There was some interest on how I textured my July Contest Image, well, here is a short rundown - very short. I'm sure there will be lots of questions, so fire away.

Hey! thanks Eric, bout as far as I ever get besides color is Bump and Disp. maps, I need to expand!

That's awesome Eric, thanks!

Excellent Eric!

That really helps to clear up some of the many grey areas I have about texturing.

Thanks very much...
Al

Great work. Looks like i have some learning to do .


Its Good that everyones coming out with a lot of these tutorials lately.

Thanks, I needed that! That's not the last, is it?

Um, well, ahhhhh....hmmm....let me get back to you on that Anything in particular you have a question about?

For starters...

Just some thoughts you might or could expand on for us noobs ...

So, to get that "Fine Grain Bump Map"

Just load in the "Color Map" into -like- Photo Shop and use various filters to highlight certain areas of the wood grain and apply it in AM as a bump to have them stand out more. If so, a few specifics ie; color/contrast adjustments ?

Is this about right ?

Or are there easier/better/more things or ways of doing this.

Thanks, so far for the offerings.

Nice tut and final render!

Ok, glad to see that this is generating some interest, and thanks for the support.

Gerald, since you asked some specific questions, I'll go into some detail to answer them. You pretty much have the gist of how I go about doing the fine grain map. One of the keys to getting good results is to use a high quality color map at the right resolution. It all depends on what you want the end product to do. If you want to create a 3d still that tries to achieve a semblance of photo realism, then you need to go for the larger res pics as decal sources. The color map I used for the example above and that I also used extensively in my "Abandoned Grocery Store" image for last months photorealistic contest has a resolution of 1500 x 800. Mind you, that the color image can be saved down to a more friendly web resolution, but always do a preview and don't skimp on detail if you can afford to. The other maps, like bump, displacement, etc, will take up much less memory since the hold much less information and you can usually save them close to low res after manipulation in Photoshop (I call it CS2 for short). Again, this will come with practice, but you will learn what will work for the type of project you are working on as far as resolution and image size.

Keep in mind, that on of the beautys of CG is the ability to use repeating tile maps. You can take a smaller image, say 500 x 500 or even less, and make a repeatable tile out of it. I make tileable maps out of almost all my decal sources. This is not as easy as it sounds, because first of all, you have to learn how to do the actual tile process - (many on-line tutorials for CS2 and PainShop that we won't go into here) and then you have to know which parts of the image to keep or not to keep. I've seen so many tiled images that look like checkerboard patterns. These images tile fine, but the actual tiles don't blend very well due to some prominant features that were ignored when making the original tile. Long story short, you can go a long way with good tileable maps that don't take up a lot of space.

Well, lest I be let astray again. Once you have an appropriate sized and detailed wood color map, take it into you favorite image editor and desaturate it. Don't change it into a greyscale map because you want to keep the subleties of the wood grain. Sometimes that's all that's needed, but I usually play around with brightness and contrast a bit, just to get a nice definition between the dark and the light (may the Schwartz be with you). As you may well know, the bump map works it's magic by taking the dark values and creating the illusion of depth, vs light values and height - just in case you did not know it, but I'm no techy when it comes to explaining this stuff ). Pretty soon you'll be able to look at a black and white picture and imagine what a render of that would look like as a bump map. Remember it's the variations in shades from light to dark that give the program the information to give differences in height. All black will give you a flat low plane. All white will give you a high plane. Shades of gray give you the exciting contours in depth that make your render come alive.

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