Tutorials:CAS Creation From Start-To-Finish - Texturing

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CAS Creation With Daluved1: From Start-To-Finish

Planning | Meshing | Creating A New Package | Texturing | Finishing Up | Glossary

Contents

Texturing

Now here comes the part that separates the mice from the men, and the okay creators from the awesome ones! No matter how detailed and intricate your mesh is, if your texture is lackluster, then your whole project is a bust.

Throughout this part of the guide, you will encounter various textures that need to be edited. I suggest you read through this List of Texture Types to get a feel for what each of them do.

Daltut-needtoalteralpha2.jpg

At this time, open up CTU again. Go to File -> Open and navigate to the package you just created. If you had saved it right, when your package loads you should see *Custom next to the mesh field, and the Mesh Name as whatever you named your mesh.

To get the 3D preview of your mesh to load, simply click on the Designs tab. You'll most likely be greeted with something like this when it first loads. Because of the adjustments we made to the mesh and UV map, part of our mesh will be missing textures. But this is easily fixed with the alpha channel of our base texture. Which is why that is naturally our next step in the creation process.

Setting the Alpha

Under the texture tab, we want to double click on the Base Texture key value. When the preview window pops up, click export on the bottom right. Give this texture a good name, and save it with your working files. This is the texture for your entire project.

Open up the file in your paint program. I'm using Photoshop's nVidia plugin, so it's just as simple as going to File -> Open to get the image into Photoshop. If you are using a different program, the import process might be slightly different.


If prompted, click load default sizes and do not generate MIPmaps. MIPmaps are essentially increasingly smaller versions of your texture that the game caches in order to more quickly render your object at different distances. When we get ready to save our final texture, our paint program will automatically generate these for us.


Cover Me Up!

Daltut-photoshop-channeltab.jpg
In your paint program, make the channels visible for editing. In Photoshop, you simply click on the channels tab and select the alpha channel at the bottom.

The alpha channel of our DDS texture controls the visibility of the texture on our mesh. The parts that are black denote areas that are without texture. Generally, these areas are where skin is supposed to show.

It is vice versa for white areas; they block out the areas where our texture will show up. Since the bottom of our shirt mesh is lacking texture, we will have to pull down the bottom of our alpha channel a bit.

It's really as easy as it sounds, simply fuzzy select (with the marquee tool) the bottom of the alpha channel and move it down a few notches with the arrow key. Be sure to go back and fill in any gaps created by moving the bottom down.

To test and see if we pulled our alpha down enough, we can save our changes and preview them in CTU.

Daltut-exportdxt5.jpg

Go to File -> Save and select DDS from the file types list. You may be presented with a long list of compression types. With base textures, we want to save them as DXT5 (interpolated alpha). Once you select this compression, hit okay.

Base Texturing

Overlays

Mask

Proper Specular

Part Mask=

Linking Textures

Separate tutorial!!

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