TF2 Style Textures From Photos

[Tutorial]

category
Texture Creation

description
Create a TF2 style texture based on a real image or photo.

keywords
texture, photo, tf2, image, textures, style.

After lots of messing around with photoshop I finally came across a technique for cartoonizing real life textures into a TF2 style. Hopefully this helps some of you who aren't very good at painting to create textures that fit the TF2 look.

Start with a texture that doesn't have loads of detail. The less detail, the better. I used this rock texture (which looks pretty fake already, likely from a zoo habitat or amusement park)



Apply Blur -> Smart Blur. Try the values I used, Radius 10 and Threshold of 30.



You should get something that looks like this. Most of the detail has been flattened out into solid colors.



Apply Stylize -> Diffuse. Make sure it is set to Anisotropic. This will give you a nice brush stroke effect.



When you are happy with the result, play with Levels or Brightness/Contrast to tweak the color value of the texture. Your end result should be something like this.



-Shanks

[Zipfinator]

It looks cartoony alright, but I don't really think it's TF2 style. Maybe in game it would fit in more, but right now it just doesn't look the same.

[ixin]

You can still edit it some more and redo the whole step that'll defo make it alot more TF2'ish, tbh I've tried it and it does look like TF2 textures are made as.

[Jman]

It just blends a little too much, tf2's textures are actually very sharp and contrasting between colored areas.

[MrTwoVideoCards]

I think so far this is the only "How To Make a TF2 texture The Right Way" Tut. Great job man, I sure needed this a few weeks ago.

[snufflez]

There was an article a while back that valve posted that stated a lot of the earlier texture work in TF2 was done in such a manner that they were hand painted textures scanned in. The effect produced a better looking texture under the microscope because of the intentional design of the texture and lack of photo artifacts.

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*edit* -- I personaly might stop before applying the diffuse if I were looking for a sharper texture, but at the same time this is a great base for going more in depth in your texture creation for TF2.

[theCommie]

Whenever I paint TF2 textures, I tend to use the Reduce Noise filter on a photo reference, before painting on top. But this is pretty much the same effect.

[chargers5583]

Looks good I should try it out soon!

[Chopium]

It works like a charm, but I'd stay away from the diffuse. I think some of the best results come from...

-Filter>Reduce Noise
-Filter>Smart Blur
-Filter>Smart Sharpen
-All the other changes you want to make.

I whipped this up in just a couple minutes.

[punky]

A good technique, that I use to make stuff look more cartoony and have less detail is using the reduce noise filter under filters->noise-> reduce noise, fiddle around with the settings a bit, I recommend to not use too much of "the reduce color noise" option though, it makes your result look desaturated...

[mat_de_b]

It looks like the choice of photo is important

[longshanks]

Glad this has been useful to some, obviously this is not the be all end all of making a TF2 style texture, but I figured it would give people an idea of where to start from if they didn't have any clue. The more people share on the subject the easier it will be for others to reproduce the TF2 style to great effect :)

I've noticed not using the diffuse does produce better results sometimes, I just like it for making smeary type brushstrokes.. and I tried the reduce noise technique too and that seems to work really well!

[S.W.A.T.Y]

Thanks man, I found this very useful.

[ReservoirWOLF]

cool ill have to try it out.

[nub]

I think it's only effective depending on the photo. If there's too much going on in a certain photo, then after using the diffuse filter, it makes it look watery almost. I'd stop just before diffuse in most cases, but regardless it's an interesting find.

It definitely is helpful to use for making normalmaps for ground textures that aren't too gritty and have nice topography.