Week 2 rolls around (a bit late, granted, but I'm here :) - today we're going to take a look at a very basic technique I use a lot to control the color of my textures (source art is notoriously tricky, and typical methods of color altering can lead to more trouble than they're worth).

BACKGROUND - Blank, as usual.

LAYER 1 - This is, really, the most important part of the texture. It's an extremely simple layer, but it's going to be a primary factor in controlling the color of our texture. I just filled the layer with brown, ran "add noise" at a relatively high setting (with "monochrome" checked), and then ran "despeckle" several times. Sometimes this leaves weird little non-despeckled artifacts. That's okay. Just clone over them while you're making it tile (which you do, of course, by offsetting by 128v/128h).

LAYER 2 - I think this is some rocks I found through lycos picture search, but I honestly can't recall. I did a quick, crappy tiling job on these (since I knew I'd be applying them at a really low opacity, and then covering them with other junk, precision was not that important), slapped the layer mode to "overlay", and tweaked out the opacity.

LAYER 3 - This is a weed/vine texture from texpack 3 (notice a theme of re-using parts of textures going on here? A texture that's only been used once is a texture that's been neglected! Photo bases are incredibly versatile that way, and can be manipulated for a variety of purposes). I erased some sections of it, gaussian blurred it, and checked to see if it tiled. Turning the layer mode to multiply, and fux0ring (that's the technical term ;) with the layer opacity brings about some good low-level grime.

LAYER 4 - more texture re-use. This is layer 3, rotating 90 degrees counter-clockwise, and motion blurred. Set the layer mode to screen, drop the opacity a bit, and let's move on. :)

LAYER 5 - This is also layer 3. Actually, it's what layer 3 was before it had the blur and whatnot applied to it. If you look at this (by turning the mode back to normal, and cranking the opacity back up), and then go look at the dirty floor tiles from texpack 3, you should see a decent similarity. I checked for tiling, flipped the mode to screen and dropped the opacity. Am I sounding like a broken record? Can't help it...this is how I accomplish a good deal of my effects (tho certainly not all of them).

LAYER 6 - Layer 5, rotated 90 degrees clockwise, set to overlay (I love overlay. It produces such RAD effects. I'm going to have a logo I did for a very popular MOD to show you guys shortly, which has some metal stuff going on that I'm especially proud of, that was accomplished with a lot of overlaying and hand-tweaking). Anyway, dropped the opacity some, and we've got our base texture. The final step would be to merge the stuff, offset by 128v/128h, check for seams, and make sure it tiles okay.

LAYER 7 - It didn't tile okay. I mean, the seams were fine...but there was a big black stripe that was such an obvious artifact, I couldn't leave it as is (I would have if I were building details on top of it, but not for an example where we're specifically looking to generate a base). So, I used the clone tool to give a more even color distribution. Hooray!