Research & Development for 3D & the Web

Creating Seamless textures and Images for tiling. This process can be used for things like ground textures or a wall or a website background - anything that you want to use a smaller image and repeat it across something many times and have it look as though it joins up in the horizontal and vertical axis neatly. In Photoshop, grab or create your image, clean it up and then go to Filter > Other > Offset. Choose an appropriate value to offset in the horizonatal and vertical axis and hit OK. Read more [...]

nDo – Good little photoshop plugin for normal maps

Check it out here:

http://www.philipk.net/tutorials/ndo/ndo.html

Works well if you set your settings to be less than what you know you will end up requiring and then applying it to your photoshop layer, setting it as an overlay layer and then duplicating it a few times until you’re happy before merging the duplicate layers.

Firstly, set your colour selection wand to one pixel tolerance with no aliasing if the colours are very flat and not blended or aliased on the edges and click the colour spot you want to edit. With that colour highlighted, select 'Similar' from the Select menu. All colours that are similar will now be highlighted / selected. You can then delete the colour - deleting replaces those pixels with the background colour, or makes the layer hollow in that space, or you can select Fill from the Edit menu Read more [...]

This post looks at one of the techniques for creating an eye texture. This technique uses the smudge tool. Make a square canvas in Photoshop. Use CTRL-R to bring up the ruler and hide the ruler. On the ruler, drag across until you are at the middle of the x and y axis so that you have a guide line intersecting at the exact middle of the canvas. Circular Marquee - from the middle, hold alt so that it gets created from the center and then hold shift so that it is a perfect circle, all Read more [...]

A quick, rough bunch of notes relating to Specular Mapping in Photoshop/Maya A 'Specular Map' controls the shininess of a model. Start by hiding all layers apart from the UV layout layer. Make a new layer and name it something to do with 'specular' so you know what it is for.. Grab a white colour and a soft brush and paint white onto wherever you want there to be shininess. It's a good idea to use Gaussion Blur for the layer too so the edges are much softer. UNDER the shiny layer, Read more [...]