JEV3's Texture Design Workshop for SAGE

[JEV3]

For those of you that missed it, I held a texture design workshop for sagexpo... which ran about two hours and sent everybody but Prime and myself to sleep. It includes some discussion on texture design in general, pointers on how to handle textures in a 3d area.

For your convenience, here are my notes which serve basically to outline the discussion.

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Basic Texture Design for 3d Environment
Description: Outlines basic procedure for designing texture themes for a basic 3d game.

0: Wait for everybody to show up; general chat

1: Describe difference between 2d visuals and 3d visuals... Introduce SRB2 as the game I'll be designing textures for during this workshop.

2: Discuss basic do's and dont's:

-a: Never texture blindly, always have a plan
-b: Stay consistent, especially within the same level
-c: Work with a palette
-d: Plan the texture by the distance it must cover
-e: Keep in mind how much modular design the level will have to use the textures
-f: Don't be discouraged, you will always end up scrapping more textures than you will use

**Questions: Non-blocky texturing and skinning**

3: Design Process Step 1 - Brainstorming (will take suggestions on what theme to work on)

4: Design Process Step 2 - Proof of Concept (sketch a concept and scan it/upload it... discuss what may work and what may not)

5: Design Process Step 3 - Texturing (will choose a relatively easy texture to make and upload various progress images while discussing what's been done to achieve the desired effect) LINK

6: Design Process Step 4 - Cleanup/Critique (time-permitting, will polish the texture up and discuss what works and what doesn't)

7: Questions: Animated Textures
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You can find the full transcript HERE

If I wasn't so tired (read: lazy) I would turn this into a tutorial, but for now enjoy the transcript and I hope some of you find this helpful.

 

[BlueZero4]

It's very cool to see the approach you use when planning out textures for your levels. I'm not trying to question that.

It's probably just because I'm a level designer and not a texture artist, but I like using subtle textures because they fall back and let the level geometry shine through. My ultimate goal is to create a memorable setpiece which looks great because of the the sum of its parts. That was easy in 1.09.4 because of the boring, overused textures that didn't distract people. In 2.0, I think we're going to see both players and designers focus on the visually busy textures and completely miss the level underneath.

I remember that NSZ1 had boring pink sand next to boring yellow sand next to boring GFZROCK2. It looked cool because it came together to be a unified beach and not a few interesting textures used sporadically.

 

[JEV3]

It's probably just because I'm a level designer and not a texture artist, but I like using subtle textures because they fall back and let the level geometry shine through. My ultimate goal is to create a memorable setpiece which looks great because of the the sum of its parts. That was easy in 1.09.4 because of the boring, overused textures that didn't distract people. In 2.0, I think we're going to see both players and designers focus on the visually busy textures and completely miss the level underneath.

That is an interesting point, and I'm pretty sure I mentioned that the textures you make are going to be largely affected by how much "modular decoration" you're going to use with it. They need to be more specific whereas others can stand out more... this is where the more dull textures come in.

Because I can't afford to get too complicated with geometry in SRB2, I tried to make many of these textures in such a way that their memorable patterns can stand out over large distances. Basically I'm striving for the same unity you are, but we both use different styles.

This is actually one of the things I want to focus on for 2.1 because while the textures are great, their application could probably use some work pretty much all across the board to make them consistent... unfortunately I did not have time to adapt to all the new detail being added and I've spent many a day in 'dev complaining about it. I'm pretty sure that you can still use some of the new textures for the kind of style you are looking for.

Wish you could have been there last night, this would have made an interesting discussion. I was hoping for more input like this, but it was kind of quiet last night.

 

[BlueZero4]

During said discussion, I had a friend staying the night, so...

Whoops!

 

[verifiaman]

So you take notes! thats how you remember what you're suppposed to do!