Creating textures is to coin a phrase, is a "never-ending art". Quite literally, the purpose of almost every texture produced - whether it be for high-end 3d objects or backgrounds for documents and webpages - is to provide a seemless environment where the viewer doesn't notice or think about the actual image, but is more focus on "the bigger picture". Textures are the environmental pieces that make a character or a scene seem real to us. They can be surreal, with bright, cartoon-esque colors and shading. They can be photo-realistic with depth and light playing an integral part in making the image "real".

    Currently almost a quarter of the video games industry is made up of 2d/3d artists whose focus is to create textures that bring the environments of their games to reality. There are many skills that a seasoned texture artist must possess, including excellent free-hand sketching skills and a great depth of understanding light and color and how they work in the real world. Although a lot of artistic talent is just that...talent, many of these skills can be acquired and perfected over time. Many colleges and universities all over the world have excellent digital press and digital media courses, as well as classes in visual design, color theory, and photography. Many of these courses can even be found at local junior or community colleges.

    Getting started isn't as hard or expensive as you might think. Even though the tutorial presented here is geared toward Adobe Photoshop 5+ (which is considered by the masses to be an industry standard), many of the design principals disclosed here are applicable to almost any mid-to-high level art program such as Paint Shop Pro. There's even a free program on the internet that you can download known as "Gimp", which works equally well as Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop.

    Ok, enough talking about the industry and more about the meat of this article...texture basics. We'll explore some of the basic tools of the working texture/2d artist, and some of the techniques behind how images are made to tile seemlessly with each other.

 Creating Tiles

    There are many ways of going about making tiles, but since this is a beginner's article we're only going to show you two. The first is a standard function in Photoshop called "offset". You can find this function in the Filters > Other sub-menu. The idea behind this tool is making the image tile without changing the size of the canvas by shifting the image up/down and left/right, then taking the concealed portion of the image and re-applying it on the empty space at the other end of the image, shown here.

    Once the image is in this state, the artist can begin working on blending the edges that are now in the center, withe the center of the image that is now the outer edges. When the artist is finished, he/she has a fully tileable surface, because the center of the original image will be used to join the four corners together into one image.

    The second method (and my personal preference) is using layered images that have been flipped either horizontally or vertically. The concept behind this is fairly simple. You start with an original image, copy it, paste it as a layer, flip the layer either horizontally or vertically, and then begin using the erase tool to remove portions of the layer. Sometimes you can use this technique in combination with the previous, to make your pattern image seem more varied. However, you have to be a bit more careful using this method - if you're too liberal with the erase tool, you may end up with a "stuttering" texture.

 Texturing Tools

    A texture artist utilizes many tools in his graphic arsenal to battle against the visual effects of tiling. So to keep this section as short as possible, we'll briefly touch on a few of the most common items. These include the "Stamp" tool, the "Healing Brush" (Photoshop 6+), the "Dodge" and "Burn" tools, and Filters.

    The "Stamp" tool is a type of brush that can copy an image, and then paint part or all of that image in a different part of the canvas, shown here. This can be really helpful when trying to patch over corners or edges of a texture that don't match their opposing faces. Simply choose a section of the image you want to use as your patch (do this by selecting the stamp tool, placing the tool over your preferred source, and "alt + left mouse click"), and then paint over the area that you want covered up.

    The "Healing Brush" is very similar to the "Stamp", but it does not copy and paint a selected portion of an image. Instead it blends the selected area onto the area being painted on, which helps preserve the material and correct color changes between samples. If you have it at your disposal, I highly recommend using this tool the most.

    The "Dodge" tool is a great device to bring out more "light" to a surface. Artists will sometimes use this tool on an organic surface or on floors and ground surfaces to give a greater impression of depth. The "Burn" tool is just the opposite of the "Dodge" tool. It makes a surface or image darker, which again, artists will use to give the image a better impression of depth. You can see an example of both of these here.

    There are many effective and useful filters that make texture creation a breeze. Among these are the "noise" and "clouds" filters. Especially when making a texture from scratch, both "Noise" and "Clouds" are able to create seamless edges, tiling like magic.

    "Clouds" is without a doubt one of the most commonly used Photoshop filters among artists and designers. When given a workspace with a height and or width of and equal or multiple value to each other, "Clouds" produces a random fractal pattern between the foreground and background colors that tile perfectly on all edges. Certainly one of the most useful tools of the texture trade, and extremely realistic looking patterns for rock and ground surfaces.

    "Noise" is yet another commonly used filter among texture makers. "Noise" allows the artist to throw random speckles into the image to make it "dirty", or "rough" in appearance. The "Noise" filter is more commonly used when creating concrete, stone, dirt, or metal textures. The "speckling" effect it has on images makes surfaces appear more random and natural. Here are a couple examples of "Clouds" and "Noise".

 Applied Knowledge

    Having enough time to experiment and try new things is key to creating and perfecting your textures. Using the common tools given to you above, you can make a very simple texture and apply some of these tools to other images to make new textures. Some of the best looking textures come from digitally edited photographs. There are many places on the internet where you can download pictures or images of natural environments. One of the best online libraries of free images is 3dcafe.com. The images there are large enough and have enough detail to create some very photo-realistic artwork.

    If you're still looking to create a texture and can't find an appropriate image or source, be creative! Get a camera and take photos of things that resemble what you're trying to make and use them. Sometimes you can get interesting effects by moving photos around inside a scanner when it is capturing an image. Be experimental and see what you can come up with. You never know when it might be useful.

 Tips & Advice

• The subtleties are what really set good textures apart from bad ones. When creating textures, unless it's specifically a detail texture, try not to let your details stand out too much, or the viewer will focus too much on them and find the pattern easier.



• Study light and color everywhere you go, and be aware of how shadows and lights affect colors and surfaces. This will help a lot when making themes or textures meant to fit certain structural or geometric orientations in specific environments.



• Always render or create images at the largest resolution possible, so you can cram in as much detail before you scale it down. Adding small details to a small image is difficult sometimes and often appears to be off scale from the rest of the image. If it doesn't seem right up close, try zooming out to 50% to see what it may look like when scaled down.



• Save everything...even the bad looking stuff. You never know when you could use something as a base or detail for something else. id Software does this quite a bit, as well as many other development houses.

Questions or comments? E-mail Mr. Lake