Design Methods

All of my textures were created in Adobe Photoshop at a size of 1024 pixels by 1024 pixels.

This is a wood texture. To create this I started off by selecting two wooden colours, one light and the other slightly darker. I then applied the fibres filter by going filter/ render/ fibres. In here I increased the variance slightly. I then applied a motion blur at an angle of 90 to stretch the fibres more. This created my wood but I wanted to make it look like that one panel can fit into the next one. I did this by using the rectangular marquee tool and creating a selection from top to bottom but very thin. I then filled this with black and added an inner shadow to it. I then reduced the fill of that layer and duplicated it 2 more times over my texture.

This is my marble texture. I made this making sure my foreground and background colours were black and white. I then applied the clouds filter then applied the difference clouds filter. I repeated the render clouds filter a few more times. I then duplicated this layer and chose the find edges filter. I then moved this layer behind the first and reduced the opacity of the top layer. After this I went image/ adjustment/ levels and increased the black slider and reduced the white one a bit.

This is my metal mesh texture. I made this texture by firstly creating a pattern of five circles in a smaller sized document. I then went back into my original document and filled the background with a lighter shade of black. I then made a new layer and filled it with a light grey. After this stage I added noise to it and then gave it a motion blur to stretch the noise out. I then simply went into the blending options for that layer and gave it a pattern overlay with my previously created pattern. I then selected of all the circles in the pattern and deleted them so I was left with holes. I then added the bevel and emboss option in the blending options.

This is my brick texture. I started off with an image of a red brick wall and used the rectangular marquee tool to get a long brick, and a short brick. With these two bricks, I took them into a new document and added some colour to them and added some lighting effects with the use of the channels. I then presented the bricks in the pattern of a line of short bricks then a line of long bricks. After that I used the clone tool, spot healing tool and the eraser to make each brick slightly varied in shape and pattern. I then filled the background with a light cream colour and added noise to it to give a cement effect.

This is a texture of denim. I started to make this by filling my background with a dark blue then creating a new layer and filling that with 50% grey. I changed the blend mode to multiply for that layer. I then went filter/ sketch/ halftone pattern the added another filter to it which was the mezzo tint, found in filter/ pixelate/ mezzo tint. I then duplicated this layer and rotated by 45 degrees and scaled it a bit bigger to fit the screen with no cut corners. I then changed this layers blend mode to soft light.

This is my grass texture. I created this by firstly filling my background with a green. I then added noise to it and put the amount up to 400, distribution to Gaussian and clicked the monochromatic box. I then went filter/ stylize/ wind and changed the method to stagger and the direction to from the left. I then rotated my image 90 degrees clockwise and repeated the process from applying the wind filter. I did this twice more to have blades of grass in all directions.

This is a texture of concrete pavement tiles. I did this by using the rounded rectangular tool to create the main shape. I then added the clouds filter to it and created a new layer with a greyish cream colour and turned the opacity down. I then went to the channels and duplicated one of them, then went into my lighting effects and selected this new channel under the texture channel option and changed my light type to directional. This gave a bumped effect to the tile. I then added grey to the background and some noise to it. After this I tiled it four times across and down then used the clone tool and the spot healing tool to make each tile different.

This is my tarmac texture. I started off making this by filling my background layer with black. I then simply added noise to it then went into the channels and duplicated one of them. Then with this selected I went back into my layers and went filter/ render/ lighting effects. In here I made my light type a directional one and changed the texture channel to my one that i had created. I then put the slider below it a more flat side rather than the mountainous side. I then created a new layer, making sure my foreground and background colours were black and a lighter shade of black, then went filter/ render/ clouds. I then reduce the opacity of this layer.

This is my rough wall texture. I started to create this by selecting 2 dark creamy brown colours. I then used the difference clouds filter a few times. After that I duplicated this layer and went filter/ stylize/ trace contour. I selected several parts of this layer with the magic wand tool, as it was separated, and deleted these selected parts. I then changed the levels of this layer and made it slightly darker. After that I gave it a drop shadow in the blending options and changed the angle to 0. This created an effect as if paint had peeled off. I then created a new layer 40% opacity and used several brushes to create scratches and dirt on the wall.

This is my glass texture. I made this by making my foreground and background colours white and a light grey. I then went filter/ render/ clouds. After that I applied a plastic wrap filter and changed the highlight strength to 8 and the detail and the smoothness to 15. I then went on to making the glass pattern. I did this by going filter/ distort/ glass. In here I edited the distortion to 20, the smoothness to1, the texture to blocks and the scaling up to 200%.

For this unit I had to create ten highly finished textures which can be used in an urban street environment and for future use in game design and 3D modelling. I also had to take into consideration whether these textures were natural or man-made. The theme that I chose to work with is a modern style theme. This theme would involve clean, smooth and sharp styled textures such as clean bricks, a variety of metals, water a possibly a few wooden textures.

To start with I completed some research. I firstly researched into textures as a whole by going outside and gathering photographs of textures from tree bark to drain covers. I then got some images of all types of textures from a single street. I photographed all components which were found in this street such as vents, curbs, garages, drains, lampposts and a phone box. I also gathered images of buildings from that street. This is where I got my idea for creating modern textures as it was a modern street and had many inspiring looking textures throughout it. I then created a mood board with images from this street to get a more precise idea on modern textures. Researching on-line was fairly useful to as there many tutorials to create these textures and there were a whole load of digital textures which others had made. This gave me a rough idea of how to produce my textures. I also took rubbing's of textures from outside.

After researching I went on to creating a mind map of all the different textures I could create. This involved textures such as tarmac, stone, marble, concrete, clean cut bricks, glass, steel, wood and grass. I then did some experimentation work to try to see how I could create them. During the experiments, I accidental discovered how to create other textures, as half way through creating a pavement texture it looked like tarmac which I found helpful.

I had to present the work I had already done to peers as I would be able to gather feedback of what to change and what I still needed to do. From this I found I only had to create my final ten textures.

After this I decided upon the techniques in which I would be creating my final textures as this gave me the opportunity to have many variations of textures so I could find the best method. I also followed a couple of tutorials on-line as I couldn’t find a way to create certain textures that I wanted. Once I had my final ten textures there were some which I weren’t entirely happy with as they were not as realistic as though they could have been. I therefor decided to reproduce them but with a few variations until I got the result I was looking for.

If I were to do this again I would choose a ruins styled theme as after researching on-line I found there were a lot of grungy based textures which would have been ideal if I chose that theme.

The importance of creating your own work is crucial as it allows you the rights to control the ways in which that material may be used. Therefore if you use somebody else’s, they might not be happy and it could end up in court.