Tutorials for creating textures?

[TheJamsh]

I have Photoshop CS3 (and all the related programs), but NO idea how to use it. I mainly want it to create effects textures.

Anyone know where to start? Steeveeo is probably the person to ask here, but im a complete PS noob.

[Shadow Knight]

I can help you here, and it's conveniant for me to do so since I'm working on some weapons.
My weapon will be a kind of ion cannon and I need a custom texture for the bolt. I'll guide you through the process i took to make it so you can learn techniques, as opposed to how to make specific effects.

To start with, think about what you'll need it to look like. I want my bolt to look like a streak with a particle on the tip, so I'll make the particle. For this tutorial I'll be using gimp, although photoshop works in almost exactly the same way.

To start, make a blank image and fill it with black. Don't worry too much about the canvas size at the moment.



Next, I'm going to make a new layer and create a white circle straight in the middle of the image by using the circle select tool and filling it with white. This will be the glow around the effect later.



Using the same technique and on different layers, hiding the ones i'm not using at the time, I then proceeded to make some particles inside the glow, ending up looking like this.



Oh wow, when you look at the entire image you would see a solid white circle! Isn't that impressive? Now it's time to make it actually look like it's a particle. First things first, hide all the layers except the background and the first, large glow layer. Next, create a layer mask. I'm not sure how it's done in photoshop, since I mainly use gimp, but in gimp it's located in layer -> mask -> add layer mask. Make sure you have the big layer selected. If it asks you to initialise it, set it to full white.

Next, select the layer mask using the layers dialog, which is under the Dialogs menu or Windows -> dockable dialogs, depending on the version of gimp you're using. The mask should have a white box around it in the layers dialog when it's selected. Once that's done, use the gradiant tool to make a radial gradiant in the center of the screen with black as the background colour and white as the foreground.

Sweetness, it's already starting to look alright!



Now is a good time to save. Just save it as the project file .psp or .xcf. You may be wondering why I chose to do it with a mask instead of a straight gradiant. The answer is that using the mask, the transparency applies to everything on the layer, whether it's a white circle or a picture of a tank.

Let's do something with those other dots now.

Select the layer of the center dot and perform a gaussian blur on it, located under filters -> blurs -> Gaussian blur. Set the radius to about 48 - 48, on RLE.



You'll end up looking something like this.



We could perform the exact same operation on the other layer with the three dots if we're in a cheapskate mood. However, I'm not. Perform a gaussian blur, same settings but with about 32 instead of 48. Next, create a new layer and (I'm being GIMPy here) create a supernova on one of the dots (located under filter -> Light and shadow). It doesn't matter too much if you get it exactly on it or not, since this will just be for lens flare in the end. The colours don't matter either, due to the step that comes after this.



Throw a colors -> Desaturate based on Lightness over it! (ignore my laziness with layer naming)



Change the supernova's layer mode to "Hard Light" and it will look like this.



We could perform that to the other three of the flares, but I'd rather not. What I will do is create a general flare that encompasses the entire effect.

So, new layer time!

Create a MASSIVE supernova over the entire image!



Again, desaturate, this time using Luminosity instead of Lightness. Swap it to soft light and turn down the opacity to about 30% or whatever looks good for you.

If that's what you want, you're done! Save it as .tga (no RLE compression) and throw it into addon. Reference it in an ODF, and congratulations! You've just made your first custom effect texture!

[TheJamsh]

Good start . Thanks. Things like this i could do most of already but theres some better ideas here, its the complex ones like smoke and steam and fire i have trouble with. Previously ive used cut-out areas of images, some of which worked spectacularly, but it would be nice to have a bank of my own textures as well.

[Shadow Knight]

Yeah, I didn't know how much you couldn't or could do from your first post, so i just went over everything.

[Clavin12]

The clouds filter?

[General BlackDragon]

TJ.

go to www.bzcommand.com and look for steveeo's photoshop tutorial. Very good.