Excellent, thanks. ^^
Yeah, it's been a while, but I'm going to have a lot more free time from now until about mid-August, so hopefully I can contribute a few things myself, as well as getting this thread back in order.

I posted this tutorial in the Oblivion TU thread, thought it might be useful here too:


Something simple I came up with, an easy way to create decent cloud textures (transparent and tileable, so they can be used in Oblivion and Morrowind).

First of all, if you don't already have it, http://nifelheim.dyndns.org/~cocidius/dds/#download. It's been significantly improved and is now completely bug-free and works extraordinary.


1) Go to "File -> New...", set width and height to 1024 (or whatever power of 2 you want it to be) and click OK.

2) Go to "Filters -> Render -> Clouds -> Solid Noise...".

3) Make sure that "Randomize" and "Tileable" are checked and "Turbulent" is unchecked. Increase "Detail" value to maximum, which is 15. Values "X size" and "Y size" depend on how big you want your clouds to be. This affects only the size of your clouds, you'll be able to control their density later. If you want many tiny clouds, make these two values higher, and if you want few big clouds, make them smaller. But whatever you do, these two values should be the same (clouds look weird otherwise). When you've chosen the value for "X size" and "Y size", click OK.

4) Select the "Layers, Channels, Paths..." window, right-click on the current (the only one) layer and click on "Duplicate Layer". Select the new layer (most probably named "Background copy"), and in the top of the window change its mode to "Burn". Make sure that the new layer is selected before proceeding to the next step.

5) In the image window, go to "Colors -> Curves...".

6) This is the part where you can choose the density of your clouds. In the newly opened window click anywhere on the graph (except on the points in the lower-left and uppper-right) to create a new point. Move that point around and observe how the image changes ("Preview" should be ticked). The higher you place the point, the denser the clouds become. As you go lower with the point, clouds become thinner. You can also remove that point by dragging it off the graph to the left or right and move only the two existing points to see how that affects your clouds, or add even more points to the graph. The method which I found gives the best results is to not add any points and move only the already existing point in the lower-left, to the right along the bottom if you want your clouds to be thinner, and up along the left edge if you want your clouds to be thicker. Play with this graph until you're satisfied with how your clouds look, and when you are, click OK.

7) Select the "Layers, Channels, Paths..." window again, right-click on any of the two layers and select "Flatten Image".

8) In the image window go to "Colors -> Color to Alpha...".

9) For colour that will go to alpha select black by clicking on that rectangle and sliding the V slider all the way to the left, and clicking OK. Click OK to apply the effect.

10) That's it. All you need to do now is save your image as [whatever].dds, for "Compression" choose "None" or "BC3 / DXT5", check "Generate mipmaps", and click OK. There - you just made a fine clouds texture.

Thanks for the tips Doccolinni

I've been organising my personal texture collection recently, which is all photographs that I've taken myself (by which I mean that they are unique, not available elsewhere, can be used without worrying that someone else [other than me] has made a texture from them before, etc.) of various things. Mostly natural stuff, bark, grass, stone, etc.

Hopefully I'll have a chance to upload the full pile of them in the near future
Maybe I'll keep a couple in reserve just for me though

Ohhh yay! :celebration:

Can I join? Oh of course I can .

I've been making sky retextures for a while, working on my pack, but I'm having trouble with the transparency in the clear and cloudy pics. Is there a tut somewhere for that?

Not that I know of, sorry SWG.
If you get your hands on one, let me know, I'd be interested in reading it myself.
Perhaps you could ask Skydye over in http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=799551&hl=


Also, http://tomvolkfungi.net/
Follow the link 'Images of Fungi' for delicious reference pictures.

Hmm.. I've figured transparency out, and as some of you may know, my skies are out. So I might just write my own...

BTW: Those are some pretty good fungi pics.

That'd be really good if you could write your own. I'm sure that a lot of people would find it useful.

delete

Some nice bark and wood textures http://www.forestry.umn.edu/extension/forest/firewoodID.html.

Thanks SWG

This thread is kind of a joke right now. :unsure:
I have to go through it and sort it out. Maybe I'll knock together a website just to get it all sorted out; it's a real state.

It also ended up being kind of dead... :-/ Which is a shame, because it seems useful.


That would be really cool.

(Filters > Map > Make seamless) In Gimp 2 with any picture what y like an texture.

source: http://yorik.uncreated.net/tutorials/treemaking.html stage 5 / bark makin

That actually tends to produce catastrophic results with most textures. Plus, the resulting tiling frequency is doubled, if anyone understands what that means.

It's easier to just use the offset filter in Photoshop then remove the seams using the clone stamp tool, I'm not sure what the equivalent tools are in Gimp/Paintshop, but it can probably be done the same way in them.

I believe we should move to make this a staple to a certain website. What do you think, E_W? If you would conglomerate it, then I can post it. However, you want to do it..

I vote the website should be a wiki.

That would be the awesomerest!

What do you mean that my bumps lack subtlety? :unsure:

Holy lizard, how the heck I missed this!
I always have problems with finding textures, since very few on net are something I need and from site that gives it for free. Bookmarking!

Also, why is this not a stickie??

Well, because if it was a sticky then no one would ever read it.
I'm glad that you're glad to see it - I was starting to wonder if it had outlived its usefulness! After all, I haven't even checked the links to see if they're still on-line for... over a year. :unsure:
Make sure to catch http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=727009&st=100. That one's a blinder.

Edit:
Hypnotised... by... avatar...

Oh, what about http://www.spiralgraphics.biz/packs/index.htm



Man, I'll spend days checking everything and bookmarking
As for working links, I've went trough most of them from 1st post, all the ones I've opened still work.



:hehe:

Someone should go through that list. It was made a while back and some links are dead.

Yeah, well, I might have a little down-time on the weekend which I could spend sorting this out. :unsure:
Unless Chaka was serious about spending days looking through them himself :hehe:


Cheers.
I think(?) Skydye linked that one on page #6. A different page, but same site.

He did!