Ok, this is gonna be a little hard for me to explain but I'll try. I understand how to make "regular" textures, ie textures of concrete and grass etc. What I'd like to know is how people generally make more artisic textures for characters and robots etc, like the boombot in Torque if anyone here knows that. Obviously someone "painted" it some how, I'm just not sure what techniques are used, whether its real paint, ArtRage, plain old photoshop or what. I would really like to make some WoW style art textures but I know my painting ability sux, so any pointers would be really helpful.

Well, it's not real paint at least. ^_~ Textures like that usually have multiple layers, as was recently explained in another thread in this forum. Then at the end of the process they are flattened as much as possible without losing functionality, to save processing time when the user's graphics card applies them.

With a character you are going to have a skin layer on the bottom. (Actually there are often several skins for a character which the player can select between, or which differ for different monsters or NPCs using the same base model). Some game systems use procedural colors instead, where the player picks a base color from a color wheel or similar, then this is used to tint the skin texture. There are often separate textures for hair, eyes, partially transparent textures for tattoos, etc. Then in some cases the hair, and in many cases the clothes, involve adding new segments to the base model to change it's shape a bit, so the textures for them may be a mix of a texture for the base model and more textures for all the added-on parts.

To make a layer of texture you can either paint onto the model in a 3D program, or paint onto a UV mesh unwrap in a 2D raster program like Photoshop or similar, or do first one then the other. The different layers have to be tested in the 3D program with the lighting used in the games (can make textures look totally different than they do in Photoshop unfortunately.)

Yeah thats getting more to what I'm thinking. Obviously somewhere along the line it still takes artistic talent, but using multiple layers is going to help a lot. I had hard time imagining how you'd do a person, and my thought was something like exporting the UV map and painting over it, so yeah, thanks for that, I think I'm starting to get the idea. Now I just have to learn to paint. Lucky I have ArtRage 2.5!

Personally I'd recommend Gimp, but I haven't used artrage so I don't know how good its layering and filters etc. are. Also my suggestion would be don't start with a person, do a plant or a simple monster first.

I have Gimp, and its nice (not as nice as PS, but hey I'm not rich), I also use Paint.NET for quick editing, but I can tell you now ArtRage is so awesome it's just not funny. There is a feature limited demo, you should really try it. You'll curse me lots (given the purchase price is about $25 I think it is).

I have this simple ship I made in blender, and I've been toying with painting the texture for it in artrage since I posted this, and it's coming out a lot better than I had expected, given that if you go over the edges the uv mapping just chops it for you.

I guess its one of those things you have to try it before you realise its not going to be as bad as you think.

I have to wonder if there are any tutorials on doing ... arty... textures... or whether it just comes down to plain art (no pun intended). Like if I wanted a building with a gold ring on a prominent face, and that ring was to have glyphs drawn etc, but it wasnt big enough to warrant modelling it, how artists do this. I'm guessing they just use stencils and other techniques that I don't know about.

Theres tons of tutorials, google will get you started ;)

It'd help if you posted an example of one of the techniques you're interested in.

Yeah, I think I may have used Google once before...

Problem with that is all my search results are always about making building textures and stone and brick and all the things I know how to make. There is not much on the interwebs in the way of actual art techniques that I am aware of or can find.

Quote: Original post by abstractionline
It'd help if you posted an example of one of the techniques you're interested in.

Yes, that would be helpful. I don't think I have the rigt to post the image I was talking about in the original post, but if you download a demo of Torque3D it's included in that. I'll try and find some other examples, as I know there are heaps. I probably just need to buy a book on anime or drawing techniques or something.

In Blender, once you have UV-mapped your image, you can use the Texture Paint mode to paint directly on the object. You can use Clone tools to paint from a loaded texture as well. This can be very handy if, like me, you are somewhat rusty on your traditional 2D painting skills. Combine texture diffuse painting with the ability to bake lightmaps and ambient occlusion maps for shading, and you can model an object in high detail, paint it, then use renderings of the high-res object to "paint" texture onto a lower res version of the mesh.