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Tutorial : Creating Textures for 3D

By Michael Hirsh.

Page 1 of 4

Introduction

This 4 page tutorial takes you through the process of creating a texture map for use in a 3D animation program.
You'll build a group of brushes that you later use to paint a multi-level canvas. After tweaking the canvas, you'll flatten it and then use the Photo Stitch wizard to build a larger, repeating pattern.
With a bit of care and attention at each stage, you can avoid the resulting texture looking too machine-made, and "tiled".

The main tools used are Geometry>Shapes>Closed Bezier Spline, the Paint>Brush Setup dialogues, and the Photo Stitch Wizard.

The tutorial is based on a real world case. I needed to create a texture map for a low hedge with the proportion 4 : 3, which is why the images are in this format. More often than not, 3D textures are used in a square format so that they can be tiled.

Here's what I ended up with, after applying a couple of Photoshop filters to my Satori output.

All the grunt work was done in Satori Film FX 64 v.3.20, and PS supplied a little grain and a teensy bit of blur.

Part 1: Build your own brushes

As you can see from the above picture, there are several different leaf shapes that have been applied to the canvas. It's best to build these yourself, but you could practice with the ready-made "leaf00.png - leaf04.png" files that are in the Brushes / Movies folder.

Here's how to build the brushes yourself.

First set up a canvas of 300 x 200 pixels. This canvas will allow you to create six slightly different brushes side by side. You might want to make more than six brushes, of course, so set up whatever size canvas you like that will divide equally in to 100 pixel squares.
When it's complete, you'll crop it into six 100 x 100 pixel squares and save each as a PNG (Portable Network Graphics) bitmap in the Brushes / Movies folder. This file type allows your brush to import ready made colour as well as transparency.

The 300 x 200 pixel canvas with the grid set to 3 columns and 2 rows. The blue line is on a temporary layer containing rough freehand sketches of the leaves.

Use the Closed Bezier Spline to shape the leaves, and fill them with a Gradient.

The gradient helps to give the finished leaf a bit of depth.

When you have created the six leaf shapes, make a new layer called "leaf textures" and add a mask to it.
Then select the leaf shapes one by one and copy them to the mask in the new layer.
Invert the mask in the "leaf textures"layer so that it looks like the image below.

You can delete the bottom layer, it's not neeed any more.

Use the painting tools to delicately suggest ribs and highlights on the leaves. Don't overdo this part, or your eventual texture will be too contrasty and attention-grabbing.
I've used a soft edged chalk brush and a light airbrush, with the Pressure and Limiter sliders set at around 50%

The finished leaves, ready for cropping into six separate bitmap files.

Now use the Canvas>Define Crop button to select each of the six sqares in turn.
Make sure that you have set up your grid for 3 columns and 2 rows, and that Grid Snap is turned ON.
Define the Crop area and use the Hi-Rez button in the Zoom Palette to make sure the image of each leaf is pin sharp.
Save the crops as .PNG files in your Brushes /Movies folder.

Important TIP. Save the first PNG with the number *00.png, and save it for a second time as *06.png.
See Below.

Save the first leaf at the beginning and at the end of the sequence of files. Why? All will be explained on the next page.

To help you with this tutorial, you can download a ZIP file of my leaf brushes here>>   (47 kb )

Click here >> to download the entire tutorial ( Includes the leaf brushes ZIP ) (1.1 Mb)

Carry on to the Next Page