Learn how to texture professionally rocks. The techniques shown can also be adopted to any other texturing tasks.

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What you need

A powerful UV Mapping program like UV Mapper Professional or even better Bodypaint 3D. And a powerful graphic editing program like Photoshop.

Content

1. Introduction

2. Analysis

3. UV Mapping

4. Texturing

1. Introduction

The goal of this tutorial is to give you some basics on how to achieve professional texture maps. To work on a texture like it’s a piece of art will show later in the game the effort – it’s worth the time.

My Photoshop software is in German. I hope you can orient yourself with the pictures anyway.

 

2. Analysis

I have made a stone arch mesh. Honestly, it’s looking very poor at the moment.

 

 

Throwing over a simple stone texture doesn’t help much. But it’s something we can start from.

 

 

For further texturing it’s important to think about the texture size. I guess for this mesh it’ll be something around 1024x1024 or even 1024x512.

3. UV Mapping

The UV map should not have any overlapping parts since I want to paint later on the map. For this purpose I map every single stone alone. Here’s an example of the left stone that isn’t really part of the arch. I assigned a cubic mapping for a start.

 

 

Now I connect these parts together to get as less seams as possible for the stone.

 

 

I do this procedure for every single stone of my object. Having done this I notice I might bring all the UV maps on a 1024x512 texture. And with some rotating it worked indeed!

 

 

 You may notice I have already the basic rock texture in the background and also assigned to my object so I can see possible texture stretching on my mesh and edit the UV map a little bit. It’s also important the different UV maps of the stone have approximately the same scale.

4. Texturing

At this stage I take a screenshot of the UV map with Print Screen to transfer it to Photoshop. With the Wand-Tool   (disable all the options and set tolerance to 0) I click on the black lines. Having selected them all, I invert the selection and hit Delete.

 

 

I load now the stone texture in the background.

 

 

I lock both the UV Map layer and the Stone layer.

Those recent steps have the purpose to be able to paint between those two layers.

 

 

As we’ve seen the stone arch only with the plain stone texture doesn’t look interesting at all. Now the creative part begins: ask yourself what could make your object more eye-catching. I decide for moss in the interstices of the stones.

I create a new layer, fill it with a tileable moss texture and I add a layer mask.

 

 

Having the layer mask selected, I press CTRL + I on my keyboard to invert the colour from white to black. Now none of the moss is visible at the moment.

 

 

I look now for a brush in Photoshop which represents the growing structure of moss best. I think the following is very good:

This one can be found under Photoshop’s standard brushes in the category Brushes for wet colours.

I choose white as colour and paint on the moss’ layer mask regarding the area I want to have the moss appearing. I work together with Bodypaint 3D to see on which edges/areas I have to paint on.

Doing this I also change the size of the brush for smaller details and a overall random look. I also change the colour to black to take a bit of the moss back where I have painted a bit too much of it. You might also want to paint a bit with grey on the mask to give a better blend of the moss with the stone.

(In the meantime I changed to Windows Vista. That’s why the windows look now slightly different.)

 

 

I’m not satisfied with it yet at all. It’s still looking way too clean and we really should give the moss more depth. For this I think a shadow layer beneath the moss layer would work well.

I create a new layer and set its mode to Multiply. I choose black as colour and a rather big round smooth brush. I set the brush opacity to about 5%-15%. Then I paint roughly there where the moss appears on the mesh. If you think the shadow is a bit too strong you can simply modify the layer’s opacity. I’ve set it afterwards to 60%.

 

 

That’s already better, isn’t it?

The game engine does shading our objects automatically. But for a more professional look I recommend to emphasize the shading also on the texture. Plus you can give the object additional shadings the game engine isn’t able to render.

Let’s think a bit further what we could shade here – a stone in nature receives rain and wind and is therefore washed out on the top. Edges are even more affected by this process. The bottom of a stone is rather dark and from the rain splashed with dirt. It’s very rough too.

We need to create a new layer. Preferably under the already existing Moss Shadow layer. We’re going to look at the moss later on. For now we concentrate on the stone. I fill the new layer with a neutral grey (128,128,128) and set its blend mode to Overlay. I also rename the layer to Shading to keep my layer window clear.

 

 

Now the next part it works like this: where we have washed out parts we paint with greys higher than RGB 128,128,128 up to white and for dirty rough parts with greys lower than RGB 128,128,128 down to black.

It’s not so relevant what for a brush you take here. But I thought it will look nice to have a brush with a pattern to create more structure on the stone with the shading layer. Press F5 on your keyboard to make the advanced brush settings pop up. Play there a bit until you think you have made yourself a good brush for what you want it to use.

 

 

Now paint intuitionally with dark and light greys regarding the UV Map where it belongs to. I’m going now to switch my shading layer to blend mode Normal so you can see what it actually looks like.

 

 

You see the whole thing is really just a scrawling but with blend mode Overlay, it becomes very interesting. I’ve hidden the UV Map for now. I think I don’t require it at the moment but I don’t delete it out of my Photoshop document.

 

 

I guess the moss needs now a little bit of retouching. It’s too bright in my opinion for the places it grows at.

Another thing I’m going to change is the order of the layers. Moving the Moss Shadow layer beneath the Shading layer gives a better depth to my texture.

 

Ok, back to the retouching of the moss. I create a new layer above the Moss layer and set its blend mode to Multiply. I give this layer the name Shadow as we’re also going to darken the corners some more. I paint with a big soft brush and a dark grey on the moss to make everything look united. For this layer you also might want to change the opacity if it’s too dark.

 

 

 

I think we’re done. Let’s see what this looks like ingame on our mesh.

 

Looks good, eh? I’ve also added some foliage and grass elements on another texture to make it look even more interesting.

I hope I showed you something new on how to improve your creations. By the way, shown above can also be applied to wood, metal, fabric etc. Always ask yourself what can tweak your texture even more.