The Photoshop Tips And Tricks Thread

[Legacy_Renzatic]

               It's been pretty much a year since I first started, then subsequently abandoned my tileset. Yeah. I know. I suck. But it's not totally my fault. I ended up getting busy, some minor to moderate things happened, and the whole thing sorta got lost in the shuffle.

Plus making models for NWN is kind of a bastard of a thing, and I'm overly spoiled by newer engines these days. Yeah, I know. You're all probably ready to break out your bucket of throwing rocks. I probably deserve a good couple of peggings after saying that. '>

But while I was here, I ended up thinking of you all as some of the most friendly and helpful bunch of people I've ever come across on the internet. I've been lurking on and off ever since, kinda watching what you've all been doing without me. As usual, all the great stuff just keeps coming.

There is an alterior motive to me posting this today, though. A few weeks back, someone on another forum I visit asked me if I'd be willing to help him out with a few texture making tips and tricks. What started out with a few PMs worth of advice ended up as a multipage tutorial covering everything from color correction, to making a brick texture from scratch.

After all the help I recieved during my brief tenure here, I figured posting this up is the very least I can do to repay you all. :happy:

As a preamble, these tutorials will cover everything from tiling a texture you've grabbed off the internet, to color correction and sharpening, and will eventually come to a multipart tutorial showing you how to go from this...



...to this...



If anyone has any questions, suggestions, or corrections, don't fret for even a second over posting. Unless you're making fun of my currently bad haircut (don't go to the beauty school for cheap haircuts), you won't hurt my feelings.

Keep in mind these aren't simple things. My intention is to teach Photoshop here, and make something cool in the process. If you go through these, you'll have a good idea of how this very handy, and very expensive little program works.

But enough jibber jabber. LETS GET OUR LEARN ON!
               
               

               

                     Modifié par Renzatic, 16 octobre 2011 - 06:00 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_Renzatic]

               First, a little disclaimer. Most, if not all, of the techniques I'm gonna put on display here should work in any CS branded version of Photoshop. Anything earlier than CS1 might be a little iffy. They should also work in GIMP, but since I barely have any experience with it, you'll have to look up a tutorial to find out how to do its analogous functions.

The ultimate goal you should be shooting for, and what I'll attempt to show you how to do through these tutorials, is making your own textures from a variety of sources. Why dig through a bunch of textures only to find one that sorta fits your needs when you can make one to your exacting specifications?

Okay, so now that I've finally got to live my lifelong dream of using analogous in a sentence, I think it's time to get down to business. That's right! It's time to learn Photoshop! First off, we're gonna start with the most basic of basics. The one handiest tool that does just about everything, and the one tool you'll be using time and again while making textures.

Alpha Mask Sublayers (insert fanfare clip here)

This first tutorial will show you how to make a basic texture tileable, and works as an excellent primer to the concept of Alpha Mask Sublayers (insert fanfare clip here).

We're gonna start off by grabbing this. These are a collection of PS brushes I find myself using constantly for blending and painting. If you end up taking to this whole texturing thing, you'll eventually find these indispensable. Assuming you've got PS installed properly, then doubleclicking the .abr should install them right away. Otherwise, you'll have to click on the paintbrush tool, go to the brush pallette at the top left of the screen, click the almost annoyingly small arrow in a circle icon, select load brush, and lead it to this file.

Okay. Now need a common texture to work with. Go to www.cgtextures.com and sign up for an account. This is where just about everyone gets their textures these days. I've got a few more I use, but CGTextuers is the major site. The free account works fine, and gives you 20 meg of downloads a day. Unless you're insistent on getting the super high res versions at all times, you should be able to grab at least 15-25 a day.

Once you got your account, go here, and grab this texture. Get the 1600x1037 texture. Always try to go for the mid-res/high-res options. For one, I find high res textures easier to work with. And, most importantly, downscaling a big texture is no problem, you'll lose some detail, but you've still got the original. Upscaling a texture, on the other hand, obviously won't bring out any extra definition or details. Most you'll get are specklies and overly large jpeg artifacts. Might as well start bigger than what you're gonna end up using, and having your high res original lying around in case you need it for some other project.

Alternately, if you don't feel like signing up right now, either because you're overly lazy, or just don't like signing up to random sites, then just grab it off my dropbox here.

Now that we've got that out of the way, lets open up the texture in PS. I know, the dirt texture I picked isn't too exciting, but it'll do its job for this basic primer here. It's got enough surface detail to make it just interesting enough for our purposes. Now, pick a square section from the base you'll want to use as your texture. You don't have to worry about every edge exactly matching up for this particular texture, but try to select left and right sides that look similar.

As seen here

Once you grab it, hit ctrl+c to copy, and hit ctrl+n to open up a new PS doc (or go to file/new from the dropdown menu). The resolutions set in the box that pops up tells you res of your copied section off the texture. It'll look like this...

here

You're gonna want to try to get your selection as close to 1024x1024 as possible. Don't expect to get it exact...that'd take about forever, and be annoying as hell to attempt, but get it close so it doesn't distort too much when you go to resize it to 1024x by going to image/image size from the dropdown menu, turn off constrain proportions, and setting your width and height to 1024.  After you do all that, you should have a texture that looks like this...

ba-doop.

Yeah, I know this part was really basic, and most of you here probably already know how to do this 10 times over. But I wanna make sure all bases are covered before we start getting a little more indepth. Don't worry, we'll get to the fun part soon enough.

Now you have your new texture, and it's just flat out begging to be edited. First, collapse your layer into the background by hitting ctrl+e (this collapses the selected layer to the next lower, not the whole stack, btw). Doubleclick the little picture on your background layer tab, and make it "layer 0". It's now a properly editable layer.

Hit ctrl+a to select everything in your current layer (or draw a marquee around it, whichever you prefer), hit ctrl+c to copy, and ctrl+v to paste your selection into a new layer. Yeah, I'm big on keyboard shortcuts. You should be, too. It'll save you a metric ****-ton of time (pardon my language '>).

Okay, now you have your two duplicate layers, all looking like this.

Remember that fun stuff I mentioned we'd eventually get to? That moment has now arrived!

First, we're gonna offset your texture. Do this by going to filter/other/offset. Offset it by 512 on x, and 512 on y (half coordinates of your texture resolution. Your end results will look like...

This

A perfect cross center of your currently untiled texture.

Now for the magic. At the bottom of your layer tab column, you should see a little square with a circle in it, that looks like:



This is your All Layer Mask button. Study it. Stare at it. Remember it. Make love to it if you have to. You'll be using it quite a bit in the future. With layer 1 selected, hit that button, and you'll see a smaller white box appear in your layer tab. That's your alpha mask sublayer (insert fanfare clip here). Your new best friend.



A quick primer on alpha masks. They're pretty much alphas as you expect them to be, but applied per layer, instead of all encompassing, like it would be in the alpha channel in channels tab. It works exactly how you probably already know alphas work in games. White is completely transparent, black opaque, and all the shades of grey represent different strengths of transparency.

So you've got your offset texture, and your alpha mask applied, lets make this texture tileable. If you installed the brush set I sent you, then go into your brush palette, and look for this particular brush. It has a nice feathered edge, and isn't perfectly a hard black and white, so blends with it's surroundings nice and smoothly. Perfect for what you're about to do.

Now, with your brush selected, choose black from your color swapper (when you're in an alpha mask, your color swapper will always default black and white, but you can change it to shades of grey. Also, Hit X to switch between the two), and start painting along your seams. Play with the size of the brush to work in finer details if you need to. Basically, just start painting, and you'll immediately notice it blending in with it's surroundings. Paint the seams, paint in the surroundings so it all matches up without any jarring terminations, and flip between black and white to bring out any details you might want to add from the layer beneath. In about 30-45 seconds, you will have a nice, tileable dirt texture.

Literally and quite simply as easy as that.

Here's my finished product. Notice I didn't stick to just the seams. I blended in some of the surroundings, too.

Now collapse layer 1 to layer 0, use the offset filter again, and look for any tiling issues that might've arisen from your initial go. If everything looks good, then a new dirt texture is born.

...and a link to my .psd file in case you want to check out what I've done

There are still a few problems with this particular texture. Namely that it's obviously tileable, even within the same single texture. Throw in a few iterations within a game engine, and you'll really notice the repetition. This is just a quick and dirty example, though, good for the sake of this tutorial. You'll obviously want to spend some extra time on your textures. The good news is that you could use this exact same technique to fix up any problem you have. You can even go in and blend other textures together on different layers to achieve just about any result you want. Hence the reason why it's your new best friend.

And thus ends Part 1. Your intro to tiling using Alpha Mask Sublayers (insert fanfare clip here). If I messed anything up, you have any questions, or you have any suggestions to add, feel free to comment below.

Part 2 will cover color tweaking, and detail sharpening.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Renzatic]

               And now...Tutorial 2. This one I copy/pasted from the original PM to Dude McAskedMeStuff. But you can all pretend I'm referring directly to you. Help build some rapport.

Also the texture I'm using is one of his first attempts at tiling. He's since released it into the public domain, so it can be used for my tut here.

Color Tweaks, Adjustment Layers, and bringing out details using (what I call) a High Pass Overlay.

First, the verymost basic tweaks you will do to all your textures: levels.

The best way to explain levels is to say that it's a way to optimize the colors in your textures. When you first fire it up, you'll have a graph showing where your texture is strongest, and where it goes weak. I'll use your cracked dirt texture as an example here. It has a narrow range of strong colors, and alot of empty color space dragging down the...er...vividity of your texture. If you go to image/adjustments/levels, you'll get this graph here...



See those 3 little arrows along the bottom? That's what you use to determine the range used by your texture. The leftmost one tends towards black and bold the farther right you drag it, the rightmost tends towards white when you drag it left. The centermost arrow allows you to tweak the base color lighter or darker within the range of the other two pointers. Play with it a bit, and you'll see what I mean. The end result is your colors will pop out. Anything that looked sorta neutral colored will tend towards more boldness. Like your dirt texture is sort of a paleish brown. It'll be a nice, vibrant baked earth red when you adjust your sliders to narrow on the higher ranges. Such as...



All other colors will pop as well, giving it more contrast, and will look better overall. Game engines in general seem to be able to do more with textures that are vibrant and contrasty, as opposed to pale and neutral. This is a good example of the difference a simple level application can make to a texture...

Here

Much better, right? But what if you like the vibrancy, but still preferred the older, browner color of the original? We'll get to that later. For now, lets take what you learned about levels, and apply them to application layers.

Okay, first off, what's an application layer? Well, when you use levels from the image/adjustment menu, it's a one-time, permanent application. If you discover you want to go back and change it later on, like after you've made another 50 changes to your texture, you'll see it's no longer in your history menu. You're stuck with what you got. An application layer lets you make that change and apply it as...well...an ever-editable layer. It'll level off every layer below it, and will always be there to tweak, change, or even delete at a later point. It's yet another example of that nondestructive editing thing I was talking about earlier.

So how do you apply it? Easy. From your menu at the top, go to layer/new adjustment layer, and select which one you want to use*. You've got a ton to choose from, but we'll choose levels since it's our most recent subject. You'll get a new layer, "level 1"

here

*(addendum. For anyone using CS4 and above, you now have a new box with an adjustments tab on it situated just above the layers tab. Everyone else has to go to the dropdown menu)

All of your adjustment layers will have an alpha mask applied to them right out the gate. I guess it's so it'll tempt you to do cool stuff like this...

Here.

...yup. If you don't want something leveled off, you can just mask it out. Handy. As. Aw. Hell. Naw.

But what if you start adding in details culled from other textures, and you find you want to level it out using an adjustment layer without affecting the layers below it? That's an easy answer, too. I'll go ahead and add a plank board in on top of your dirt texture. I'll mask it in, add a layer effect drop shadow to blend it into the scene, then add a level adjustment layer above it.

Hmmm...

Well, that leveled out the board, but it screws up the color of the dirt. So, what do you do? Well, just hold down the alt key, and click between your plank and the adjustment layer. When you see your cursor turn into what looks like two little dark circles stacked on top of each other, then left-click, which'll offset your second level layer, and show a little downpointing arrow along the left side of the tab. You've now made your first clipping mask, and that level layer is now applied exclusively to the plank layer, and won't affect anything else.

BRILLIANT!

(Little addendum here. This handy trick is useful for situations far beyond adjustment layers. Like you want to add detail on some certain thing, but nothing else. You can just clip it to your intended layer, and there you go. I greatly suggest experimenting with it)

And thus, your primer on adjustment layers.

We've still got more to do, though. Like remember when you got all gripey, and complained that you thought the dirt was a little too red? No problem. We can use a multitude of approaches to fix that. Since we're already on the topic of adjustment layers, lets throw a hue and saturation one into the mix. Go back to layer/new adjustment layer, and throw in the hue and saturation above your dirt texture, but below the level layer. When you click on it, you'll find that it lives up to it's name, allowing you to adjust...wait for it...hue, saturation, and lightness. Don't play with lightness too much. It has a tendency to wash out details. Overall brightness is better adjusted in your levels.

...so brown

So now that you've got a more browish patch of dirt, you're finding that it isn't quite as vivid as was before. Oh well, you can fix that no problem. Just go back up to your level adjustment layer, and play with the middle slider until it looks good to you.

...and here you go

Wow. Those adjustment layers really are about damn handy, aren't they? Tweakable at any time, and all without making any permanent changes to your base texture.

Like I said before, this is only one method you can use to change texture coloring. This particular technique is the one I tend to use the most, though, so I figured it'd be best to focus on it first and foremost.

But say you want to bring out and sharpen up your overall details. Make them pop a little more. You have two options to do this.

1. Sharpen. Ehh. It's destructive, and doesn't always look all that good.

or...

2. High Pass Overlays

So, an explanation. When you've gone down to your offset filter, you probably saw high pass in there amongst all the other filters...and probably didn't pay much attention to it. That's a shame, because the high pass filter has a multitude of uses. Basically what it does is tries to normalize the colors on a texture by bleeding out the contrast. It does this by making everything tend towards this sorta chromatic looking bluish-grey color. You can adjust it's strength. High up only makes subtle changes, lower just makes the texture look flat out weird. It's a hard to thing to explain. You'll see what I mean when you play around with it.

What it's good for by itself is taking details that stand out, and normalizes them to their surroundings. It's rarely every a one hit fix-all. You'll have to use your masks and everything to really get the most out of it. But it is useful.

We're gonna be using it for another little trick. Bringing out details.

To do this, make a copy of your base texture, and place it just above it. Go to your layer filters dropdown, and choose overlay.

Whoa. Holy crap! That looks kinda neat.

Yeah, the effect of doing this is sorta similar to leveling out your texture. I don't use this much, because you don't have as much control over the end results. Sometimes though, you get something cool, which you can use if you feel like it. But we're gonna be doing a little something more.

With your new overlayed layer selected, go to filters/other/highpass. You'll immediately notice the difference. The blacks and whites are being overlaid with the little details, and the slight gaussian-like blurring is popping them out, defining edges, giving everything a little more crispness. You generally want to stay along the far left side of the slider, only adding just enough definition. Anything more starts looking a little garish. For the sake of example, though, I'm gonna go completely against instructions, and jump the radius up a bit more to show it off.

Here.

And there you go. A colored up, brighter, more defined texture. I went ahead and tweaked it out a bit to taste. Here's a nice before and after shot to show it all off (downsized slightly)



...and since I'm pretty sure you'll want the source .psd to play with, I'll go ahead and post it up here.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Renzatic]

               This is a preprimer for the brick wall tutorial. A semi-indepth explanation on the useful tools in the toolbar.

The Toolbar Explained   


edit: color selection tols?

Now you'll notice that some of the tools have a little black notch along the bottom right of the icon. That means there are multiple subtools under this selection. You access them by rightclicking. I'll go through each one of them one by one.

1- The Move Tool

Pretty Self Explanatory. With nothing selected, it'll move whatever you have in a selected layer. If you marquee select something, it'll move that. Yeah, I know. No crap. But hey, I said I was going indepth here.

You can also do precise moves using your arrow keys. Hitting one will move it one pixel in the selected direction. Holding down shift and the arrow keys speeds it up, jumping about 5-10 pixels per step.

2 - Marquee Selection Tools

Rightclicking gives you 4 subtools. Rectangular, Elliptical, Horizontal Row, Vertical Row. These are all pretty self evident here. Playing with them for 5 seconds will give you a better idea of what they do than any wordy explanation I can give.

But there are some handy tricks that aren't very obvious, such as being able to tailor your selection. So, breakdown time.

Without an active marquee up, holding down alt will grow out a uniform selection from the middle of your mouse pointer. Not too handy with the rectangle, but almost necessary with the elliptical marquee.

With an active marquee up, holding down shift while you draw out another marquee adds to the selection, and alt subtracts from it. This is good for selecting something difficult, or making weird shapes to fill in like this...



So handy! Also, you can grow, shrink, feather, or invert selections by going to the select dropdown menu at the top of the PS window. You have quite a few tools available to fine tune your marquee selections...and you'll use em.

Oh, and holding down alt while a marquee tool is active temporarly activates the move tool, so you don't have to switch back and forth constantly.

3- Lasso Tools

Yet another selection tool, but more freeform than the marquees. Lasso lets you draw a selection, polygonal lets you block one in one point at a time for more exacting selections, and magnetic tries to follow shapes and patterns.

FYI, the magnetic lasso is annoying as hell to use. You have to draw along your intended selection sllllooooowwwwly for it to align to your intended target. But what if you sneeze? TOO BAD! You're screwed. Start over again from the beginning. Hope you got a steady hand. Don't use it unless you hate yourself, or really love tedious BS.

4 - Quick Selection Tools

The much ballyhooed magic wand, and the namesake quick selection tool. Weirdly enough, I've never much used the quick selection tool, but the magic wand is handy for any number of situations. Want to select a range of colors across your texture? Want to grab the white space surrounding a tree limb so you can cut it out? With a few tweaks to sensitivity, you can use the magic wand to do just that.

….though you do have to really fine tweak the settings to get it exact. Like say you want to select a leaf to use as an alpha mask. Unless your source is a lossless file type, it's sometimes better just to paint it out by hand, as the magic wand can and will pick up jpeg artifacts.

5 - Crop and Slice Tools

Another self explanatory set of tools. They're useful for some things, I guess. Mostly, I just marquee and ctrl+x or c and v to copy and paste.

6 - Color Selection Tools

I should've called this category the Miscellaneous Stuff Tools. The one you'll use the most here is the eyedropper tool, which lets you grab a color from your picture and applies it to the color switcher for later use. As for the other tools?

Color Sample Tool – for those moments when you absolutely need to know the exact RGB specifications of the targetted color. There's probably more to this tool than I realize, but for now, it seems more a tool for the anal retentive among us.

Ruler Tool – Measures stuff. How many pixels wide is this? ...oh.

Note Tools – lets you write love letters to yourself so you can find them later and cheer yourself up.

7 - Quick Fix Tools

For when you need something fixed quickly.

Spot Healing Brush Tool – Lets you paint over a section of your picture, and blends it in with the surrounding pixels. Good for blending when used in small doses.

Healing Brush Tool – Like the spot healing brush mixed with the clone tool. You alt-click to define a point elsewhere on your picture, then paint somewhere else. It'll take that point of reference, and blend it with the underlying area of your picture. It's useful for some things, I guess. Truthfully, I rarely ever use any of the tools here.

Patch Tool – Does this neat looking thing that I can find absolutely no use for. Sort of like a lasso selection mixed with the healing brush tools.

Red Eye Tool – Just like Visine. It gets the red out.

8 - Drawing Tools

Brush Tool – Wot you paint with.

Pencil Tool – Almost exactly like the brush tool, but it seems...I dunno...more exact somehow.

(interesting little aside on the brush and pencil. If you want to paint a straight vertical or horizontal line, hold down shift, and start painting. As long as you hold down shift, you won't be able to paint in any other direction. Alternately, you can hold down shift, click a dot on one point, and click in another, and PS will draw a line directly to the second dot.

Color Replacement Tool – Normalizes the color of your picture to whatever color is selected in your color swapper. Like say you have a blue section you want to paint red, but still keep your shading, and variation of colors. You'll use this tool to do just that. I honestly don't think I've never found a use for this tool. Your mileage may vary, though.

Mixer Brush Tool – Takes the color on your switcher, and blurbs it in with the pixels you're painting on. Sorta like painting with wet oils. Good for smearing stuff.

9 – Stamp Tools

Clone Tool – Alt-click to select a point of reference, and lets you paint that reference elsewhere on your picture. A very very very VERY handy tool for texturing. Use it with a soft brush, and you can blend and add variance to a lot of stuff.

Pattern Tool – Lets you select a pattern from the pattern palette, then paint it in. Good for something, I guess. I never use it.

10 – History Brushes

History Brush – Say you did a lot of work in a specific area, but you don't like one specific change in that specific area. Use the History Brush to paint in that specific area to go back to earlier changes without affecting all your changes. If you've ever seen a photo that's mostly in black and white, but has a color subject, this is the tool they used to achieve that effect. Now you know.

Art History Brush – Same as History, but I believe only applied to changes made with brushes, pencil, and maybe the paintbucket. I don't think I've ever used this tool even a single time, so I dunno exactly what it does.

11 – Eraser Tools

Eraser Tool – Pretty self explanatory. Erases what you paint over, and leaves a trail of whatever your subcolor is on your color switcher.

Background Eraser – Same as the eraser, but it cuts through the image, and leaves a swatch down to the  layer below.

Magic Eraser Tool – Like the eraser mixed with the magic wand. If you need to delete large swaths of colors, then this is your tool.

12 – Paintbucket/Gradient

Paintbucket – Everyone knows what this is. Dumps color all over your picture. Per pixel if you've got the tolerace set tight, or whole areas if it's loose.

Gradient Tool – This tool is easy to understand, hard to explain. You select a gradient pattern, and draw out a line of whatever length. PS will apply the gradient to the length of the line you drew. Good for painting some shadows, or adding curvature to a flat object.

13 – Sharpen/Blur/Smudge

Sharpen – Like applying the sharpen filter to whereever you paint. The more you paint, the more you sharpen. Good for bringing out details and highlights on specific areas. Use in moderation.

Blur – Like applying the blur filter to whever you paint. The more you paint, the more you blur. Good for blending harsh edges together. As with sharpen, you want to use this in moderation.

Smudge – Takes the pixels whereever you paint, and pushes them into each other. Think of it as sorta like pushing your finger through a wet painting.

14 – Dodge/Burn/Sponge

Dodge – Whitens where you paint. Why they call it dodge, I have no idea. Good for painting highlights directly on your picture

Burn – Opposite of dodge. Darkens where you paint. Good for painting shadows.

Sponge -  Kinda sucks the color out of the pixels you paint. Kinda. Hard to explain.

15 – Pen Tools

Think of these as a small selection of vector tools from Adobe Illustrator. All of these are good for drawing in detail frames, or defining a mask to make fine selections. I only use these on rare occasion.

Pen Tool – Lets you define edges with Bezier Curves.

Freeform Pen Tool – Same as the Pen Tool, but you don't draw point to point. You just draw, and it makes a vector.

Add Anchor Point – For the Pen Tool. If you need another curve in there, use this

Subtract Anchor Point – Deletes an anchor point if you don't need it.

Convert Point Tool  - As far as I can tell, it lets you reedit an anchor from scratch.

16 – Text Tools

I ain't gonna go indepth with these. You need to type words on your texture? Use your text tools.

17 - ...something

Well, after playing around with my pen tools, I figured out what these tools are. They let you select specfic stuff on your vector drawings. Wow, I learned something new! '>

18 – Marquee Fills

MS Paint in Photoshop. You get a bunch of shapes, you draw them, and they either make a line drawing of varying thickness, or a solid shape. Great for defining basic shapes on a future texture map.

19 – Grab/Rotate Canvas

Grab is good for scrolling through your picture when you're zoomed in. It's the default left-click application when you're using a pen tablet. Rotate Canvas lets you...yeah, rotate your canvas around. If you find yourself wanting to paint something, but find it more comfortable to paint in a certain direction, then use this to...yeah, rotate your canvas around.

20 – Zoom

I don't need to explain this. But for the sake of completion, I'll go ahead and do it.

It lets you zoom your picture in and out.

There.
               
               

               

                     Modifié par Renzatic, 16 octobre 2011 - 05:56 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_Renzatic]

               The Brick Wall Tutorial

I'm gonna be taking a few extra unnecessary steps in this tutorial. Basically to show you some neat tricks. This'll make some steps a little more complicated than they should be, but it'll help you learn a few extra tricks, and fix a few mistakes that can arise because you pushed something off the canvas. You'll see what I mean below.

Okay. Lets get this started! Go to file/new, and make a 1024x1024 canvas with a white background. Doubleclick your background to make it Layer 0, and add two layers above it. You're gonna do absolutely nothing with Layer 0. It's nothing more than your white background. Layer 1 will be your horizontal lines, and layer 2 will be your vertical. At first glance, this might seem like I'm going a little overboard, considering you're not going to be doing much other than drawing out a glorified grid. There's a reason for that. Say you just finished up, and find you want to move some of your future bricks around. Instead of having to erase lines and redraw them elsewhere, you can just marquee select a vertical line, and nudge it into a new position. That's obviously a helluva lot faster, and considerably more convenient.

Now lets get to making our alpha mask. Select Layer 1, rightclick on the brush tool, and select the pencil tool. From the brush selection menu, find the size slider, and set it to 5px. Yeah, it's kinda thin. The reason we're making it so thin is because we're gonna eventually rough up the edges. For this tutorial, I don't want to have any huge gaps between the bricks.

So with your pencil tool set up and activated, pick where you want your first horizontal line to be, hold shift, and drag right. This locks down any excess mouse movements. You can only draw a line on the Y axis. When you're done, hold down shift, and go to the next line.

Wait...what's this?



The fuuhhhh? This is a nice feature/bug with Photoshop. It existed in CS3, and it's still there in CS5. For some reason, when you're doing a shift-click draw, and you move off the canvas, PS still considers it active for some incredibly ****** reason, even if you've already release the shift key and pressed it again. It'll will draw a line from the last point drawn, to the first point on the new line you're starting. If it happens (and it will), then hit ctrl+z to undo it, and start the line again. Annoying as hell, but not too difficult to fix.

With that out of the way, go ahead and start your horizontal lines. Space them out as far apart as you want. For the top and bottom border lines, do a marquee select around one, and move it up to the top by selecting the move tool, holding shift, and pressing the up arrow. It's 5 pixels thick, so when you get it aligned to the edge, hit up 3 times sans shift to push it beyond the canvas 3 pixels. Do the same for the bottommost line, but only push it in 2px. That way it's uniform in size with the rest of the lines. When you tile it, it won't be thicker than the rest. Once you're done, collapse your two new layers back into the original by hitting ctrl+e.

If you find one or two of your lines don't quite go edge to edge, don't worry about painting over it. Just hit ctrl+t to activate your free transform tool (I'm gonna be getting heavily into all your transforms in another tutorial), and you'll see a bounding box with 4 squares in the center of each line. Just select the box on the left, drag it past the edge of your canvas. Do the same for the right if you need to.

One little thing you need to keep in mind is that just because you moved your lines off the canvas doesn't mean that those extra edges are now gone. They're still sitting there, waiting to screw up your eventual offset. I'll add in an extra step later to show you how to fix that.

Alright. Now on to the horizontal lines. Select Layer 2, activate your pencil tool, hit shift, and drag down. Lets do one line that goes completely top to bottom though. This will be our brick edges that'll sit flush with the left and right sides of the texture. Take the original, select the move tool, and hit shift-left arrow to move til it's flush the edge, use the arrow keys by themselves to fine tune it. Once it's flush, hit the left arrow three times to push it in three pixels. Do the same for the right, but this time only push it beyond the canvas two pixels.

Once that's done, activate your marquee tool, and drag it across the second row of bricks. We want it to stagger, so every other row will have the flush bricks on them. Sorta like this....



You can either shift select each row like I did, or go through them and delete them one at a time. If you need to fine tune your select a bit, then hold alt and drag the marquee out to shave a few pixels off your selection. Once you're done, your results should look like this...



Now, just start drawing lines between horizontal lines to make your bricks. You can make them uniform, or stagger them off a bit. I'm gonna stagger mine, since I want a rough, uneven wall.

Try to keep in mind any patterns that might arise. Like don't put too many small bricks to one side, or group them in the center. Try to keep it sorta generic.

If you really want to make life easy on you, then just draw one line, draw a marquee around it, copy it to a new layer, and use your move tool in conjunction with your arrow keys to move it into place. When you're done placing one, draw another marquee, copy/paste it into yet another new layer, and do the same. When you're done with one full row, collapse them down onto Layer 2, and repeat the process for the next row.

Alternately, you can just draw them all out. Or you can constantly position them and hit ctrl+v to paste another one into the texture when you want another one. Pasting them in like that places them in a random position on your canvas, but it's arguably the quickest way to do this. Once you get a row done, then collapse all your layers back to Layer 2 to keep things from getting too confusing. If you find your lines are a little too short, then collapse a single row to Layer 3, and use ctrl+t to stretch it to fit.

Try all these methods out to see which you prefer. If you're drawing them out and get the cross connecting lines, then do the same as you did before. Ctrl+z to undo, and redraw again.

This is my finished wall mask. As you can see, I crowded the bricks in a little more closely this go round.



Once you're satisified with the results, then collapse all the layers together down to Layer 0, draw a marquee around the entire thing, hit ctrl+c to copy, and ctrl+v to paste it into a new layer. Now you're probably wondering why the hell I did that. Seems like a huge waste of time, right? Well, remember when I said that just because you drag something off beyond the edges of the canvas doesn't mean it's gone? This is the reason why I did that. Due to that first transform you did earlier, you probably have your horizontal lines stretched off the edge of the canvas. That'll mess up your offset a bit. By marquee selecting the canvas, and copying it to a new layer, you're copying only what you see. Everything else off the edge has been left in the layer below it.

Confusing? Eh...maybe a little bit at first. Stuff like this will become second nature once you get a little more used to Photoshop, though.

So now that you've copy pasted it, offset it by 512 on X and Y to see if it looks okay. If it does, run the offset tool again to set it back to normal, delete layer 0, and rename Layer 1 to something like “Base Alpha” by doubleclicking on the layer title til it becomes editable.

Your end results should look something like...

This

Alright! Now we've got a plain, ugly grid!

...woohoo.

Now lets make it an alpha mask sublayer!

One thing you're gonna discover is that you can't paste anything directly into the alpha mask from the layers tab. You can merge other alpha masks together when you collpase them, but no pasting. None. So what do you if you made an alpha mask on a regular layer? Are you screwed? Did I just totally and completely waste your time?

...Arguably, yeah. But you're not screwed. I'm not that mean. You can, in fact, paste anything into a sublayer. You just have to do it in a stupid, roundabout way.

Do a Load Selection on your Base Alpha. You do this by holding control, and left-clicking on the picture in the layer. It'll draw a bounding box around the whole thing (get used to doing this, I'm gonna be using it a lot in this tutorial). Hit ctrl+c to copy it, make a new layer, apply a new mask, and go to the channels tab. See that channel at the very bottom labled “Layer 1 Mask”? That is, appropriately enough, your submask. This is what you're gonna be pasting your alpha into.

To do this, first activate the tab by clicking the little square here...



...paste your alpha base into the channel, then turn it off. If you don't, you'll always see this light red overlay marking the transparent areas of your texture. It's doubtful anyone will need that. When you go back to your layers tab, you'll see your Alpha Base sitting right where it should be.

It's roundabout and annoying, yes. But that's how you do it. I'm sure there's some very good reason for doing things this way, but hell if I know what they are. At least you now know how to do it.

Now that we've got that out of the way, lets get back to the fun stuff. I think it's about time we rough up our bricks!

Start out by filling your new alpha masked layer with any color you want. Preferrably something comfortable to look at, because you're gonna be staring at this screen for quite awhile. Once you've got your color, double-click on the label, and name it something easy to reference. I went with “Brick Base”. Now, disable your Base Alpha. It's only there for reference, or if you need to paste it into your alpha channel again because you severely screwed something up during the painting phase. After you do that, create a layer underneath Brick Base, and fill it with black. This is so you can have some contrast while you're painting, to see what you're doing. You'll more than likely be deleting it after you're done.

Now things get interesting. Activate your brush tool and pick a brush. Any brush. Preferrably something with a little bit of noise to it, but without much grey, so you have a somewhat clean transition. Now start painting on your alpha, and have a ball. Round out your corners, roughen up the edges, and go to town.

...like so

I rotated the canvas to 90 degrees counterclockwise, because I find it easier to paint up and down than I do left and right. If you find yourself wanting to do the same, then go to image/image rotation from the dropdown menu, and select whichever option you prefer.

Zoom in if you need to, hit X to switch between black and white to fill in or subtract details depending on taste, hold down shift if you find yourself wanting to paint in a straight line, use your ] [ bracket keys to resize your brush, and start to hack away. If you have some trouble reaching the lower bits, or the very edges, then use an offset filter. You're gonna want to use that to make sure it tiles anyway.

It's gonna be a little bit til you're done. So be patient, and keep at it until you're happy.

Also, this is one of those moments when it's really handy to have a tablet. If you find yourself enjoying this whole texturing thing, then go and buy yourself a Wacom Bamboo Fun. It'll set you back about $80 or so (USD), but it's worth the price of admission. It'll make your life so much easier.

Time passes. Seasons change. The years march on. You just spent anywhere between 1 to 3 hours of your life making fake rocks.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Renzatic]

               By this point, you should have whatever color you chose permanently burned into your retinas, and maybe even a cluster headache as an added bonus. That's the price you pay for dedication, people. You man up, and DEAL with it. Also, you should have an alpha that looks something like this...



Not too shabby. But say you want to do a little more. Maybe scale out a few of the rocks, or rotate them to give it more of an uneven look. That's no problem. It's easily done with load selections, subtract marquees, and the oh so powerful free transform tool. Here's what you do...

First, lets get the these bricks on their own layer. Rightclick on Brick Base, and you'll see the option “Duplicate Layer”. Do that, then make another layer right below it. Collapse your duplicate layer into that, and you'll have your bricks, nice and separated. Like this...



You wanna do this anyway because, from here on out, your brick base is your safety net/quick selection mask. If you mess anything up, you'll always have your original to go back to.

Now, lets select your brick.

First, hold down ctrl, and click your alpha sub. You should get something like this...



Notice how it selects your bricks perfectly? That's because, as far as Photoshop is concerned, a black mask on an alpha doesn't exist. It'll ignore the black, and select everything else. Very handy. You'll be using this quite a bit.

Now, pick which brick you want to scale and/or rotate. Me? I'm gonna startoff by picking one in the middle right of the texture. Holding down alt, use your marquee rectangle to deselect everything surrounding your intended brick.





...like magic.

Alright, now that you've got your brick selected, hit ctrl+t. You'll see something the same transform box you saw before. But this time, I'm gonna explain how to use it in detail, instead of leaving you hanging like I did earlier.



See those boxes? They're your manipulation points. Hovering the mouse over one of these points will change the cursor to show you which direction you can scale the selected object in. If it's pointing up and down, you can stretch it up and down, and ect. Grabbing it from a corner and holding down shift while manipulating it will force the object to scale ratio correct (in other words, it scales linear without distorting). Moving the mouse cursor farther away from the selected object changes it to the rotate cursor. You can use this for very obviously rotating the object around. Grabbing the object inside the box allows you to move it around and reposition it, and you can nudge it with the arrow keys, much like the move tool. This is a handy little thing, and you will use it quite a bit.

What I want to do is rotate my brick a little ways to break up some of the monotony. I end up with this...




Alternately, I could've magic wanded the empty spaces in the new brick layer, and inverted my selection by going to select/invert selection in the dropdown menu, and gone on as usual with subtracting selections with the marquee.

Or even easier, I could've just drawn a marquee around it, and started editing it. Since there's no pixel data around it, the marquee tool will conform to the nearest group of pixels inside the selection when you go to move or edit it.

I figured I'd do things the more indepth way to show you all some of the ways you can select items in your texture. From here on out, I'm gonna do the latter most, and drag a rectangle around anything I want to change. I'll go in, do add and subtract to finetune my selection, and transform like a mofo. If I accidentally catch any extra edges on another brick, and move it, I'll probably just use the eraser tool to rub them out.

After about 5 minutes, this is my results....

We've got ourselves a rough brick wall, ladies and gentlemen.

...and a link to the .psd file
               
               

               

                     Modifié par Renzatic, 16 octobre 2011 - 06:02 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_Renzatic]

               One little tidbit I should've added in the last section would've been to offset your alpha mask, and rotate/scale your bricks along the edges to maintain uniformity across the entire texture.

So here we are. Our bricks are all knocked out of alignment and roughed up even more so, and things are looking nice and haphazard. Before we get into anything else though, lets see how it tiles.

Since our brick wall is currently nothing more than simple shapes, now would be the best time to see if there are any unaligned edges or other little kinks in the texture that need fixing. Any problem you find now can be fixed with a couple of brush strokes.

To do this, I'm gonna show you all a neat trick you'll probably find yourself using on occasion. Normally, if you want to test tile your texture, you'll save it out to a .jpg or .tga file, open it, make a new document that's double the XY res of your base texture, do a marquee select and copy of your texture, and paste it in 2x2 into the new document. What I'm about to show you allows you to skip a couple of steps, and make your life that much easier.

So you've got your current layer stack. Open it up so you've got your bricks overlayed on a black background. Pretty much like most of the shots I've posted in the previous tutorial. Once you've got that set up, rightclick in an empty area in any one of your layer tabs. At the very bottom of the popup menu, you'll see “flatten image”



Select that, and you'll see a little popup box appear asking you to discard hidden layers. Hit OK, and you'll see your layer stack has now crunched down to one background layer. Drag a marquee around it, hit ctrl+c to copy it, then go to the history tab, and undo the flatten by selecting the action just prior to the flatten command

Now, with your texture stored on your clipboard, open a new document, and make it 2048x2048. Hit ctrl+v to paste, align it to one of your corners, and do it 3 more times. And you've got it. A nice preview of your tiled texture.



It turns out mine tiles pretty much alright. No immediately noticeable patterns. The only thing I don't like is that one little split brick aligned to the middle of my vertical seam. To fix that, I'll just offset, and paint in some blue on my edited brick layer.

...but what if you want to cover it back to an alpha map and edit it there? That's easy. Just ctrl+click the picture in your layer tab to get a nice, specific marquee selection of all your bricks, and hit the add layer mask button. It'll take your selection, and convert it to an alpha. Then you can just go back and fill the image with a single color to get back to standard with our as-usual alpha layers.

I ended up doing this AND keeping my standalone selection layer. So now I have my old Brick Base alpha, a new alpha labeled Bricks Edited, and my standalone floating bricks. Seems a little redundant, right? Well...it is. But I always like having my alphas handy for those just in case moments. Plus you can use either one of those alphas again for a variety of other projects later.  Keeping them around is a good habit to get into.

For reference, here's my current layer stack



...now that we've got all this boring checking and cleaning up out of the way, lets get down to the fun stuff. '>

We're gonna start this off by making shadows to round out our bricks.

But first, a disclaimer.

There are multiple ways to make shadows. None of them are a one size fits all solution. What I'm about to show you below obviously won't work in all situations, and will sometimes require you to do different things with the same technique to compensate for the color of the texture you're working with. It's all about experimenting, seeing what works, and what doesn't. That said, the technique I'm about to show you is a good foundation for making shadows, and even work as a good foundation for a heightmap, and thus a normalmap, so you'll be armed with at least a little bit of knowledge to work off of when you finally launch off on your own texture making endeavors.

Okay, enough disclaimerage. It's time to get down to business. '>

Lets start this off by drawing a marquee around our Bricks Edited alpha, and pasting it above our separated bricks layer 4 times. These will be your shadow layer foundations. Go ahead and hide the top three layers for now.



With your first copy selected, go to filter/blur/gaussian blur, and give it a blur radius of about 4.5. Go to your layer effects dropdown menu and select multiply (which, by the way, is pretty much the main go-to effect for adding in shadows). Now, ctrl+click your Bricks Edited alpha mask to marquee your bricks, go to select/inverse, select your bottommost shadow layer, and delete the blurring around the bricks (we're gonna worry about the mortar later). You should have a brick with a nice little shadowed lip, like so...



If you want more squared bricks, then you could say we're pretty much done. You could use what we're about to do, but with much smaller gaussian blur steps to draw out and strengthen the edges so they show up against your future texturing. But we're going for rounded bricks in this tutorial, which'll require me to go a little more extreme.

Now lets go to shadow stage two. Unhide your second shadow later, and do the same thing. But this time, lets use a gaussian radius of 7.0. Apply the multiply effect, and it out.

By this point, you should see what we're doing here. With each gaussian layer, we're defining the slope of the edge of our brick, and its corresponding gradient shadow. We have our steep angled edge on the bottom layer, and we've just made our first shallower edge on the next. The ones above it will be even more shallow, and thus use a higher gaussian radius.

To use a visual example, it's like we're doing this...



...where each color represents one of your shadow layers.

Now that I've done hopefully more than a halfassed job of explaining what's going on, lets finish this bastard up. Do your other two shadow layers exactly like the previous two, but with a higher radius on your gaussian blur. Lets go with 13 for your 3rd shadow layer, and 25 for your last. Your end results should look something like this...

here

...eh. It's alright. But alright just ain't good enough for my standards :crosses arms: Lets fix that.

First off, shadow layer 4 might be a little overkill. Lets get rid of it. In its place, lets duplicate shadow layer 3, set it to multiply, and lower the opacity a bit. That'll strengthen the shadows on the layer below it, and lowering the opacity will keep it from being too overbearing.

Looking better already? Yup. But it still needs more. Lets go to shadow layer 2 and lower the layer opacity there. Adjust to taste...and...yup. Even better than the better before. I still think the edges are a little too dark though. Well, okay then. Lower the opacity on shadow layer 1 by about 50%. Okay...



Now it looks a helluva lot better. You've got a nice gradient across most of the bricks, and it's not too overbearingly dark. It still needs a lot more work, but we're gonna save that for later,  For now, lets collapse all shadows down to a single layer using ctrl+e. I know this goes against my usual nondestructive philosophy of Photoshopping, but making a new shadow layer is easy now that you know how to do it, and we'll more than likely be editing it later anyway.

So now that you've got all your shadow layers into one image, lets do one more little step before we head to the next bit. Right click on your shadow layer, and duplicate it. Run the gaussian blur filter over the duplicate, set to around 7 radius or so, and add a multiply effect. Play with the opacity a bit, and strengthen up your shadow base. Just enough to make it stand out a little more, without being too strong. When you're happy, collapse it down yet again

We've finally got enough detail to finally get around to making our brick wall look like a brick wall, instead of deformed blue circus peanuts floating in the dead of space.

So lets hit up CGtextures! About damn time, right? '>

We're gonna pick three sources starting out. One for our stone base, and one for cracks and surface modulation on said stone base, and one for our grouting.

I usually get most of my bare stone materials from either rocks/smooth or concrete/bare, depending on what I'm working on. Since I want it to go for a more natural look, rocks/smooth would be the better choice here.

...I chose this for my base

For a cracked material...hmm...rocks/layered has a decent selection of cracked and uneven stone.

...this one looks good.

This is an old wall, so we want our mortar to be rough and pebbly. Concrete/Rough is a good category for that.

...this is perfect.

Go ahead and grab the medium sized textures, and lets get started.

This part is all familiar territory if you've already been through my previous tutorials. We're going to approach adding it to our brick wall a little differently though, so I can show you a couple of neat tricks.

For this, lets go ahead and open up an explorer window to whereever you saved your textures. With your window opened, hovering over Photoshop, take the file, and click-drag it into Photoshop.

Just like this

In CS3 and below, if you drag it into the grey space, it'll make a new nested window. In CS4 and above, it'll add it directly to the canvas as an unrasterized image, scaled aspect correct. I usually find this to be a much quicker way of adding in extra material to work with. I'll just keep a window open to my texture folder, instead of having to file/open/blah blah.

Now you've got your base wall texture into Photoshop, take the entire thing, and put it into it's own layer, above your floating bricks, but below your shadows. Hit ctrl+t, and scale it so that it fits the confines of your canvas. It'll snap to the edges, so aligning it is easy to do. And yeah, it'll distort a little bit, but since this particular texture doesn't have any standout details, you can get away with it. FYI, if you ever want to turn that snap off...and there will be situations when you do...then go to view from the dropdown menu, and uncheck snap.

(split PS instructions here. In CS3 or earlier, if it's in its own nested window, select the whole image with ctrl+a, ctrl+c to copy, and paste it into your wall texture. CS4-5, just line it up, hit ctrl+t to scale, then rightclick its layer tab, and hit rasterize image).
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Renzatic]

               From here on out, tile it up using the usual method, and add your usual levels and hue/saturation adjustment layers. If you find the shadows to be a little too dark, then adjust them using the opacity slider. Knocking it down to 90% should be enough to make it blend smoothly. Now, ctrl+click on your Bricks Edited alpha, invert your marquee by going to select/inverse, and delete the spaces between your bricks.

You should now have a texture that looks something like this

Do the same for your detail cracks layer. Make it tileable, delete the spaces between the bricks by ctrl-clicking your alpha, invert your selection, add your two standard adjustment layers, tweak those, and give it an “overlay” layer effect (though feel free to play with all the various effects to see what they do. You'll learn a bit, and might find one that ends up doing a blend effect you like better). Adjust the opacity to taste, and see what you think. Your texture should look something like this...



Go ahead and throw in another hue & saturation adjustment on top of all your textures, but just below your shadow layer. This way, you'll have access to yet another layer of fine tuning.

Next....the mortar. Remember way way way back, when I said that you'd end up deleting that black fill? Well, I changed my mind. We're gonna be using it, but only to darken up the spaces between the cracks, make it look more shadowed in, and deeper set.

We're gonna take some slightly different steps here, since I want to keep our pebbles nice and small. Take your texture, drop it in, but transform it so it's a much smaller texture. Use the shift-corner drag to keep it aspect correct. We're doing this so we'll have some nice, small pebbles. You won't have to spend too much time with this one, since the details are only barely seen. Instead, just run a quick high pass filter over it to even out the colors, and start lining them up. If you have too many jarring transitions, then do a couple of quick jabs with the clone tool. The only thing you want to be careful of is keeping all your bits and pieces inside the canvas. That way you won't mess up the offset tool if you ever need to use it. For me, it took about 6 tiles, and a couple of passes with the clone tool to make it look good.

Do your adjustment layers. Since it'll be pretty desaturated after your high pass filter, go ahead and click the colorize box to bring in some overall color to the thing. Your end results should look like this...



...not exactly what I'd call pretty. I'd say it's about time we add some shadows in between the bricks.

Once again, draw a marquee around your Bricks Edited alpha, and copy it just below your shadow layer. The process is almost exactly the same as we did before, except we'll invert the colors by going to image/adjustments/invert (or hit ctrl+I). Now, run the gaussian blur filter with a low radius, about 2-2.5 will do. Ctrol-click your alpha, and delete the bricks. Apply a multiply effect, and see how it looks. Hmm, not really noticeable. Lets duplicate our new shadow layer a couple of times, apply a small gaussian to each of them, and play with the opacity to see what we can get. We want it to look shadowed, but only just so it blends in naturally with the mortar between the bricks. Nothing too garish.



...still ugly, but we're getting there. I think the biggest problem is our mortar texture is way too bright, and looks like it's lit so it's almost flush with the bricks. We'll need to adjust some color settings.

Lets go down to our old black layer. Turn it on, and give it an opacity of about 70%. Ahhh. Much better. That, along with our new shadow layer, makes your bricks stand out much more nicely with the mortar. Go ahead and duplicate your new shadow layer one more time, play with the opacity a little more to strengthen it up a bit, and adjust the levels and colors on your mortar texture adjustments until you're happy with the results.



I do believe we have ourselves a nice brick wall. If you're happy with the results, go ahead and collapse your two shadow layers together.

But I think there's one more thing we can do before we call it a day on the bricks. Right now, it looks like all our bricks are about flush with each other. This is an old brick wall, and having some unevenness not only on length and width, but also depth will make it look that much more interesting, and add some nice variety.

This'll be incredibly easy to do. Start by making a new layer just below the shadows, and filling it with black. Make an alpha mask, and, once again, fill it with black. Set the layer to 50% opacity.

Now there's a couple of ways you can go through fill in your bricks. One would be to go to your floating brick layer, doing a marquee, do a quick nudge move so the marquee conforms to the brick itself, then paintbucket in the resulting selection on your newly formed recessed bricks layer with white. Doing will give you more exacting results, but will take forever to do. So instead of going through all that, we're just going to paint our recessed bricks in.

Find a soft edged circular brush, any one of the default PS brushes will do nicely here, and start painting away. Try to keep inside the brick, but don't fret too much if you accidentally overshoot an edge. It won't be that noticeable against the darker mortar background.

Try to keep an even spread throughout, don't forget your edges, and play with your opacity to make them darker or lighter to taste. You can even use shades of grey to get even more variance in there. Eventually, you'll get something like this...



Once that's done, lets go in for a final tweak, and apply a high pass overlay. Play with your shadow opacity, all the various levels and colors of your textures, deepen or lift your recessed bricks.

Once you're satisified with the results, flatten your image, copy the results, undo the flatten, and past the single texture at the very top of your layer stack. Set it to overlay, run a low radius high pass filter over it. If you think the results are too crisp, then adjust your opacity until it look up to your standards.

And the link to the .psd
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Renzatic]

               Now this last part is gonna be relatively short and sweet compared to the rest. The hard part has been done. From here on, it's all about touching up to taste, and adding some spice and variety to the mix. To start off, we're gonna tweak our shadows so all our bricks aren't perfectly even and rounded. They need to be roughed up a little bit.

To start off, lets unround some of our bricks. This is easy to do. Make an alpha submask on your shadow layer, and select a very soft round brush. Now, just paint out some of your shadowing.Try to keep some corners rounded, and flatten others on the same brick. Make it look uneven. The effect is very, very subtle (almost to the point it's barely noticeable), but it does help to break things up a bit.

Now lets get into something that stands out a little more. Make a new layer above your shadow layer, fill it with black, make an alpha, and fill it with black as well. Set the filter to multiply, and give it an opacity of about 55-70%. Next, select a brush with a good bit of transparency in it. Lots of soft greys, and transitions. From here, start painting white into your alpha mask, hitting x to go back through and soften some of your edges. Paint in your corners, little dips in the center of your bricks, soft indentations along the edges. Make the rocks even more rough and uneven, but keep it subtle, and play with your opacity a bit to see how it looks.

A before and after shot of my results.

Left is the old, and right is the edited results.

As you can see, my new shadowed bricks look a little more rounded and rough, without going too overboard. It might take you a bit to get the hang of, but keep play around with it until you're happy.

Okay. Now we've got this snazzy brick wall, what more needs to be done? Hmm...how about some moss growing between the cracks? That sounds cool.

This is yet another thing that won't be too terribly difficult to achieve. To start with, lets go to CGTextures and find ourselves a nice moss texture.

I'm gonna go with this one.

Do the usual tile job to it. Try to keep your details homogenous, so you don't have one patch of moss that looks totally different from the others (unless that's what you want). Now, when you're done tiling, go to image/image size from your dropdown menu, and resize it to 512x512. We're doing this so your moss...er...grains will be fine and to scale. When you've done that, copy your new moss texture 4 times into your texture.



Make an alpha submask, fill it with black, and start painting that stuff into your cracks. Don't worry about adjusting your colors and levels just yet. We'll do that when we're finished painting. Use a soft edged brush with a lot of feathering on the edge, and go to town.

….go ahead and add in a drop shadow to add some depth and roundness by doubleclicking on a grey space in your layer tab, and selecting, appropriately enough, drop shadows. The default settings should be good enough here, but play with the settings if you want to tweak to taste.

Mossin' it up

Eventually, you'll get to the point where you need to paint in your edges. Now you could go through all your layers one by one and offset them, but that'd be a huge pain in the ass. Instead, we're gonna use our flatten layer/copy trick. You know the routine by now, first hide your moss layer, then flatten your image, copy it, step back in your history to just before the flatten, and paste your new flattened bricks just below the moss layer. Offset it, and your moss, and begin painting away. Once you're done, delete the flattened image (or hide it, whichever you prefer), and offset your moss yet again.

Also, you can add in a drop shadow to make it look like the moss is situated more between the cracks if you want. In general, play around with your shadow effects to see what you like best.

Once you're done with your painting, add your usual adjustment layers, play with them until you get a nice color, and see how it looks. Also, I recommend tweaking your other adjustment layers a bit to try to match your new moss just a bit more. Once you're done, you should have a texture that looks like this...



...and lets see how it tiles...



Beautiful!

We're just about done, folk! There's only one more thing I want to cover.

Grunge Maps.

Grunge maps pretty much live up to their name. They're textures you'll throw into your layer stack to add in random noise and detail, or throw in a few more random fields of color. They can be pretty much any nasty, dirty texture. A grotty wall, a water stained piece of metal, a rusted pipe, an image consisting of nothing but random spots. They can be color, or black and white. They don't even necessarily have to tile, depending on how strong they are in your texture.

These are the two I used to finish off my brick wall.

This one...


...which I used to add in some random spots and splashes of color, and....

This one...


...which I used to differentiate color on my texture. As you can see, they're really just desaturated images I grabbed off of CGTextures, Imageafter, or any other number of texture sites. Adding them in is incredibly easy. Just take your intended grungemap, throw it in on top of your image, play with the layer filters and opacity until you get something cool looking, and you're done.

If you want to make your own grunge map that's more like the topmost texture, then here's what you do.

Find two textures. A rust texture, and a stainy one will work alright here. Like these two...

www.cgtextures.com/texview.php?id=41779
www.cgtextures.com/texview.php?id=3675

Make a new texture, add them both into your layer stack, then put a white background underneath them both. Then, take Rust0081, and gaussian blur it. Set the opacity to 60% or so. Then take Rust0155, go to image/adjustment/threshold. That'll make your top layer all spotty. Set it to the multiply filter, and there you have it...your first easy to do grungemap.



Pretty basic, even for a grungemap, but it's enough to give you a good idea on how to make your own.

edit: .psd file hurrrr
               
               

               

                     Modifié par Renzatic, 16 octobre 2011 - 07:15 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_Renzatic]

               By this point, you're probably noticing that the current results don't quite look like the example up above. Know why? Because I haven't done the totally optional, but occasionally very handy, last step. Making and applying a normalmap to a 2D texture.

Yeah. A good ole normalmap. They're not just for those smarmy NWN2 guys who think they're better than everyone else cuz they got a shiny new engine. Oh no. Even you can take advantage of them.

Remember when I mentioned that you could use the first steps of the gaussian blur shadows to make a heightmap, and then a normalmap? We're gonna do that now.

First, what you need to do is disable all of your detailing layers. Your moss, your brick texturing. All that good stuff. If your grungemaps are black and white, you can decide to leave those in. Play with the opacity on them a bit. They might add some nice variance to the end results.

Next, take your old floating bricks layer, and do a ctrl+left click select. Invert the selection, and fill your cracks in with black. If it looks too rough, you can go ahead and disable your second shadow layer. They're painted to look good on top of the textured bricks, so they might not work too well on your heightmap. Maybe even go in and disable the alpha mask on your first shadows layer. You want everything nice and smooth. Once you tweaked everything out a bit, you should have something that looks like this...



That's it, ladies and gents. A basic, bog standard heightmap, and the foundation for making normalmaps in Photoshop. Blacks are low, and whites are high. It's all fun stuff. You can even go in and use the same shadow painting techniques I covered earlier to paint in some dips, bobs, and dots. You just have to make sure that it's all smooth, and it matches the brick texture. Any sharp terminations, even ones you yourself barely notice, can cause weird things to a normalmap. So keep that in mind while you're doing your thing.

Converting it to a normalmap is either super easy, or a little indepth depending on what program you use. Me, I use Crazybump. It's about as simple as you can get. Open up your heightmap, play with the sliders, and you'll eventually get something you're happy with. Doing it inside of Photoshop is a little more complicated, as you'll see from this tutorial here (which also works in GIMP).

Whichever way you decide to go, you can end up with a texture that looks like this from that surprisingly easy to make heightmap. This is just the normal and height together without the diffuse, to show you exactly what you get without any distractions. Everything together looks like this...





Course this only helps if you're making stuff for NWN2, or maybe even if you decide to go all brave, and do some high end Unreal Engine 3 work. By this point, you're probably wondering how this helps you out.

....and I'd say "geez, you're impatient. Gimme a sec, and I'll show you".

So, you got this nice normalmap. It's looking all pretty and blue, and it ain't helping you none whatsoever. Lets fix that.

Okay, take your normal, and paste it in on top of your layer stack. Desaturate it, and either use an overlay or multiply filter. Play with your opacity, and apply a level adjustment to it to tweak to taste. There you go, a nice, more realistic, and generically lit brick wall.

But you can still do more. See, normalmaps use an RGB color wheel to determine the direction a baked surface normal is facing. Basically, this...



Now I'm not about to get into a detailed explanation of how normals work here. That's way, way, WAY beyond the scope of this tutorial (it involves math and stuff). But what it does mean for you is that you can edit certain color channels on your normalmap to achieve a lit-from-a-certain-direction look.

For instance, if you darken the red channel, it'll darken all the normals oriented towards the bottom left of the texture, giving you lit from the top right apperance. Lightening the red, and darkening the green will achieve the opposite effect. To do this easily, go to image/adjustments/black & white. This allows you to desaturate your image, and lets you lighten and darken colors across your texture according to their color channel. Open it up and play with it. You'll see exactly what I mean.

It's a little bit quicker than just painting your shadows in, and tends to look more realistic, since doing them by hand tends to give your texture a more painterly or cartoony look unless you spend tons of time with it.

I edited the red channel on mine just slightly, tweaked the levels to taste, and came up with what you saw above...



(special thanks to Judith over at the TTLG forums for helping me out with this part)

And here you are. You now have a hand made, nice and shiny brick wall. '>
               
               

               

                     Modifié par Renzatic, 18 octobre 2011 - 07:35 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_Renzatic]

               There you go, folks. Hope you all find it informative.

If I glossed over any details, or totally messed something up, then give me a reply and say so. Like I said way up above, any questions or comments are more than welcome.

Enjoy it. '>
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_OldTimeRadio]

               Nice tutorial!  I've gone and added a link to it in the Custom Content Tools thread.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_ShadowM]

               Added it to NWN1: Custom Content Tutorials list too
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Estelindis]

               Glorious!  Thank you very much for sharing your skill and insight.  :-)
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Renzatic]

               Thanks for the complements everyone! Greatly appreciated. '>

It looks like I'm gonna be bored this weekend, so I'm thinking about writing another tutorial. Maybe one showing how go from a high poly object inside of a 3D editing package to a texture. I dunno how useful that'd be for you all here though, considering I'd have to rely on the reader being comfortable with programs like Max, Lightwave, or Blender. I could only cover the generic techniques of HP modelling, since I can't go indepth on each platform.

But hey, I'm pretty open to the idea of doing anything texture tutorial related. If any of you have any requests, send them my way, and I'll see what I can do.