How to make textures thread

Post » Sat May 28, 2011 10:25 am

Great thread here. There's http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=727168&hl=union floating around somewhere here as well, which is also very informative.

Thanks for the link StarX: Earth was suppose to start this thread last week as I didn't want to run both this and the one in morrowind. But I guess he got busy. Earth is very helpful to the community. :bowdown:
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Chantel Hopkin
 
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Post » Fri May 27, 2011 6:00 pm

To see beginner tiling please check the morrowind thread.

Here a great one by Matt Vainio http://www.twisted-strand.com/ for advanced for advanced tiling.
http://www.3dm3.com/tutorials/texturing/advanced_tiling/
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Albert Wesker
 
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Post » Sat May 28, 2011 2:48 am

You both have strong points. These are more a matter of opinion and that's healthy in a thread like this. :foodndrink:

I think we pretty much just agreed on all our points :lol:

I put it down to different fields, Bomrets specially is more towards architectural and environmental textures, and I am more towards the character modeller/texturer end. Where Bomret would take a tiling brick texture as his generic example of a texture, I would take a sword with jewels, golds, steel, glowing runes, and all manner of leather materials on a single map as my generic example.
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Jay Baby
 
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Post » Fri May 27, 2011 10:49 pm

I think we pretty much just agreed on all our points :lol:

I put it down to different fields, Bomrets specially is more towards architectural and environmental textures, and I am more towards the character modeller/texturer end. Where Bomret would take a tiling brick texture as his generic example of a texture, I would take a sword with jewels, golds, steel, glowing runes, and all manner of leather materials on a single map as my generic example.


Exactly what I was thinking ;) I would never do a sword without a spec map. Although I must admit that I don't have that much experience with weapon and armor/clothes textures. Any tips on that?
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CRuzIta LUVz grlz
 
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Post » Sat May 28, 2011 2:20 am

Exactly what I was thinking ;) I would never do a sword without a spec map. Although I must admit that I don't have that much experience with weapon and armor/clothes textures. Any tips on that?

Weapons, armor? I want S.I. Get back to work. :bolt:
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Emilie Joseph
 
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Post » Sat May 28, 2011 8:42 am

Weapons, armor? I want S.I. Get back to work. :bolt:


:lol: Well at the moment I'm still recovering from an illness that struck me down last week. I only have my laptop at hand which is quite old and wouldn't be able to run Photoshop. So I still have some time to learn new things :D
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Jaki Birch
 
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Post » Sat May 28, 2011 4:52 am

Blimey! My bookmarks list needs new pants. Thanks!

Jeebus... I thought I knew a few things. :shakehead:

Its enough to make one give up... if one had not already done such a thing ;)

Nice to see you active and informative sky mate :wave:

Welcome back. It is as always good to see you again.
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Leanne Molloy
 
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Post » Sat May 28, 2011 2:50 am

Here's a link to a free program many of you may find this very useful.
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/art/features/mapzone/

I'm off now. Got to find me some bird seed and coffee beans.

Thanks for all the wonderful posts. I think we are really doing a great job at help each others. Remember it's easier to get an answer if there is a question.
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Steve Fallon
 
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Post » Sat May 28, 2011 6:14 am

Exactly what I was thinking ;) I would never do a sword without a spec map. Although I must admit that I don't have that much experience with weapon and armor/clothes textures. Any tips on that?

It depends on what it is. lots of armor/clothing/ and some weapons- essentially a full on project goes.... low poly>High poly(possibility of using a hand painted displacement map on the high poly here)>normal map(you kinda have to know what details you should do in a high poly and what will come out best if painted as a height map and then applying a normal map filter. then mixed into the rendered normal)> diffuse map & specular map. Seems backwards doesn't it. Well the diffuse map and normal map are really finished at the same time, some of the last touches I put into the normals are from the diffuse maps texture. example would be, I sculpt the folds of a cloth in high poly, But the cloths weave comes from a 2d texture I used in the diffuse map. But the diffuse map doesn't start untill I have a normal map first.

The displacement map may come in handy when creating the high poly, sculpting some details can be very hard or tedious and yield not the right results. Sometimes I will make a displacement map. This will be used to displace the high polys geometry instead of having to sculpt it.

The specular map is set up specifically. It works best when correct materials are set up on the mesh in the right places and then rendered. Plus a second stage of editing it in 2d.

I suppose a little step by step explains one process. Everything takes a bit of experience to know how best to proceed, and trail and error, as you will see, is usually involved.

Once I have the base mesh. its texturing time. for this particular texture I figured displacement would be the best...
I originally painted this- http://i25.photobucket.com/albums/c85/lego-botz/other/flakvestdisplacement2.jpg
applied it to the highpoly and rendered this. http://i25.photobucket.com/albums/c85/lego-botz/other/flakvestnormal2.jpg

I decided that the stitching wasn't coming up very good, and removed that layer from the displacement.
http://i25.photobucket.com/albums/c85/lego-botz/other/flakvestdisplacement.jpg

I normal filtered the stitching layer. For things like this I often copy the layer, in this case those black lines, or stitching.
Then make a white layer (the stiching is black). merge the copy and this white layer. normal filter that. select the orginal black stitching layers transparency. and cut the normal mapped stiches out.

So I have this.
http://i25.photobucket.com/albums/c85/lego-botz/other/flakvestnormal.jpg

I made a material with this as a bump. applied it to the mesh, and rendered out diffuse map.
And finally I added a cloth weave overlay layer, to give it some texture and a unbleached cloth like color.
http://i25.photobucket.com/albums/c85/lego-botz/other/flakvestdiffuse.jpg

I then normal filtered this cloth texture and overlayed it onto the normal map. As you can see even after I DXT compressed it the artifacts didn't affect the final product too badly.
http://i25.photobucket.com/albums/c85/lego-botz/other/flakvestnormalFinal.jpg
That was saved as dxt1 no alpha and reopened and saved as a jpeg.

This texture doesn't have a spec map as it'll only be minor improvement in this case.
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josh evans
 
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Post » Sat May 28, 2011 10:23 am

Thanks for the advice. Do you know what texture go up to 2048? I didn't know oblivion can't take Dxt5_NM. I'm just now trying to find out about parallax. Because oblivion uses spec you can't put the height map there. I thought I said that.
Here a link for finding details on parallax.
http://www.cgtextures.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=142
heres a link on making a great normal.
http://www.cgtextures.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=30
In action with parallax
http://www.cgtextures.com/tutorials/normalmap/images/deep_normals_video.avi
http://www.cgtextures.com/tutorials/normalmap/images/deep_normals_lid_video.avi


Well, Oblivion *can* take a dxt5_nm file, but it won't render properly, the shaders weren't written with that in mind. :) I've seen/used 4096 textures and have them render just fine, it never occoured to me that it may never use the 'top' level image. I guess for testing, make an all white image, save it with mipmaps. Then re-open it, change the base image to black, and save with the option of "use existing" mipmaps. If you never see the black image, then you'd know if Oblivion discards over a certain limit. *shrug* (and in case you're curious, I do believe saving 64bpp images worked, but I do remember that 128bpp ones didn't.)


As to parallax, control for that goes in the alpha channel of the color map when the texture mode is apply_highlight2. (so, no transparency for parallax'd meshes)
I haven't played with it in ages, so I don't know if 50% grey = 0, or black = 0.


This is a great thread, but tonight is not for reading! I'll have to give this a proper go tomorrow :D
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Wane Peters
 
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Post » Sat May 28, 2011 2:16 am

Parallax- is a source of headache for me. some are quite difficult. If I get lucky and one comes off nice, it does look sweet. Anyway, 0 is closer to 50% grey. It is around RGB 138-140. At least it is for me. a little weird I thought.

Some parallaxed textures I made, that I think worked out-
http://i25.photobucket.com/albums/c85/lego-botz/textures/TelvanniCeilling.jpg
http://i25.photobucket.com/albums/c85/lego-botz/textures/stone.jpg
http://i25.photobucket.com/albums/c85/lego-botz/textures/FloorGrate.jpg
http://i25.photobucket.com/albums/c85/lego-botz/textures/IceCave.jpg

There are some other textures in that folder that I tried parallaxing, doesn't always come out how I'd like.
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Cathrin Hummel
 
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Post » Sat May 28, 2011 10:31 am

Parallax- is a source of headache for me. some are quite difficult. If I get lucky and one comes off nice, it does look sweet. Anyway, 0 is closer to 50% grey. It is around RGB 138-140. At least it is for me. a little weird I thought.

Some parallaxed textures I made, that I think worked out-
http://i25.photobucket.com/albums/c85/lego-botz/textures/TelvanniCeilling.jpg
http://i25.photobucket.com/albums/c85/lego-botz/textures/stone.jpg
http://i25.photobucket.com/albums/c85/lego-botz/textures/FloorGrate.jpg
http://i25.photobucket.com/albums/c85/lego-botz/textures/IceCave.jpg

There are some other textures in that folder that I tried parallaxing, doesn't always come out how I'd like.

Don't know if this is going to be any help. http://www.cgtextures.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=142&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=
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Maya Maya
 
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Post » Sat May 28, 2011 5:27 am

Parallax- is a source of headache for me. some are quite difficult. If I get lucky and one comes off nice, it does look sweet. Anyway, 0 is closer to 50% grey. It is around RGB 138-140. At least it is for me. a little weird I thought.

Some parallaxed textures I made, that I think worked out-
http://i25.photobucket.com/albums/c85/lego-botz/textures/TelvanniCeilling.jpg
http://i25.photobucket.com/albums/c85/lego-botz/textures/stone.jpg
http://i25.photobucket.com/albums/c85/lego-botz/textures/FloorGrate.jpg
http://i25.photobucket.com/albums/c85/lego-botz/textures/IceCave.jpg

There are some other textures in that folder that I tried parallaxing, doesn't always come out how I'd like.


For quicker testing, you may want to tinker with nifskope\shaders\ob_parallalax.frag Try cranking up the "Float Offset" value, from 0.015 to something like 0.05. This will make the effect much more extreme, and easier to see where/how it all works out. As far as I remember, m4444x had just eyeballed the settings to what is seen in Oblivion, nor is it the exact shader used, but it does make previewing esay :)
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Dean
 
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Post » Fri May 27, 2011 11:03 pm

not really. its just the nature of the beast. Parallax displaces the texture coordinates. Its about finding the balance of offset and hiding ugly warping. I'm sure if I spend enough time cleaning/bluring/ tweaking/ testing, something usable surfaces. Still some textures are not quick and easy to get a parallax map out of.


Edit: ah...

probably 0 in game is 128RGB then..
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Marie Maillos
 
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Post » Fri May 27, 2011 6:58 pm

I wonder if this should be stickied as it's a good resource for the community.
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TWITTER.COM
 
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Post » Sat May 28, 2011 5:10 am

I wonder if this should be stickied as it's a good resource for the community.

Nice idea Aventhorn, but when it becomes a sticky I don't think we can run thread 2, thread 3 and so on. This look like it will be on going, thanks to everyones kind input.

Ghogiel cool seeing you at the other place. B)
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Austin Suggs
 
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Post » Fri May 27, 2011 11:58 pm

Since I use parallax mapping in my SI texture pack I can say that black is <0. When you create a totally black parallaxmap, the texture will be warped below 0 and you can see "behind" the other textures that surround your parallaxed texture. 50% grey creates no seam. White will make the texture warp outwards.

Although I also had some very rare situations in which parallax maps with 50% grey did create unsightly seams.
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Music Show
 
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Post » Sat May 28, 2011 8:02 am

Yes Bomret. Black is zero depth and white full. Because it's a height map white and black is usually used but not grays. If you find that it doesn't look right with only black and white, Then most likely it will not be useful as a parallax. Your normal map does most of the work.
Heres a link about parallax. It's a little old but it should help. Follow the next buttons at the bottom.
http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Components/shader-NormalParallaxDiffuse.html
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Andres Lechuga
 
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Post » Fri May 27, 2011 11:38 pm

What I was trying to say is that black is below zero depth (Minus). If you put a non parallaxed texture next to a parallaxed one, which parallax map is completely black, the parallaxed one is warped inwards, below the non parallaxed one.

Something like this:

NP P
--------|_____

Hope this schematic shows what I mean. NP is non-parallax, P is parallax. You can see behind the non-parallaxed texture through the gap because the parallaxed one is lower than the non-parallaxed one.
Normal would be this (50% grey?):

NP P
--------|-------

With a completely white parallax map:

NP P
--------|*****

Hope that it's understandable. Unfortunately there is no upper line ;)

Edit: The layout is screwed up a bit by the forum. I still hope it's clear (left line non-par. | right line parallaxed).
That can be a serious problem. In Shivering Isles there are many building textures that are similar to each other and layed out in a row. It can be hard to create gapless parallax maps for them.
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Elisabete Gaspar
 
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Post » Sat May 28, 2011 3:28 am

What I was trying to say is that black is below zero depth (Minus). If you put a non parallaxed texture next to a parallaxed one, which parallax map is completely black, the parallaxed one is warped inwards, below the non parallaxed one.

Something like this:

NP P
--------|_____

Hope this schematic shows what I mean. NP is non-parallax, P is parallax. You can see behind the non-parallaxed texture through the gap because the parallaxed one is lower than the non-parallaxed one.
Normal would be this (50% grey?):

NP P
--------|-------

With a completely white parallax map:

NP P
--------|*****

Hope that it's understandable. Unfortunately there is no upper line ;)

Edit: The layout is screwed up a bit by the forum. I still hope it's clear (left line non-par. | right line parallaxed).
That can be a serious problem. In Shivering Isles there are many building textures that are similar to each other and layed out in a row. It can be hard to create gapless parallax maps for them.

Yes this is true. The black will be the lowest starting point. Below even your normal...which is the whole point. The white will be your highest point even above the normal. As you say grey is the middle. But we use the normals for that. So the standard is only black and white if possible. This will creative a height map to work with the normal. We seem to be saying the same thing.
Oh Ghogiel is a member of http://www.cgtextures.com/forum/index.php now. Joining the forum is free. love to see you there.
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remi lasisi
 
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Post » Sat May 28, 2011 6:28 am

Two things first: The images are quite large so please be patient while they load (they are this large so that you can see the details) and I run the german version of photoshop. But it should be obvious what I mean.

Quick'n Dirty Tutorial: Creating Normal Maps using the Layer Technique

In many cases I recommend creating a height map before creating the actual normal map. This is a greyscale image which contains height information. In some cases it's enough to turn you image into greyscale, but you'll get better results when you edit it by hand afterwards. Let's do an easy example: Take your image, turn it into greyscale (quick'n dirty: Crtl+Shift+U), create as many empty layers as you need to add height info and then paint them with black, grey and white, set an appropriate blend mode (soft light, overlay... experiment with them). At the end you'll have something like this:

http://i247.photobucket.com/albums/gg135/Bomret/Heightmap.jpg

Notice: There are people who favour using the dodge and burn tool. No problem with that.

Now some explanation: The grey stones will be "normal level", the brighter ones will stick out more the darker ones less. Easy to understand, I hope. That'll look much more lifelike ingame, because in such an irregular brickwall not all stones are the same. But that's important for other types of textures too. See http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?s=&showtopic=799551&view=findpost&p=11625784 to get an idea.

Now on to the normal map itself. The idea is to duplicate the original layer a few times, then put on a gaussian blur on each layer with an increasing amount, except the top one. After that run the normal map filter on each layer with an increasing scale from top to bottom. Sounds complicated? I hope I'm able to clear the confusion with some screens. First, it's necessary to put the image into a matrix of itself. Just enlarge the canvas size and layout the image next to each other. That's important to avoid evil gaps in your normal map. Here's what I mean:

http://i247.photobucket.com/albums/gg135/Bomret/HeightmapMatrix.jpg

The height map is in the center, surrounded by itself. When the normal map is finished, we'll reduce it to it's original size.

Time for step-by-step:
1. Put the heightmap into a matrix, afterwards flatten the image.
2. Duplicate the image five times. At the end we'll have six layers showing the same http://i247.photobucket.com/albums/gg135/Bomret/Ebenentechnik.jpg.
3. To be able to see what you're doing next, hide the top 5 layers with a click on the eye next to them so that only the bottom layer is visible. Now comes the Gaussian Blur. Activate the bottom layer and run "filter->blur->Gaussian Blur" and use a value of 10. Then unhide the next layer and repeat the Gaussian blur. But this time use a value of 8. Next layer gets a 6 and so on. Reduce the value of the Gaussian Blur by 2 on every layer. So from bottom to top that would be 10->8->6->4->2. The top layer is left unchanged.
4.Now hide all layers except the bottom one again. It's time for the normal map filter. Activate the bottom layer and choose "filter->Nvidia Tools->Normal map Filter". In this window set up the following:
- Filter Type: 4x4 Sample
- Wrap
- Scale: 80
- Height Source: Average RGB
- Alpha Field: Set to 1.0

Click OK and we'll get the following http://i247.photobucket.com/albums/gg135/Bomret/Ebenentechnik2.jpg.

As you can see there are some errors like small "stairs". That's normal for an 8bit normal map. You can avoid that by working in 16bit. But on the one hand the whole thing would take longer and on the other hand we'll lose color information when converting it back to 8bit, which may lead to ugly errors. Instead we just use the Gaussian Blur again with a value that eliminates the small stairs (in most cases a value from 1 to 4 is enough. I used 2 in this example). The procedure is the same for the next steps:

5. Unhide the next layer and run the normal map plugin. This time use a scale of 60. If errors occur, jsut blur them away with the Gaussian Blur. Now put the blend mode to "hard light". With doing that our layer is added to the bottom one and we gain more detail with every layer.
6. Do this with the remaining layers. The only thing that changes is the scale of the normal map filter. In our example from bottom to top: 80->60->40->20->10->6. Every layer gets the blend mode "hard light", if the "small stairs" appear, blur them away.

http://i247.photobucket.com/albums/gg135/Bomret/Ebenentechnik3.jpg

7. Flatten the image. Now we can reduce the image back to it's original size. Just use "image->canvas size". It's important that the center square is http://i247.photobucket.com/albums/gg135/Bomret/Ebenentechnik4.jpg.

The last step is Re-Normalization. Until now we treated our normal map like an image. But that's not the case. For the game engine it's a map that contains mathematical information, not colors. Re-Normalization is simple: Open up the normal map Filter and click on ?Normalise Only". Your normal map may lose some brightness, but that's ok. You won't lose anything. Now our blue channel also gets it's height information. Now we can save it in .dds format.

That's the wall ingame (I created the color map earlier):

http://i247.photobucket.com/albums/gg135/Bomret/Screen1.jpg

If you put more time into that, you'll get much better results, that's just a quick'n dirty example. I love the layer technique because it's extremely flexible. It's up to you how many layers you use and which values for the Gaussian Blur and Normal Map Filter. You can do any normal map with it and get astonishing results. Just experiment ;)

A last tip: For the last two layers (the two top ones) do not use the height map but the original image as a source. In many cases you preserve more detail.
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matt oneil
 
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Post » Sat May 28, 2011 3:59 am

Yes this is true. The black will be the lowest starting point. Below even your normal...which is the whole point. The white will be your highest point even above the normal. As you say grey is the middle. But we use the normals for that. So the standard is only black and white if possible. This will creative a height map to work with the normal. We seem to be saying the same thing.
Oh Ghogiel is a member of http://www.cgtextures.com/forum/index.php now. Joining the forum is free. love to see you there.


Yeah, we're saying the same thing there, I guess. Sorry, it's not my day. Am a bit confused today :wacko:
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CArla HOlbert
 
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Post » Fri May 27, 2011 11:38 pm

wow, awesome thread! the normal map tut is great, have been looking for something like that for a while now. *eager to go try it out*
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patricia kris
 
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Post » Sat May 28, 2011 5:25 am

wow, awesome thread! the normal map tut is great, have been looking for something like that for a while now. *eager to go try it out*

Great to see you here. :hugs:
Can you post a link to your photos?

I added this to the link page.
different tutorials many programs

-------------------How to sites *** ----------------------------------------------------
***Many sites have forums.Look through the forum. If it seems there are professionals in them. Join so you can post your question and art and became known (it's free) make up a new email. Just for forums.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://gameart.jaquays.com/texture_resources.html texture resources

BEST SITE.... http://www.cgtextures.com/ tutorials in this site. Best textures and if you join the forum (it's free). You'll be talking with many profesionals.

http://www.digitaltutors.com/digital_tutors/tutorials.php under Browse free tutorials by category are many program tutorials

http://www.strarup.net/maya/imageplanesetup/ image editing (maya or others) to photo shop. Rendering

http://web.alfredstate.edu/ciat/tutorials/FakingGlobalIllumination.htm Rendering

BEST SITE.... http://www.cgtextures.com/ tutorials at this site,Great textures and if you join the forum (it's free). You'll be talking with many proffesionals.

http://web.alfredstate.edu/ciat/tutorials/LightLinking.htm rendering

http://web.alfredstate.edu/ciat/tutorials/TexturingPolygons.htm texturing

http://web.alfredstate.edu/ciat/tutorials/basicModeling.htm modeling

http://web.alfredstate.edu/ciat/tutorials/MuscleDeformations.htm animation

http://web.alfredstate.edu/ciat/tutorials/RotatingCarWheels.htm animation

http://www.geocities.com/tomerep/bullet.htm animation

http://hfx.planetquake.gamespy.com/tutorials.html Texturing

http://www.loonygames.com/content/1.11/gc/ Texturing.Buecheler Hates photo shop. But with deadlines He'll show the fastest ways to use it.

http://www.3dtotal.com/team/tutorials/minishading/minishading_1.asp Texturing

http://www.geocities.com/sweekimlai/ texturing

http://forums.3dtotal.com/forumdisplay.php?f=73 How to site ***

http://cgexpanse.com/phpBB2/viewforum.php?f=11&sid=e99ae618a71ba83279349a980961f4ed how to site ***

http://www.mapcore.net/forums/viewforum.php?f=36 how to site ***
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Joey Avelar
 
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Post » Sat May 28, 2011 8:17 am

Some fine texture tutorials from methodonline.com

http://www.methodonline.com/texture_tutorial.htm

http://www.methodonline.com/painted_tutorial.htm
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Jonathan Windmon
 
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