William Willing

Wood Texture

Continuing the Game Assets in 3DS Max series of video tutorials, I created a wood texture.

Left: the texture from the video tutorial. Right: my texture. (The picture on the left is a screenshot of a video, which explains the low quality.)

Creating the grain required a fair bit of experimentation, since the Photoshop techniques shown in the video tutorial don't transfer well to Xara. To get the streaks of the grain, I created a rectangle with a fractal plasma fill. Then I pulled the vertical fill handle up as far as I could (while holding Shift, so the horizontal handle would stay in place).

When using a fractal fill, Xara basically gives you a choice between repeating patterns with high detail and a very pixelated fill without repetition. If you want a highly detailed texture without visible patterns, you need to use overlapping shapes. It's not ideal, but after a bit of practice, it gives decent results.

The Liquid Colors effect in Xara does pretty much the same thing as the Liquify filter in Photoshop. It's not as friendly to use as the Photoshop variant, but it gets the job done. It's just so cool that you have this kind of control over your fill in a vector tool.

One of the main benefits of using a vector program like Xara, is that it's easy to go back and change a few settings. This makes it really easy to experiment and to get a good feel for all the tools and options. After I applied the Liquid Colors effect, though, every change required a re-render of the effect, which took a couple of seconds each time. That's not nice if you want to shift colours around a bit. So, I named each colour in the texture and created a copy without the effect applied and then I locked the effect. Now I can change the colours and immediately see the effect in the copy. When I'm satisfied with the colours, I unlock the effect, and the original texture gets updated with the new colors. Works like a charm.

Download

• Download the 512 x 512 wood texture in JPEG-format (32 kB)
• Download the Xara-file for the wood texture (144 kB)

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Stone Texture

The next tutorial in Game Assets in 3DS Max is on making a stone texture. This one was a bit harder to convert to Xara than the video on creating a brick wall texture. I couldn't pick pixels from a bitmap of random noise, so instead I used layered planes of transparent fractal clouds. My first attempt wasn't all that successful.

Left: the stone texture I used as a reference. Right: my first attempt to recreate the texture.

The problem with fractal clouds (and plasma clouds) in Xara is that you can't really cover a large area with it at high dpi. Increasing the surface area lowers the dpi and I needed high granularity for the stone texture. Raising the dpi reduces the surface area, leading to a repeating pattern, which is undesirable in almost any texture.

I experimented a lot with various layers at different resolutions, but in the end the approach that worked best was giving each layer a high resolution. To get rid of the tiling, I moved and rotated each layer slightly until the pattern disappeared (mostly, anyway). The texture I used as an example had little pebbles all throughout the stone, which I simulated with a layer of transparent plasma clouds. These pebbles also helped to reduce the tiling.

Left: the stone texture I used as a reference. Right: the stone texture I ended up with.

The stone texture from the video has a different colour than the reference image I used. In Xara, you can specify colours as shades from other colours. This is what I did for all layers in my texture and it makes changing the colour of the texture as a whole a matter of seconds.

Left: the texture from the video tutorial. Right: my texture, colour-shifted and without pebbles. (The picture on the left is a screenshot of a video, which explains the low quality.)

Download

• Download the 2048 x 2048 stone texture in JPEG-format (0,99 MB)
• Download the Xara-file for the stone texture (52 kB)

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Brick Wall Texture

3D Buzz released a new video tutorial series recently called Game Assets in 3DS Max, Volume One: Modular Assets. I bought it and now I'm making my way through the videos.

The first tutorial explains how to draw your own brick wall texture in Photoshop. Since Photoshop is a bit expensive just for occasional hobby use, and as I'm a fervent opponent of illegal downloading, I tried to convert the techniques shown in the tutorial to Xara.

Left: the texture from the video tutorial. Right: my texture, created in Xara. (The picture on the left is a screenshot of a video, which explains the low quality.)

I'm pretty pleased with the result. The entire process was quite painless. It only took me about an hour to make the texture, including figuring out how to convert the Photoshop-techniques to Xara. My only gripe is that the edges of the bricks are too uniform. I used the diffuse filter and a light feathering to make the bricks a bit rougher, but I'll have to experiment a bit more to see if I can deform each brick slightly without having to do it one brick at a time.

Download

• Download the 2112 x 2112 brick wall texture in JPEG-format (619 kB)
• Download the Xara-file for the brick wall texture (57 kB)

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.