In Painter open a new 512x512 image. First off you want to decide what kind of texture you want to paint. In general, any texture that will be colorful or dark, you start with a very dark base. You paint the base using the airbrush tool. I like to keep the base fairly solid in color, but vary the tones up and down a bit to create a subtle pattern. Nothing too eratic though. If you want to paint a light texture, or a grey texture, I suggest using a much lighter base color. You will be layering on top of this with the Square Chalk tool, but since we won't be filling in with solid color with the chalk, you want to have the base a good color from the start. You could even try, at the very low end of the value range, an opposing color to the main texture color. Don't go overboard with that though.

Next, pick the chalk tool. This is how the chalk tool works: It's like you're doing a charcoal rubbing of an engraving. The texture you pick under the papers panel will act as the object you're rubbing against. The darker the area in the paper, the more it will show up. So a brick paper, where the grout lines are black, will draw in black grid lines, but leave the brick areas blank. BE LIGHT with your stylus(you need to use a Wacom tablet to do this easily). If you're heavy handed about it, you will fill in a solid color, which you don't want. There is also a button that says "Invert Paper." This button is very important. In our brick example, it would make the tool fill in the bricks, and leave the grout lines out. What does this let us do? Well, it lets us pick different colors and tones, and not just overlap them on top of each other. There is also a slider that says "Texture Size." It ranges from 25% to something like 750% or so. This lets you change the size of the paper texture. So if you change it to 200%, the bricks you're drawing in will be twice as big! This is very handy as well, because a paper at 25% looks completely different than the same paper at 200%.

For realtime(games usually): You want to paint in realistic tones, realistic colors. I don't recommend having a bright light direction-keep it neutral, and we'll take care of the lighting later. Use lots of colors, but don't oversaturate them. Look to the right. The first image is the painted texture. It is for an upcoming Quake3 Total Conversion called Bid For Power. It's for a canyon wall in a desert stage. Neutral lighting, plenty of colors, but not too overblown. You don't have as many colors as you would in rendered textures. Why? Because games don't push toward grey as much as Lightwave or other 3dcg programs do. Remember to take the texture into Photoshop, go to Plugins/Other/Offset and offset it half the total resolution. Use the Rubber Stamp tool to erase the seam, and then offset again for the same amount. Now your texture will tile properly(you also must remove and noticable "landmarks" in the texture-things that stick out when tiled).

Take your texture into Lightwave. Paste it onto a 1m x 1m x 1m cube. Create a bump map of the texture, like to the right. Don't go overboard with the contrast, because you'll lose detail as you gain contrast. For a bump of that contrast level, I gave it a 2.5 amplitude in the bump map panel(normal is 1.0, so find your program's equivalent setting). This is a fairly bumpy surface. For a smoother stone I would reduce that. Remember, too much bump is a killer. Keep it low people! I don't want to see 5.0 amplitudes and really contrasty bump maps. It's a sure way to scare off people. Turn off Texture Antialiasing in the map panels.

Next, take the light in the scene and make it an area light. Turn the ambient intensite down to nothing. Position the light a ways in front of the cube, and angled down at it. I angled it about 35-40 degrees. Render it big, then shrink it down in Photoshop. This texture is now ready to apply to the face of a canyon. The lighting is bright, but that'll be kicked down a notch in the game. At this point in games, lighting and object shape should be handled by the engine and geometry. Gone are the times of painting shadows and highlight on textures-we now have specular highlights in realtime, shadows, lighting. It's great, but you must change with the times in order to stay on the wave.

For rendered(film, FMV, TV): Lightwave forces all your textures towards grey. Because of this, we use what look like very bright and noticable colors when painting our textures for use in our 3d applications. Look at the texture on the right. It has definate marks of red, purple, blue, green, and orange. However, this will be used as a stone texture. The application for this would be one in which I actually modeled the stone out of polygons, and applied the stone texture. Modeled stones? Yes, sometimes you can't fake everything with a flat wall and polygons. Besides, photos of walls lack realism in general, because photos too tend to lose the colors and surface details. Have you ever seen those images where they paste the color photo of a guy's face on a 3d mesh? Doesn't look quite right does it? Not next to a really well painted map, like they have in the Final Fantasy Movie.

You'll want to make sure it's tilable if you're going to be animating this. Look at the image to the right. The grey stones use the grey texture I just showed you. See how the colors are knocked down? The other bricks use the stone 1 and 2 from my textures page. If I had merely had a monotone color map on the rocks, they would have looked very boring, and not at all realistic. Textures are part of the realism quadrilateral of Model/Texture/Light/Animate. Never overlook one area to try to save time. Just like a table, you might be able to get by without one of the legs, so long as no one leans on you too hard, but if you skipped two legs, well, you're buggered. All the textures in the image to the right were painted in Painter 6.0. The black metal area on the lower right is made up of about 15-20 polys. You don't always need a lot of geometric detail to garner realism, but in certain areas, like the bricks, you do. A lot of time is saved by planning ahead, and knowing what areas to put the time and effort into.

Anthony Fransella is a freelance computer graphic artist currently living in Orlando Florida. He is available to anyone from any industry at, as he put it, "really good rates." For more information, please email him at ant@antsin3d.com