Creating Game Textures with TheGIMP

I often played with the idea to create a game texturing tutorial. It could be called "Creating Game Textures with The GIMP". I wrote down some ideas for the table of content:

Introduction
The GIMP introduction
- palettes, layers, getting along with the several windows
- installing plugins (normalmap plugin nvidia)
- customization
Image Processing
- making tileable images
- removing lighting
- removing specularity
- creating selection masks
- replacing a background
- perspective correction
- brightness, sharpness, color balance and the histogram
- creating height maps
- generating normal maps
Texture Painting
- creating custom brushes
- painting height maps
- illuminating
- adding color
- adding details
- adding age and dirt
- creating spec maps
- ambient occlusion data

I would choose TheGimp for this because the latest Photoshop license costs 999 $ in the US and more than 1,300 Euro in Europe. GIMP is for free.

Do you like this idea? Did I miss something?

you missed...

short intro to the Gimp
- palettes, layers, getting along with the several windows
- installing plugins (normalmap plugin nvidia)

imageprocessing:
- perspective correction
- playing with brightness, sharpness, color balance and the histogram

texture painting:
- adding custom patterns
- "aging" (dirt/rust/etc)

Thanks Broozar, I added your suggestions to the post

i think this would be a great contribution to the community , hope to see it soon

That would be awesome Frank, it would be very much appreciated. I could use all the help I could get on texturing with the GIMP.

Well I can only ask why it took you so long to come up with that idea... ^^

I have some suggestions though:
Skip those parts of introducing the interface & stuff. There are tons of tutorials and even video DVDs out there (I even own one) and there's no need to explain that yet again...

I'd also appreciate if you really show some focused and advanced stuff. I mean have a look at tutorials for making tileable textures from photos for example: About 95% of those either show you a bunch of grass or a very simple brickwall together with the "use the clone brush tool" and that's it. Something LIKE THIS is totally rare and in the end the really useful stuff. So I'd like a focus not just on showing the principle behind things by showing extremely basic stuff but also taking the next step and showing advanced and more difficult stuff...

When it comes to actually creating a texture "from scratch" (I think both methods of using a texture refernce you alter or not are valid) it also would be important not just to tell which effect to use but much more as to WHY. In lots of cases you don't really now why someone uses this filter or that tool now. As a good example I can GIVE A LINK FROM THE SAME SITE AGAIN where you don't just learn about layer blend modes but also have a comment here or there for which purpose those may become handy...

Oh and one more thing I think is extremely important:
Give us a raw file of the texture you create. I've bought some books about texture creation and none of them did include the raw PSD file for the texture that was shown with a step by step tutorial. This is quite annoying when you come up with a way inferior result to what you were told you should get...

Enjoy your meal
Toast

Thats a great Idea, maybe i could learn something more .

cYa Sebastian

I've always toyed with the idea of selling some tutorials on how to create game art with completely opensource/free resources. If you do intend to do this, you should send me a PM, I'd love to work with someone on this.

Yes, source material will be available and I will not do the simple brick and grass stuff

If we come to photos then I would use something really bad as source, like an image with perspective problems, with specularity to be removed, with lighting to be removed, with background to be replaced or corrections to be used as a height map. I need a really bad photo to show all these techniques.

And yes, I plan to explain why I overlay a certain layer. I will tell how to extract lower and higher frequencies from the data and how it works.

The idea to create a video tutorial is also interesting. It has some advantages but also some drawbacks. It must be very well prepared if you really want to explain everything in detail.

Imo a video tutorial doesn't make much sense in this area. At least I find it more difficult to follow video tutorials where lots of menus, commands and values are used. It also is way more "difficult" to redo what you're told to do. You can just read a text but with a video you have to do the stop-n-go and rewinding also is quite annoying...

A text based tutorial also gives me the possibility to advance at my specific speed which is better for learning. In video tutorials (especially basic ones) I either got bored fast because the progress is so slow or couldn't follow because there's too much stuff going on too fast...

There also is a technical hurdle for video tutorials: You really need to have a silent PC. It's extremely annoying to listen to someone else's ventilator noise (especially as you sometimes see videos of guys which have to be pretty free of noise pain ). I also would only consider a video tutorial if you have no strong accent. That GIMP DVD I own was made by a woman with strong Swiss accent - it really sounds very strange if you don't share that accent and you sometimes pay more attention to pronunciation than the lesson. In my case I nearly got insane how she would pronounce "Gimp" (= "Giiiieeeeeeeeemp") which you'll encounter at least once a minute...

Well do what you like the most, I prefer a written one. If it's good you even could sell it - I'd certainly buy it (especially as good texturing tutorials are rare)...

Enjoy your meal
Toast

Great idea Frank.



I disagree here, if the artist can explain ánd show what he does at the same time, then it's really really useful. If you don't get it the first time, just rewind.. it's really not that bad. (What I tend to do is make notes while watching so I can easily remember what steps to make to achieve similar results.)

I've got a couple of The Gnomon Workshop DVDs on PainterIX and Photoshop. By far the best tutorials I've come across so far. They're a bit expensive, but you can watch the pros and they often explain and give away very useful tips & tricks.



If there are any really annoying noises in your recordings, there's a reasonably easy fix for this.

Just add sound and explanations later or redo them while you make sure the noise doesn't get recorded. (A not-that-expensive directional mic will often do the trick just fine.)

Cheers

I am working on some video tutorials and has turned out harder than anticipated for me. Several others have handed stuff in and I'm still going. In my case I am use to being immersed in what I am doing, stopping to think and explain as I go has made me sound like a doddering old man "uh, ahhh, errrr, what's that called" and a few similar challenges. Do a test first, walking through some process you are familiar with and see how it goes. A possible intermediate solution is to use one of those screen capture/playback products like Wink so that people can see a demonstration of a step-by-step process then click to go to the next section. It is also possible to add some sound I believe. Here is a bare bones example http://www.stormvisions.com/showme/how_to_change_brush.htm

With the price of PS GIMP tutorials might be popular. Look forward to seeing yours.

Practice makes perfect.

I've got one of those DVDs from an Asian artist and even though his English at times is not that easy to follow, he's still very much able to explain it all relatively well with not that many words. I'm sure he has redone the audio or added it later because of the way he talks. He often used lines like 'this is where I did x to achieve y and made sure not to do z and run into problems later on'. Very useful, but I'm sure it has taken some extra time to get this 'perfect'.

By the way, because these tutorials are of video format, you don't have to explain everything down to the details. A lot of movies actually are sped up to two or three times the speed, showing you art made in 10 real hours in only 2 hours of video time or so.

When it comes to certain program specific steps you have to go through, you might run into 'version' differences anyways.

One of the DVDs I have uses an older Photoshop version then I have, so it takes some additional research there anyways. If you're planning to explain interfaces and things like that alone I'd make a text tutorial or a powerpoint-style video instead of recordings of how your mouse moved to click somewhere. Efficiency counts in my opinion,

Cheers

yeh, go go go

So ... Did this idea die?

Enjoy your meal
Toast

I guess :P

No, this idea did not die.

Last month was very busy but I am happy about it. I sold good amount of licenses of my business software, had to support them and we launched new packs at Dexsoft Games. Besides that there were the usual christmas events (e.g. visiting the family).

I started to write a book about the complete game producing process. The chapter about programming in C++ is already done (more than 100 pages). So I will support a lot of tools like Ogre, Irrlicht, C4, Torque. I started with some Irrlicht examples because this is the most intuitive C++ engine out there. But I want to support more powerful tools as well (C4 as an example).
I started with 3d maths and AI. 3d and 2d graphics will be part of this book as well as project management and methods of creativity.

Some parts will be launched separated (just like this 2d GIMP tutorial). But I need some more time to finish it. Unfortunatelly I am the only author and I do it in my spare time. And I need help from English speakers to translate it from German to a fine English at the end.

All my client jobs have first priority. This project follows after this.

I didn't want to put the screws on you or something - I was just curious if this idea had become a project which died due to lack of time / interest or not. Good to hear that it actually made its leap on your to-do-list...

I'll sure keep an eye on this!

Enjoy your meal
Toast