctly. The one part i don’t fully understand is how artists are able to get more than two types of mixing textures at a time? Is it done by multi-sub textures (i use max), or do they simply detach the meshes at certain locations to apply another round of different mixing texture maps? I attached an example of what i’m visually puzzled by? The red outlined area is obviously not tiled the same way the dirt and grass are tiling on the floor, which is the blue outline? So then it would have to have another material, along with another UV coordinate applied to those certain polies, right? Thanks again for that info, every bit helps.
you could say it kind of uses a submaterial yes, and each material has an aplha channel. You familiar with photoshop? basically its piling up layers, then apply an alpha mask to each layer, as if you were deleting parts of that layer.So every layer has an image that serves as an alpha and should be a grayscale image.
You can create a similar effect by using a multisub object I suppose. The technique is universal, be creative, there are multiple roads that lead to rome.
As I understand it, the trick is to learn how many textures you can combine in as few rendering passes as possible. Some hardware supports in a single pass just two color bitmaps being combined by a grayscale third, with that third often being vertex colors instead of a bitmap. Some will let the artist combine more textures at once in a single pass.
As I see it, it all comes down to how long it takes to render. If I have to re-render the surface multiple times (rendering passes), after a certain point the framerate starts to suffer.
Some engines don’t support 3ds max’s Multi/Sub-Object material type, a few do. If they do, each sub-material will be split into a separate set of verts by the exporter, creating in essence a separate surface. The verts along the seams between these chunks will get the same normals, so there is no visual seam in-game, but increasing the number of these chunks will slow down performance too.
The M/S-O material isn’t for blending bitmaps, it’s for dividing the mesh up into separate materials. If you want to blend, you use the map type they support, like a Composite map or a Mix map or whatever. It seems many engines these days set up their shaders in a separate app though.
In case you haven’t seen this thread, some good tips about landscape texturing.
http://boards.polycount.net/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=15652&an=0&page=0
Hi guys, from what i have learned from the post is that the dodge and burn tool help you get rinkles, but how exactly to you start out the rinkle. Right now i set up a blank scene with a blue background and used the 2 tools and i dont really get any detail till i draw a line in there, but still im not seeing the results that i would like to with just these tools. Is there any tutuorial that i can follow to learn a little more? This is a very important part of 3d that i would like to learn a little more but just dont know where too start.
Unfortunately I have not seen one way of doing things. If you want to start skinning and drawing textures for that I would recommend to draw more. I have seen plenty of tutorials around that give a rough step by step process, but that will not help much except for that one situation. Getting to know tools in programs is good but not having the tools become the only means of getting one effect. If you have the drawing skills already just keep practicing.
If I was you I would invest in some of the books mentioned by these people here. Some of those have great tutorials and such to help you with the tools and what the book tells you can do with the tools of the program. But in the long run the best thing you can do for yourself is to get a sketch pad, Pick up some fruit and draw them. Draw them till they look realistic on paper and once you get to the point you are good to go with the rest. 
Any ideas on how to use PhShop bevel&emboss in order to simulate wrinkles, instead of the burning tool?
One way…
TY Eric.
Ah… some time ago, I’ve heard of a tool for Phshop, perhaps a plugin, which serves to simulate directly wrinkles upon a matte surface. Never heard of this?
There are tons of filters around. But most of them suck. All the game artists I know paint wrinkles by hand. IMHO painting skills are a must for game texturing.
Having said that though, sometimes filters can help speed things along. I’ve found this page helpful in seeing what the defaults are.
http://openstream.ch/photoshop/index.php?cat=all&lang=english
Agree.
All the game artists I know paint wrinkles by hand. IMHO painting skills are a must for game texturing.
Do you think it is better to get the wrinkles from solid polys after normal-mapping?
I’ve seen good results when an artist models the larger wrinkles in geometry, then extracts a normal map (or height map), then paints the smaller details as an overlay… small details like pores, pimples, moles, wrinkles on the lips, etc. I’ve used photo-source for pores and fine wrinkles, gray-scaled and added as an overlay, works well.
what i do often these days is to take my game model into zbrush and sculpt the wrinkles (and other mid size details) on. afterwards i import the zbrushed model into my main 3d app (max in this case), set up lights as i wish and render-to-texture an image that serves as a rough texture overlay.
hand painting comes in at a later stage but i found that this workflow speeds me up very noticeably and improves the texture quality as well. extra benefit is that one could output a normal map at the same time if that was neccessary. but, be careful when mixing pre-painted highlights and shadows with a normal map.
another way i use(d) is to paint the wrinkles with zbrush’s 2d painting tools onto the texture page. the 2d/3d effect comes out really well and you’re able to position lights above the surface to tweak the effect.
the bevel filter /layer effect from photoshop is still handy for creating fine detail, though.
I finished modeling a character and unwrapped it but texturing is very difficult. I’m trying to paint the face but it’s not going anywhere.
1- What is a good lighting setup to get the prelight shadows?
2- I like how some people paint the faces like they would paint a 2D illustration, I wonder what tools they use in PS? Only some paintbrush? And if so which brush setup?
Thanks!
Thanks guys for this tread, it’s very helpful for textures making. I’ll try some of the tricks like the square brush and the higher to lower resolution in photoshop and that works very good. My textures are better now after following all the stuff here. Thanks 
i would texture a face starting with a base color, and using a somewhat large fuzzy brush, bring out highlights, and skintone colors, and put in darker skin tone colors for the dark spots. works really well. The detail is similar, just tightening it up as you go along.