Texturing a Hatch Tutorial
Part 2

Time for the next long awaited installment.

After you are done coloring all edges of the square, deselect the selection and drop the layer opacity to about 25%. Unhide the metal layer, save and test the texture.

Now, you may not see much of a difference in this render now, but it does make a difference later.

I will be hiding and unhiding the metal layer constantly to check my position to the UV, but it takes too long to show in this tutorial, so I will skip it, but keep in mind that I don’t expect you to draw blindly on the canvas without looking at the UV.

Next I add a new metal texture to the entirety of the crank mount. Use the Circle Selection tool (tool pallet, hold the square selection tool button down to see it.) to copy a piece from another texture and paste it onto the door texture. Use Free Transform (Edit>Free Transform, hold shift to lock proportions) to get the circle of metal placed exactly over the crank mount(hint: set the layer property temporally to multiply to see the UV through the selected layer). I then added a Radial blur (Filters>Blur>Radial Blur) to the layer to give it that machine lathed look.

Use the Magic Wand(tool pallet) to select the blank area outside the metal circle (make sure the metal circle layer is selected). Inverse the selection (Select>Inverse Selection) so that the metal circle is selected. Create a new layer and stroke the selection with a 2pt black line to create a thin black ring around the metal (Edit>Stroke). Inverse the selection again so everything else is selected. Apply a 4pt Gaussian Blur to the stroke (Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur). You should end up with something that looks like the picture to the left. Merge the stroke layer to the circle metal layer (Layer>Merge Down).

Create a new layer. Using the Circle Selection and Paint bucket tools (tool pallet), create a white circle and delete the center to get a ring. Place the ring right over the faces that creates the leading most outside edge of the crank mount. Set the layer opacity to about 10%.

Create a new layer. Using the Circle Selection Tool, select the edge where the surfaces push inward away from the crank. Inverse the selection. Using a 100pt black brush, click about three times in the center of the circle to add shading around the outside of the selection. Throw a 2pt Gaussian Blur on the layer and set it to about 75% opacity. It should look like this.

Create a new layer. Use the Circle Selection tool to create a white circle covering the very top of the crank mount. Set it to 10% opacity. Using a black brush at about 36pt make the hole the crank fits into.

Test it and it should look something like this

That's all for now. Next week we will start on adding depth to the whole hatch.

This a Texturing Tutorial I am in the Process of making. I will post more as I make it.

How to Texture a Hatch

A texturing tutorial by Eric Geusz.

This tutorial will teach you how to texture a metal object using UV mapping. The 3d program I am using is Lightwave 8.0 and I will be creating the texture in Adobe Photoshop CS3.

This is our blank model fresh off of the UV mapping press. Quite boring. Before we can texture it, however, we need understand basically what a UV map is and how it works.

This is a UV map of the door. It can be thought of as an atlas of every surface of the door. It shows the computer how to take the 2D texture we are going to create and attach it to the 3D object. Each face on the UV directly corresponds to a face or multiple faces on the door.

For example,

If I were to color the UV map like this...

The door would end up looking like this

Can you see how each face corresponds to a specific area of the texture? (Refer to the previous image of the UV map if you need to.) But don’t worry, this isn’t going to be our final texture.

First, open up the Image of the UV map in Photoshop. If you don’t know how to UV, the person who did UV the object should be able to provide you with one.

Since we are going to be exporting the final texture in .dds format, (.dds is a common image format used for textures in many games) we must set the dimensions of the image to powers of 2, ie 2, 4, 8, 16 etc. 1024X1024 is a good texture size and our UV map happens to be square.Go to Image>Image Size and type 1024 into the Width: and Height: fields under Pixel Dimensions: and hit ok.

Now before we proceed, remember to keep the original UV map image as the background layer and DO NOT ALTER IT. I suggest locking the layer so you don’t accidentally move it or paint over it.

Since our door is mostly made of metal, it is best to create a base metal texture we can edit on top of. You can create your own metal texture, use one from another texture or find one on the internet. I used an old favorite metal texture I’ve used many times before that I originally copied from another texture.

Past your metal texture on to your UV texture in a new Layer (Layers>New Layer). After you make an adjustment to the texture save it and render the object in your 3D program to test it. Many times it is necessary to redo and readjust.

Metal texture on UV Texture and the rendered on hatch

Since the center crank area catches the eye the most, I’m going to start working in details there first. Hide the metal layer so we can see the UV. Create a new layer. Using the selection tool, select the center square surface around the crank mount. Then using a soft black brush, about 100pt, add pigment to the edges of the selection. The selection will prevent the brush from coloring outside of the dotted line.

Thats it for now. Stay tuned and watch as the texture takes shape. :)

Hello

This is my first blog post. It is for my web publishing class. I plan to show art work as i make it.