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OK so, first thing I'll say is, everyone has their own preference/opinion on what they think is "good texturing" - that's fine and I appreciate that.
But when I see stuff like this;
+ Show Spoiler +
And then replies like this;
+ Show Spoiler +On July 30 2011 01:43 WniO wrote:
the textures look good, but a bit plain
I die a little inside. (Note: Absolutely zero offense meant to either EffectS or WniO, the objective here is to help people improve - this was simply the first relevant image I found)
So, with that in mind, I made a basic video tutorial on how to blend textures for a natural and aesthetically pleasing appearance.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0SVouUAcWM&fmt22
Normally I use my wacom tablet for this sort of thing, but in this case I used the mouse - something I hope each of you guys have - and so will be able to recreate. And yes, I know my mic is a bit quiet/not the best, I'll boost the volume in any new videos if it's a problem.
I know Bel'Shir may not have been the best texture set to use to demonstrate cause it tends to look quite nice regardless, but the same method applies elsewhere.
If people like this/find it useful I may be tempted to make more video tutorials.
Poll: Was this tutorial useful to you?Yes (8) 47% Maybe a little bit (7) 41% No (2) 12% 17 total votes Your vote: Was this tutorial useful to you? (Vote): Yes
(Vote): Maybe a little bit
(Vote): No
Poll: More tutorials?Yes (25) 100% No! (0) 0% 25 total votes Your vote: More tutorials? (Vote): Yes
(Vote): No!
Thanks for reading/watching.
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Good tutorial for the basics, overlapping textures is one of the fundamentals to reach natural looking aesthetics! 
(mechanical textures benefit less from overlapping, and can sometimes look really ugly when overlapped together, but mechanical stuff + dirt or rock can look awesome when overlapped).
I wonder why people always seem to forget that there is a falloff option 
I almost always use a large (6-10) brush with very low increments (10-40 ish) with the falloff set to 100. This will make the blending that funcmode made in the video above slightly easier as you already have the gradient "built in" into the brush.
But then I am someone who usually goes over the same area several times with very transparent brushes to paint "layers" of textures.
Anyway, keep it up funcmode! It is good stuff!
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I don't like when the brush is very large with a big falloff because it makes the overview picture look blurry. You lose details. A big size is for big open areas without detail and a small size is for cliffs and around doodads. You have to paint around doodads and details the same way as the cliff in the tutorial, but with less contrast.
The important settings are the speed to very fast and the increment to something like 10-16 or lower. This way you have a smooth stroke instead of a series of dots. The fractal and noise brushes are useful but they're too slow for my computer.
Another important setting is to switch to the low graphics settings (File/Preferences/Video). Low Shaders help differenciate textures, there'll be more saturation and contrast between them. Low terrain will remove foliage and will help with the framerate which will help having a smooth stroke. View/Show Lighting/None is good too.
When you're painting empty areas, think of your textures as a palette of different colors and not in terms of what textures look like. Sometimes textures can also represent variations of the same color, lighter or darker. Use darker textures to fake occlusion in corners, and lighter textures to give emphasis on edges and make them look rounder. Also take care not to have the same stroke painting the top and bottom of the cliff at the same time. Try to have 2 different textures at the top and bottom.
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Why don't you just use max fall off and/or texture blur tool? Achieves the same effect with a tenth of the effort you just showed in that video.
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On November 03 2011 23:51 chuky500 wrote:
I don't like when the brush is very large with a big falloff because it makes the overview picture look blurry. You lose details. A big size is for big open areas without detail and a small size is for cliffs and around doodads. You have to paint around doodads and details the same way as the cliff in the tutorial, but with less contrast.
The important settings are the speed to very fast and the increment to something like 10-16 or lower. This way you have a smooth stroke instead of a series of dots. The fractal and noise brushes are useful but they're too slow for my computer.
Another important setting is to switch to the low graphics settings (File/Preferences/Video). Low Shaders help differenciate textures, there'll be more saturation and contrast between them. Low terrain will remove foliage and will help with the framerate which will help having a smooth stroke. View/Show Lighting/None is good too.
When you're painting empty areas, think of your textures as a palette of different colors and not in terms of what textures look like. Sometimes textures can also represent variations of the same color, lighter or darker. Use darker textures to fake occlusion in corners, and lighter textures to give emphasis on edges and make them look rounder. Also take care not to have the same stroke painting the top and bottom of the cliff at the same time. Try to have 2 different textures at the top and bottom.
You're absolutely right, this tutorial is simply supposed to be a very basic introduction to blending textures - obviously you can go much deeper, thanks for the post!
On November 04 2011 00:21 a176 wrote:
Why don't you just use max fall off and/or texture blur tool? Achieves the same effect with a tenth of the effort you just showed in that video.
Personally I prefer the additional control I feel this method gives, but like I said at the beginning, to each his own.
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I would love to see more videos on different texturing techniques you use, Func. Please do more. =)
Personally, I don't think gradual blending is effective unless all the textures involved are natural blanket textures like grass or dirt (without rocks and cracks). I'm not sure how many people are like me, but when I look at textures I often just see the bitmaps. >.> So I prefer to use an "illustrative" style that focuses on portraying an idea because it won't look realistic to me no matter what. With the exception of grasses basically.
Of course there are many many subtle styles you can use at texture edges and blend zones to create entirely different perceptions of the essentially the same basic texture choices, which is where the real mastery lies--and this is what takes up all the time, so I don't pursue it much. ><
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My votes were "maybe a little bit" and "yes". This was not an earth-shattering revelation, but it was interesting to see what kind of technique you use. Something more interesting (to me anyway) would be your decision making with different textures to get the effect you were trying to achieve. The mechanics may be a part of that, but your overall strategy each time cannot just simply be "well, I'm going to layer this texture on that texture around every edge" as I think you were criticizing in your "die a little inside" example.
What I would really like to see out of you (along the lines of the mechanics rather than the thought process) is a lighting video -- I think you have at least one map (submitted to the TL contest?) where your walls look like they are glowing. I could not seem to find the right references on this because I couldn't seem to get the omni lights to work.
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The goal for texturing imo is to make it look natural, like with Bel'shir it just feels natural to have longer/darker grass next to walls and lighter grass on open fields.
Also if you're interested in lighting you should check the VOD of iGrok's light tutorial (don't ask me about a link though :/)
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On November 05 2011 13:53 FlopTurnReaver wrote:
The goal for texturing imo is to make it look natural, like with Bel'shir it just feels natural to have longer/darker grass next to walls and lighter grass on open fields.
Also if you're interested in lighting you should check the VOD of iGrok's light tutorial (don't ask me about a link though :/)
Yes, but you don't just go into a map and say "ok, terrain is done, I want this to look natural" and poof your aesthetic just does itself. You have something that you want to do and then you try to do that *and* you try to make it look natural. Even in making something look "natural" you could have different takes on what is natural for a given section of the map. For example on your map, Hellvetia, you decided to take a much broader point of view on the aesthetic and shaded different regions differently, but on the whole blended the sections of the map much differently than most do where the aesthetics generally just get mirrored along with the terrain. You did this to good effect and with the lava theme it looks very "natural" and was a neat take on map aesthetics. This however, was much more transparent an aesthetic decision (to me anyway) than saying "it just feels natural to have longer/darker grass next to walls and lighter grass on the open fields." Granted in a grassy area the shady undisturbed corners generally tend to get more easily overgrown, by what made you choose to go that route instead of something else that might be equally "natural" but different. You might say this is just style or preference, but I'd like to hear the thought process why you chose to make it look "natural" in the particular way that you did. And by "you" I mean funcmode or whoever is stepping up to do a tutorial.
Edit: Did you mean his lighting packs? I don't see a VOD in there...
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On November 05 2011 13:48 HypertonicHydroponic wrote:
My votes were "maybe a little bit" and "yes". This was not an earth-shattering revelation, but it was interesting to see what kind of technique you use. Something more interesting (to me anyway) would be your decision making with different textures to get the effect you were trying to achieve. The mechanics may be a part of that, but your overall strategy each time cannot just simply be "well, I'm going to layer this texture on that texture around every edge" as I think you were criticizing in your "die a little inside" example.
What I would really like to see out of you (along the lines of the mechanics rather than the thought process) is a lighting video -- I think you have at least one map (submitted to the TL contest?) where your walls look like they are glowing. I could not seem to find the right references on this because I couldn't seem to get the omni lights to work.
The end goal of any texturing job is to provide contrast to the player. To let them quickly evaluate with their eyes rather than their brains where cliffs start and end, different paths and directions around the map, etc. This is important because in SC2, and most RTS, the angled view means there might be situations where low and high terrain may otherwise be indistinguishable if you don't take take to make the proper contrast.
Using a dark to light scheme is the most effective way of achieving this. Making it look 'natural' is just another way of saying 'making it look good'.
And cliff glow, use the 'Back' lighting key for that. For localized cliff glow i use large omni lights, just place them next the cliff. You can modify the size of these lights just like any other doodad to make the light cover a larger area if needed.
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@HypertonicHydroponic - I apologize I never went into the thought process behind *why* things should look the way they do - this was never my intention anyway, this tutorial was always supposed to be about the technique and not the concept. a176 and Flop pretty much summed up my opinions though, differentiation between cliff levels is absolutely key to good texturing.
Also, the "glowing cliffs" you refer to can only be Neonights + Show Spoiler + - in which I just used cyan omni lights to illuminate the cliff edges, the lighting itself I think is just default Shakuras.
This tutorial seemed to be somewhat helpful for most people, which is good, and there's an overwhelmingly positive response to more tutorials - so I ask you guys - if I made more tutorials, what subjects would you want me to cover?
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No need to apologize, as your poll shows, the tutorial was entirely helpful to some people to see your technique. I was just clarifying my poll vote since "maybe a little bit" could mean a lot of different things. Again, I would say an answer like "to differentiate cliff levels" is like "to look natural" in that it is a guiding principle rather than a design decision. In general you want to do these things, but *why* you choose each specific *how* is something I'd be interested to hear. For example, your *how* in this video is not "to shade dark around the columns and gradient to the middle where the grass is light to non-existent", that is just the technique, your *how* is "to make it look like the old stone tiles are getting overrun by vegetation". Obviously your were trying to make it look *natural* or good, and you are also highlighting where the cliff level is. But *why* did you choose to do that in this specific way with this tile set? You could have taken another artistic direction with this tile set, one that looks just as good/interesting and differentiating of cliff levels, could you not? But why the one you choose? I hope I am being more clear about what would interest me in the next tutorial, even if you decide its main focus will be on techinque.
As for the omni lights... ::sigh:: do you have a reference for this? I've tried using omni lights, but they just don't seem to work for me and I really don't know why. I read somewhere that you have to turn up your graphics. Mainly I have everything set to low because my FPS on anything else is horrible. But when I did set it to high to test the omni lights I was using, it still didn't show up. Do you just drop them on the map or is there some way you have to activate them or what? What could be causing them not to show up? Do they have to be at a certain height above the ground? My "next tutorial" vote is for lighting -- even if it is only technique. 
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EPT![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/3lb3w.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/1lLUX.jpg)
