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. :)