Tutorial: Tiling Photo Realistic Textures

[Ghogiel]

In an attempt to give some good advice on texture creation, specifically normal maps, which, if all you know about making them comes from the CSwiki, Well lets just say forget about simply hitting the nvidia normal map filter from now on. This is the kind of stuff I should have been told to know when I started trying to normal map.

However you will need to know what all the nobs and buttons in photoshop actually do. I think mostly knowing the basics and how to handle the selection tools will suffice here.

Everyone here who is concerned with textures and specifically normal maps, please download this referance PSD and give this post a read. This gives a good idea how I create normal maps from a bitmap image.

referance file-(this is a wip file btw, the difuse map needs tidying up on the tiling edges. so I wouldn't use this version for anything as it is)
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=GEQFYGS9

This is a tutorial for creating a tiling slate roof tile texture in photoshop CS2. The techniques I used in creating this texture can be used for just about any texture creation. Here is the finished texture on a chorrol house http://i25.photobucket.com/albums/c85/lego...ooftexture1.jpg
I'm rather proud of this texture.

Get a hold of a high resolution image. My orginal was 2660x1950 slate roof tile. It was kind of created as possibility of being used for the roof texture of the Silgrad Tower remake of the common imperial tile set, when it gets made. Having the textures before trying to UV helps me a lot.

I took a square marque tool and lined my selection up so the top and bottom edges aligned fairly well with the edges of the roof tiles. The more straight the photo and the tiles are, the easier this step will be.

Then its time to make it tile. I did my own hand made variation of the offset filter. To do this I marque selected about 1/12th of the image in from top left to about mid way down the bitmap. ctrl C and ctrl V to copy that selction and paste it into a new layer. Then I moved that layer to the far right. helps to have snap on. Then transform- flip horizontal. With the eraser set almost fully to soft and about 20 opacity. I blended that layer so it flows into the base layer. I had erased most of this new layer really only leaving a few pixels to make the seam invisible. The image I was doing this was at 1660x1660. I didn't shrink the doc to 1024 till very last.

I could cut a single roof tile in half and hand place one half on each side to create a non mirrored tiling effect. I could and may still do at this late stage.

I repeated this process, but from the bottom right to left. merged th layers and checked if it does tile nicely. with some minor tweaking the diffuse map should be done. Then make a new duplicate layer of the base map for safe keeping.

Height Mapping

Now here is the tedious part. I hand painted a height map of each of the tiles. These are faily essential for good normal mapping and a requesite for paralax mapping.

I used the polygonal lasso tool after finding it was getting me better results. After selecting each tile individually, using this set up http://i25.photobucket.com/albums/c85/lego...iontutorial.jpg (\o/ for the only pic in tutorial ) I then painted all those selections white. there is no need to be very exact, I went over the layer filling in gaps and softening edges with a soft white brush. I added a blending options outer glow to soften out some of my hard edges

In a new layer bellow that height map, I filled the whole thing just off black.

This part is me messing around with layering the height map over the diffuse map to create a nice balance. Look at the highly contrasted height map layers in the psd referance file. that was more or less the effect I was after. these
make excelent bitmap to normal map conversion. I use crazybump for its excelent low frequecy normal map details. The Nvidia plugin doesn't quite do it well enough for me. The only things I did for this stage was using copies of the height map as overlays on a version of the diffuse map. And a little bit of the brightness/contract and the blur filter.

to do that I flattened the image with those 2 layers( the white hieght map tiles and the plain almost black layer) visable, selected all, crtl C. then went back in the history to before I flattened the image. And crtl v in the new layer.

I hid everything except that new layer and the base diffuse map. Overlayed that new layer, maybe copy/paste another layer of it over again. Upping the contrast of the diffuse map. then flattened the image, and copy, went back in the history and crtl V. just experiment. till you have something that looks right. I made a number of variations and ended up using a couple that aren't in the psd document to make my normals.

Usually I would save out the finished height map(height map 1 in the psd doc.) to a png. then make a normal map with crazy bump. then paste it back into PS and use it as overlay layer in the normal map creation process. My PC is sick at the moment and can't even extract the silgradtower.7z with out rebooting :eek:, so I did all my normal map layers with the sucky nvidia plugin. Which is only good for noise layers imo. :yes:

Edit- tweaked the tiling on the diffuse map DL png here http://www.megaupload.com/?d=C9FFHD7B

Any questions, thoughts, further explainations?