How to create good art?
Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Beginners Area/How to create good art?
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| Does anyone know how to draw good art/textures for games? I'm using Microsoft paint, and at the moment my art is not so good.Any advice? |
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| Paint Shop Pro (www.jasc.com) |
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| 1. Don't use MSPaint- it's the worst graphics application on the planet. Get Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, or the GIMP (that's in order of highest to lowest priced). 2. Spend four years learning how to draw right. Study lighting and color theory, take some life-drawing classes, etc. 3. Make stuff on a daily basis. That's an over-simplified summary of the 'steps' (all lies, mwahaha- no). I know how to 'draw good art/textures for games', but it took me 4 years (I'm one of those self-taught people). If you've got the cash, it's probably best if you just contract someone to do it for you. |
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| You should try Wally, its freeware. I like to start in Wally export to photoshop or paintshop pro and then back to wally to make sure that it tiles seamlesly. Only wally has that feature...I think. |
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| Paint Shop Pro 8, 7 or even 6 lets you do seamless tiling if you know what the control is called. There are several freeware programs out there for Windows... Wally is "acceptable" but tetchy! I reccomend you go to www.snapfiles.com and search the freeware for drawing / painting programs... I also reccomend you go to www.turbosquid.com and look for FREE textures... Textures are all over the internet. If you use Google Image Search you can see bazillions... OK maybe not bazillions but a great many! The problem is that textures are becoming to be used like fonts. fonts are free. I care less what anyone says in the USA fonts are free. So what about textures??? Ah theres the rub... and it certainly will rub someone the wrong way. Lets say you find a great texture for your dungeon wall on a "Free Textures" website. You use it. You manage to make a game that people buy. One day some lawyervampires show up at the site of your game company with a lawsuit from Guiseppe Blow who claims he created the texture you used. What happens... Oy! It should depend on the country you are in but it will indeed be interestng. That said... I make my own. --RZ |
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| I'd go with Paint Shop Pro 8! Its affordable and comes with a very well written manual. Then get out there with you're digital camera and collect some good texture starting points. (don't use images you find on google-images....you could have a lawsuit on you're hands....of course if you make it unrecognizable then you only have to deal with the guilt factor:P) Now there is only so much you can do with photo editing tricks, so I would encourage you to buy a Wacom tablet. They aren't cheap, but they last forever. This will allow you to make lots of freehand touches and so on. |
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| Here's some tips for creating realistic textures: First, get a decent paint program that supports layers. I reccomend Photoshop. Next, get yourself some photographic source material. Metal, brick, dirt. Now, cut out a section of your source material which is square, and then scale the image to 512x512, or 256x256. Textures hsould always be powers of 2. Now, copy your texture to a second layer, and blur it by 64 pixels. Then make that layer black and white. Then invert it so white is black. Then make the layer "soft light" or if you don't have that, try multiply. Fade the layer until the lighting over the image looks fairly even. Now that you've evened out the lighting, use the offset filter in your paint package to offset the texture by half it's width and height, with wrapping turned on. The edges of the texture should now be in the middle. Use the clone brush to copy peices of the texture from the corners and paint with them over the middle to remove the visible seams. The healing brush in the latest version of photoshop is especially good for this. Now you have a seamless texture which should tile without too many ugly repeating light patterns or seams. If you're trying to do stuff wirh brick you'll need to distort the image before you do the offset step to try and line up the lines in the image from one side to the other. Having the grid turned on will help. Painting over the seams will then be easier. Also make sure when you crop the initial image you choose edges that will either have whole or half bricks there or else you'll never be able to make seamless brick. Now here's the fun part. Let's assume oyu've made a seamless metal texture. All you need to do now to make it interesting is add beveling and holes. To do that, you make a layer on top of it, and then make some 50% grey shapes in there. Then you use the bevel modifer to make these shapes appear to indent inwards or outwards. SHARP bevels will generally look more professional and realistic than soft bevels. So don't make the bevels too rounded unless you're going for a specific effect. Now that you have a beveled grey square that looks like it goes in or outward, set the layer to soft light. Or if you don't have soft light, copy the layer, and make one copy multiply, and one copy screen. You can also use dodge and burn but you'll have to turn the layer transparency way down or it will look like crap. Finally, add holes. To make holes, first make a grey beveled shape. The brightness of the middle will be unaffected. Btw, sometimes you might want to make your bevel grey a bit darker to make the low part of the bevel a bit darker than the high part of the main texture cause it adds depth... Okay so now you have a bevel. Now make another layer on top of the bevel and make a black shape to fit the middle. Voila. "Hole" Here's another tip. Pay attention to lighting. For wall tiles, make the bevels have light from the top of the texture, down. So inner bevels should have the bright part on the bottom. In most levels, light comes from the sky. But for floor tiles, you don't want to do that. In fact, you may not want much beveleing at all, but you can try to have a little. Foor tiles are lit from a number of directions so a bevel in any one particular direction might be exactly the opposite direction of whatever light source happens to be in the room. So bevels on floors are generally a no no. Instead, try making black holes. But under the black hole layer, make white holes with a slight blur, and then set those to screen or dodge and fade the layer a lot. That will make the area around the black hole appear to be scuffed metal. Finally, let's assume you did not start out with a metal texture but instead started out with a plain grey background. Well, just stick a metal texture over everything and set it to multiply. Then adjust the brightness and contrast until you get a good effect. Make it really bright and you'll get a nice dirty look to your metal. But if you up the contrast, and brighten it up you can make some bits be very dirty and other bit be clean. Adding dirt in this way is the key to making realistic looking textures. You can also use an alpha map to paint dirt only into the corners of the texture or only dripping from the holes in a wall. You can also paint in streaks and stuff coming down from holes and that works well. Jut make lots of random lines going down and the blur them, and then maybe up the contrast of that layer assuming you painted on a white background and the layer is set to multiply. That will de blur them a bit if you up the contrast. But the blurring will help the lines to run together. Phew. Well that's a lot of details but that's pretty much how I make my textures. |
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| It also requieres something called 'talent' :) |
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| Talent is helpful, but you can make a lot of nice textures if you're a no talent hack using Photoshop and the methods I outlined above. Just don't try to model ancient greece unless you can go to greece to take photos of all the sculptures. :-) |
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| You could also check out a book called "The Dark Side of Texture Mapping"....I think thats the title anyway. I picked it up at GDC and its a pretty good buy. It assumes you have no freehand artistic skill, thus teaching you photoshop tricks to the hilt. But you still need that freehand touch if you want you're textures to look like more than a heap of photoshop effects:P hehe |
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| You can't go far wrong with http://www.texturemaker.com I just knocked up this texture for example in less than 30 seconds.  *texture is public domain and free for all to use. If you have photographic media to start from the results can be even more unique but I suppose if you want mind blowing art then you will need an artist i.e. someone with talent hehe. |
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| I'll spare you my ranting, but seriously, what kind of question is that? How to create good art? Practice, duh! |
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| take some life-drawing classes Only 374 days to go until I can do one without my parents permission! But again, like the others said, it takes time and practice, and crap loads of study...my suggestion, start with simple geometrics and apply different forms of principles (balance, texture, rhythm, etc, arty terms) to it, then try mixing them, then do the same to other objects until you've mastered that crap, then start doing...well, the stuff you need to make. :-/ |
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| Follow these steps: pose, sketch, block colors, pick light source, shade, refine. Pose: rough out the pose / scene. Do this using primatives, lines and anything to build up the shapes of your character / scene. sketch: rough out some detail into your image, using your pose step as a guideline. Doesn't at all need to be detailed. This is the key, to not worry about the finer detail until a later point. block colors: Fill in areas with block colors, envolves simply going over your sketch areas. pick light source(s): It is essential you choose your type of light source, and where the lights are coming from. If you don't keep this globally during the entire image, everything will look completly wrong. Also think about the materials in your scene. Metal will shine, and reflect.. cloth will absorb light, and have many creases and folds that have soft shadow. shade: this is the hardest part. You need to build up your colors, try to look at what your surface is comprised of, then slowly water color / smooth the colors together until you get the style you want. refine: this is where you bring your image to life. Add in light shines, minor creeases and generally add the really small details, that "make" an image. It's a long process, and it is what puts people off, but just practice this drawing method (for anything) and you'll see it produces good results. A good way to practice, is to take a photo, and copy it by hand. It should teach you about how light falls, and is recieved. Which of course, is the key to good art. |
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| Another very fine freeware paint program, well the older version is, Dog Waffle! I was amazed at this program, and also for freehand / anime type drawing, textures etc.. I highly also reccomend: Pixia, Image Forge I use both of these programs on a daily basis, also might I reccomend Tattoo, for painting textures directly onto models, and a good Wacom drawing tablet, which I could not live without once I got used to it. I use Milkshape3D,Tattoo,Image Forge for pretty much all my model/texture work. This of course combined with the above mentioned suggestions, and some talent ;') would get you well on your way. Have Fun and Good Luck! Welcome to the Blitz Family, BTW. |
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| Does anyone know how to draw good art/textures for games? Its very easy. Learn to draw. |
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| Not sure about the art. There are many tutorials for computer based drawing/art which you can find at gamedev.net. My 2D art improved from hopeless to 'not so hopeless' when I bought a drawing tablet. In addition, get to know the graphics package you're using. If you are taking textures from photos then there is a great book called "The Dark Side of Game Texturing" by David Franson. You might also like "Game Art for Teens" by Les Pardew. Hope it helps... P.S. When did 'Teen' replace 'Beginner' in book titles? Very annoying. |
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| Tonyg is right, you simply must have a drawing tablet. Drawing with a mouse is like drawing with a bar of soap!!! You will also learn everything by screwing up alot first. I became pretty good at sprite animation after 3 months of trial, error, and a pantload of coffee:) |
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| So have any of you tried Painter Classic? Not that great for use with photos but I have made some...interesting art with it. "Paint Shop Pro 8, 7 or even 6 lets you do seamless tiling if you know what the control is called." Darn! I just have Paint Shop pro 5 LE. Even so, Do these programs let you see your drawing tiled like wally does? Mabye I need to upgrade. |
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| Paint shop pro 5 is still my favorite tool !! Easy handling and you can get good results. Here are some of my textures : http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=30899#329385 Also check out this plug-ins for Psp: (Makes your life much easier) http://www.btinternet.com/~cateran/simple/ And some pretty good tutorials : http://www.pinoy7.com/psptutorials/default.htm |
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| wheres he gone? He hasnt replied to anyone in this post. |
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| last one out.. turn off the light |
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| Over 5000 free seamless textures at: http://www.grsites.com/textures/ |
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