Elder Scrolls Forum: Texturing - How do you guys do it?

First off, I use Photoshop 7.
Secondly, I ALWAYS have both Photoshop and the TESCS open at the same time to check on my progress.

It depends on what you are trying to do Frostie. If you are trying to implement a character from another game, or anywhere else for that matter, you just need source photos to work from. Its alot of trial and error to get things to look correct.

What I usually do is look for strong lines that stand out from the source picture and try to plot them out on my texture so that they are where I think they should go on my mesh. I then switch over to the TESCS and see where the lines sit. I then work back and forth to get the lines in the areas that I want them. Once I have my initial planning done I fill in between the lines, on a seperate layer, and slowly pull together what the piece is suppost to look like. I generally end up with ALOT of layers, (the last head I textured had something like 50 layers) most are not used in the end but are there for reference or incase I want to keep something seperate to pull from later on (the head ended up using 3 layers).

Its mostly trial and error, and time, alot of time. The above technique can be used for compeletly original works. Granted, its alittle harder unless you have what you want already planned out in your head. For anything totally original, I usually draw it out the best I can on paper. It doesn't have to be perfect, as long as you know what you are looking for and at.

Tip 1: First, drop the item you are retexturing into the render window. If its an original mesh you should only see the multi-colored poly map. When ever you make a change to the texture, save it as a .dds, .tga, or .bmp (whichever your mesh points to.) Then go into your TESCS and up to the view menu. Switch to the preview window (This usually shows animations of parts selected from one of the item menus). Wait a few secodns then switch back to the render window. This will make TESCS update the texture information and it should now show whatever changes you made.

Tip 2: I use bright colored lines to mark where bends in the mesh are when I first start doing the texture. This also works well on re-textures because they are easy to see on the previous texture.

Tip 3: HAVE SEVERAL SAVES. At the end of a project I generally have anywhere from 3-10 photoshop files saved serperately incase I mess something up and have to copy and paste a portion of texture from a previous save. I usually save a new .psd after each texturing session, no matter how small the change. Plus, you never know when something will go horribly wrong, like saving the flattened image as a .psd instead of the .bmp you meant it to be, and not realizing until next time you open the .psd to work on it. Or even worse, saving it, flattened, as a .psd and not realizing it until you have used the blend tool so many times that you can't back track to un-flatten the image. (I have done both too many times to count.

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Tip 4: BACK UP YOUR FILES. try to save the original mesh/texture and the modified texture to a disk of some sort. I can't count how many projects have gone ghost lately due to Harddrive crashes.

Good luck, I hope this helped alittle.

[edit - wow, it took me so long to type this that the thread went from 4 replies to 12...]

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Edited by UnScathed (11/11/03 04:36 PM)

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