texturing tutorial part 5

Ok! Now comes my favorite part; adding dust, grime and scratches to make the hatch look old. I find that for dust, pictures of clouds work great

I like to take my own pictures of clouds, but this particular one is from the internet. The best kind are white with a solid blue background. Invert the picture (Image>Adjustments>Invert) and add a little contrast to it. Now, with the Eyedropper (tool pallet) suck up some of the peachy orange around the cloud. Using the Replace Color function (Image>Adjustments>Replace Color) raise the orange color’s brightness to the point it becomes white. Also, increase the Fuzziness to remove most of the orange from the picture.

Copy the entire cloud image and past into the texture. Move it to a place you think needs some grime. Set the Layer property to Multiply.

Since grime likes to hide in cracks and corners, there would be more dirt in the recessed parts of the white paneling. With the Magic Wand, select the area around the black bars. Delete that area from the cloud layer and reduce the layer’s opacity to about 30%.

Continue adding dust to the whole texture until the door looks suitably grungy. Remember not to overdo it. Galactica has been around for 40 years but it also wasn’t crewed by mud ementals.

Now it is time to do the little surface chips and scrapes caused by wear and tear. Using the Polygon Lasso Tool(tool pallet), select a little jagged area on a convex edge that has a high possibility of being scraped. Use the paint bucket to fill it with white and drop the opacity down to about 25%.

Continue adding chips to the door.

Use a fine sharp brush to add some scratches here and there along the edges.

Our Hatch is almost finished!! One last detail is needed. The Mag Lock sticker. I copied it off of this picture I found on the internet.

Use the square selection tool to select the sticker. Copy and paste it into the texture. Transform the layer to make it smaller and to scale (Edit>Free Transform) Use brightness and contrast to get the metal part of the layer black and the white part solid white. Set the layer property to screen.

Congratulations you have now textured a Galactica Hatch!

The techniques described in this tutorial can be used to texture most metallic technical things. Remember to think creatively when using Photoshop, as there are always many ways to do something and you have to experiment to find out which way suites you best. If you ever get stuck, look at other texture artists’ work to get ideas.
Good luck and always remember to have fun.