Tileable texture work

The past days I’ve been working on textures for a level in Mechropolis. It has been a bit of trial and error for me, as the first iterations was way too realistic. We decided early on to not bake textures from high poly 3D models as it would take too much time, so I went 2D at once. But default when I made a stone texture, I tried to make it look as realistic as possible, all while forgetting that it isn’t in our intended art style and that we’re going for a much more stylized approach. I had to go back to the drawing board, and had some discussions about what exactly we wanted it to look like.

Going back and forth, I decided to try and paint the texture by hand in Photoshop instead of sampling photos and use too many textured brushes. Doing so was proving a bit difficult, especially when making the textures tileable. It’s a challenge to make a tileable texture look interesting, while still keeping obvious pattern from appearing and making it too repetative. It must look like cave wall, but it must fit with our art style. In the end, this painted  texture was something that we decided to keep.

The diffuse map

Although the art is stylized, we still use normal maps so after finishing the diffuse, I generated the normal by using CrazyBump. It works pretty well to to a good normal map from a painting, but I need to fiddle a lot with the  variables, as well as some minor tweekings in Photoshop after, to make it look right like we want to. Making a specular map for the texture is easily done in Photoshop.

The tiled texture, with specular and normal maps in the Unity engine (…but not the final lightning)

It took some time to get all this right and make it look good in Unity, but after I finished this texture I immediatly felt like I got a hang of t and I’ve done several rock and gravel floor- and metal textures, using the same principle. It feels good to see the first level starting to come together!