CREATING GAME ART FOR 3D ENGINES- P5

CREATING GAME ART FOR 3D ENGINES- P5: Iwish to thank the editing team at Charles River Media (Emi Smith,Karen Gill, Jennifer Blaney, and Jenifer Niles) for their help in gettingthis book publish-ready. Thanks, too, to my technical editor, MikeDuggan. Also deserving recognition are the guys who make the TorqueGame Engine available, GarageGames, who directly or indirectly madethis book and the accompanying CD possible. In particular, I want tothank Joe Maruschak at GarageGames for the great articles and forumanswers that have helped me and many others get a handle on this engine.I...
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CREATING GAME ART FOR 3D ENGINES- P598 Creating Game Art for 3D Engines layers pallet as often as you might think; consider working without these tools while you are painting your images and using the I key to activate the ink dropper and the B key to switch to using the brush. Use the Alt+Tab key combination to bounce between 3ds Max and Photoshop. Using Layers for Flexibility Layers tend to be underused in Photoshop. Just as in other software solutions, layers add power and flexibility to your design process. With layers, you can move and manipulate different aspects of your design separately. Without layers, you commit too quickly to different changes and lose the flexibility to make further changes long after the design is completed. Using Layer Effects There is a tremendous amount of power available in Layer Effects. Highlights, drop shadows, bevels, and other effects can be set up and saved as a Layer Style and easily applied to any other layer, in any file. Using Layer Effects, you can almost instantly create shadowed and highlighted textures that look 3D. Many of the tex- tures in this chapter utilize Layer Effects. Using Layer Masks for Nondestructive Editing When we erase a portion of an image for any reason, as soon as we save, those erased pixels are gone forever. By using a Layer Mask, we preserve the entire image. If you erase too much, Layer Masking allows you to paint it back in, even a year later. This is because the Layer Mask allows you to paint-add or paint-subtract on an image, using any size, style, or opacity of brush you prefer. Layer Masking is described in more detail in the later section “Texturing the Oil Drum.” Using Actions to Save Time We can minimize repetition in Photoshop by using actions. Actions allow you to record commands and then repeat that sequence of commands automatically as needed by clicking a button. One of the processes that takes a lot of repetition is the saving out of a PSD file so that you can check your texture in 3ds Max. Although you cannot use the native PSD file for the actual texture in the game, it is sufficient for checking how the texture is coming together on the model in 3ds Max. Usually you will find something wrong with the texture, meaning you must go back and tweak it, turn off the template layer, save the texture, take a look, turn on the tem- plate layer, tweak again, and so on. Every time you do these types of tasks, it costs you time. Making an action in Photoshop takes about one minute and pays for itself the first day you implement it. For an action to work smoothly, you need to keep your templates on a standard layer name, like template. Use as many layers as you Chapter 4 Texturing Game Art 99need to make the texture work; the texture as you see it, but with the template layerturned off, is what you will have on your model when you are finished. It is better to wait on actions until you are comfortable with the sequences youare trying to automate. When you are ready to automate any task, the procedure tocreate an action is as follows (see Figure 4.1): 1. Make sure the Actions pallet is up. 2. From the flyout on the right, select Create New Action. 3. Give the action a name (call it SaveNoTemplate) and assign a function key (F12). 4. Click the Record button. 5. Turn off the template layer. 6. Save the PSD file with Ctrl+S (so that you are not prompted for a name to save to). 7. Turn on the template layer. 8. Click the Stop button at the bottom of the Actions pallet to stop the recording. Make sure Toggle Dialog On/Off is turned off so that you will not be promptedto name the exported file. You can find this toggle in the Actions pallet to the left ofeach listed action. If both Photoshop and 3ds Max are open and this action is implemented, youwill be able to change the texture while the template is visible and press F12 to seean updated texture on your model. You can flip between Photoshop and 3ds Max byusing the Alt+Tab keys. Being able to see the results quickly and easily on the modelwill improve your result. If you have a dual-screen setup, you can keep both appli-cations visible at once and work even more efficiently.Preparing the UV TemplateFigure 4.2 shows a basic template layer setup in Photoshop. The background layerhas been converted to a regular layer and renamed as template. A new layer wascreated for the actual texture and thus named texture. The template layer has beendragged above the texture layer so that it is on top. The Blend mode of the templatelayer is set to Screen ...