General Texture Creation Question - Tile Pattern

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General Texture Creation Question - Tile Pattern

Postby wereMole on Thu May 09, 2013 12:55 pm

Hello Interlopers Community,

I would like the ask if anyone can direct me to a tutorial that might help me fix a custom texture of a bunch of tiles to fit a certain area.

In order to get a clear picture of what I want to learn I've included a picture what I'm doing: http://imageshack.us/f/836/floortexture.png/

So what I have is a rectangular texture of tiles with a couple of things that I need to fix:

- It needs to designed that it can be applied to floors on the ground level in such a fashion that the size of the tiles on the texture is constant - irrelevant of the brush size. I assume that I have to resize the format of the original image so that I only need to fit L or R within Hammer.
- Repetitive parts of the tiles need te be removed.
- The color of the tiles has to be reworked to a more reddish/brown tile.
- I have no clue how textures work with memory space and whether if I don't take them into account whether I will seriously affect the performance of my map.

I have virtually no experience with all the technical details that come with generic texture creation and I more the less got lost in all the tutorials that deal with too specific targets and tutorials that were too generic that they did not spend time on addressing the problems I've encountered. I lost track of what I need to learn about to be able to achieve this. I have Photoshop CS6 available for graphic adjustions and I use VTFEdit for formats and conversions.

It would be very much appreciated if anyone would know a good starting point in the form of a tutorial or webpage I did not find. Generally the problems I encounter within Hammer are specific and I know where to look but in this case I'm such a beginner that I don't know where to start.

Sincerely,

wereMole
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Re: General Texture Creation Question - Tile Pattern

Postby WhiteDevil on Thu May 09, 2013 7:50 pm

I don't know really how to help you. Your problem seems so basic which should be easy to find a solution with just googling around and watching some videos on youtube about the basic things about the hammer editor and texturing. But you're still here writing a comprehensive explanation that people would find you a shotcut for this? There are no shotcuts, you sit down and learn like everyone else has.
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Re: General Texture Creation Question - Tile Pattern

Postby wereMole on Thu May 09, 2013 8:21 pm

Well, yeah. I'm looking for something on texturing which similar to this guide on optimization.

I am indeed going too much into details and I'm sorry for opening a thread on it - but I am kind of desperate to get a good starting point. I have been looking around before asking the question directly ofcourse but most of it is either too basic (simple guides on how to import the textures into hammer etc.) or too specific.

Perhaps I am looking for something that isn't there and I should learn by trial and error - but I'd suspect there must have been countless people that bump into these problems at one point or another. I'm looking for something that can help me understand how to do these basic things and what technical aspects are relevant besides that.
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Re: General Texture Creation Question - Tile Pattern

Postby Sathor on Thu May 09, 2013 8:49 pm

Most of your problems don't seem to be specific for creating a texture, but rather not knowing how to work with an image editing program like PS. So perhaps your search parameters are just wrong.
I mean, you talk about colour editing and such ... that is really basic.

And I dont understand the question about the constant tile size to be honest.

About the performance: well the larger the texture file, the bigger the impact. Add a normal and specular map and the impact is bigger yet. Just guessing there.
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Re: General Texture Creation Question - Tile Pattern

Postby Plague on Thu May 09, 2013 10:06 pm

wereMole wrote:- It needs to designed that it can be applied to floors on the ground level in such a fashion that the size of the tiles on the texture is constant - irrelevant of the brush size. I assume that I have to resize the format of the original image so that I only need to fit L or R within Hammer.


This doesn't make much sense, are you having trouble applying the texture to one larger brush?
You can resize a texture on a brush and the texture repeats indefinitely.

wereMole wrote: - Repetitive parts of the tiles need te be removed.
- The color of the tiles has to be reworked to a more reddish/brown tile.


This is standard texture creation fare, any google search for something like "how to make a seamless texture" should bring something up. (seamless being a texture designed to be repeated without too many obvious repetitive features)
Color is also simple, most graphics editing programs will have multitudes of ways to change the color of the image as a whole.

wereMole wrote: - I have no clue how textures work with memory space and whether if I don't take them into account whether I will seriously affect the performance of my map.


you shouldn't really have to worry about it at this stage.
In the long run you want to figure out what size texture fits your goal, the larger it is the more detail and fidelity you get, but your budget will increase if you use too many.
Things like normal maps or specular maps also add to your texture budget but can be used to achieve higher quality looking textures.


Maybe start out with some simple texture creation guides?
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Re: General Texture Creation Question - Tile Pattern

Postby wereMole on Fri May 10, 2013 11:12 am

Thanks for the replies - I see that I shouldn't have included various unrelated problems in my initial post.

Sathor wrote:Most of your problems don't seem to be specific for creating a texture, but rather not knowing how to work with an image editing program like PS. So perhaps your search parameters are just wrong.
I mean, you talk about colour editing and such ... that is really basic.

And I dont understand the question about the constant tile size to be honest.


What I mean is that if I put my texture on a small brush (32x32) and fit it - the tiles on the pattern are a size (something like 8x8). But I want my tiles to be a constant size on whatever size brush I'm pasting it on by having the pattern repeat itself on the surface of the brush. I'm now messing around with fitting it by altering the texture scale and shift but is this the way to achieve this?

Plague wrote:This doesn't make much sense, are you having trouble applying the texture to one larger brush?
You can resize a texture on a brush and the texture repeats indefinitely.

This is standard texture creation fare, any google search for something like "how to make a seamless texture" should bring something up. (seamless being a texture designed to be repeated without too many obvious repetitive features)
Color is also simple, most graphics editing programs will have multitudes of ways to change the color of the image as a whole.


Thanks - this helps a lot - I wasn't sure whether I had to alter the image outside of hammer or whether I should just adjust it within the texture editor. I think I'll postphone the recoloring for when I have actually fixed an already working texture in-game.

For clarification I'm working on a rather simple map to get more experience with Hammer, to see what kind of mistakes I'm making on the way and to see if I can actually finish a small scale project.
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Re: General Texture Creation Question - Tile Pattern

Postby pk_hunter on Fri May 10, 2013 12:10 pm

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Re: General Texture Creation Question - Tile Pattern

Postby wereMole on Fri May 10, 2013 7:14 pm

Thanks for the link - very instructive.

This is a very crude image of the effect I'm trying to obtain. Just to get the picture clear:

Image
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