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