Introduction to Textures and Skins

1. Introduction to Texturesand Skins Chapter 8 & 9 3D Game Programming All-in-One By Ken Finney

2. Using Textures One of the most important uses of textures in a game is creating and sustaining the ambience, or the look and feel of a game. Another way textures can be used is to create the illusion of substructure and detail.

3. Using Textures (Continued) Another area in a game where textures are used to enhance the ambience of a game is when they are used to define the appearance of the sky. A Skybox is basically the inside of a big six-sided box that surrounds your scene. By applying textures to the skybox, we can create the appearance of an all-enveloping 360-degree sky above the horizon.

4. Using Textures (Continued) One of the most amazing (and best) uses for texture mapping is when defining technological objects. This entire wall of electronics can be “painted” on to a surface using an image of the hardware.

5. Bitmap versus Vector Images Bitmap (sometimes called Raster) images are composed of pixels laid out on a grid. If you increase the magnification, you can see those pixels.They look like squares on a screen. An image in bitmap format is resolution-dependent. If you later decide To increase its size, you enlarge each pixel, which lowers the image quality.

6. Bitmap versus Vector Images A vector image is composed of procedural and mathematical instructions for drawing the image. A vector is basically a line that has definite magnitude and direction. Vector File Information: Draw a rectangular shape with coordinates at a, b, c, d and fill with blue. An image in vector format does not depend on the resolution. It can be Resized without losing detail because it is stored as a set of instructions.

7. Texture Skins Skins are special textures used in games. The quality that separates skins from regular textures is that they typically wrap around the shape of a 3D model.

8. Game Texture Basics From 3D Game Textures By Luke Ahearn What is most important in the creation of game textures is the ability to understand what you are seeing in the real world and to recreate it on their computer.

9. Shape & Form A shape is simply a two-dimensional (height and width) outline of a form. A circle, square, rectangle and triangle are examples of shape. Shape is what we first use to draw a picture before we understand such concepts as light shadow and depth. Form is three-dimensional (height, width and depth) and includes simple objects like spheres, cubes and pyramids. As a texture artist you are creating art on flat shapes that are later placed on the surface of forms.

10. Light and Shadow Light and shadow give depth to and as a result define what we see. At its simplest, light and shadow are easy to understand. Most of us are familiar with shadow; our own shadow cast by the sun, making animal silhouettes with our hands on the wall or a single light source shining on a sphere and the round shadow it casts. Many of the decisions that need to be made are based on whether light and shadow should be represented using texture, geometry or technology.

11. Visual Texture Visual Texture is the illusion of what the surface’s texture might feel like if we could touch it. Visual texture is composed of fine highlights and shadows. As computer game texture artists, we deal solely with this aspect of texture. So for example an image on your monitor may look like rough stone, smooth metal, or even a beautiful woman and if you try to kiss that woman she is still just a monitor – not that I have ever tried that.

12. Color There are many color models, or ways of communicating color verbally.There are models that concern printing, physics, pigment and light.They each have their own vocabulary, concepts and tools for breaking out color. As digital artists, we use the models concerning light since we are working with colored pixels that emit light.

13. Hue and Saturation Most people use the word “color” when referring to hue. While there are many, many colors there are far fewer hues. Variations of saturation and brightness create the almost unlimited we see in the world. Saturation is quite simply the amount of white in the color.

14. Brightness Brightness is the amount of black in a color. Like most other aspects of color, brightness is affected by other factors. What colors are next to each other? What are the properties of the lights in the world? Another job the texture artist needs to do is to make sure that the textures in the world are consistent. That involves the balancing of hues, saturation and brightness of the color in most cases.

15. Color Systems – Additive and Subtractive Subtractive color is the physical mixing of paints or pigments to create a color. It is called “subtractive” because light waves are absorbed by the paint and only the reflected waves are seen. The Additive system is when light is added together (like on a computer screen) to create color, so naturally we deal with the additive system as computer artists as we are dealing with projected light.

16. Color Emphasis Color is often used for emphasis. Of course, there are many other forms of emphasis you can use in creating art, but can be the most powerful – and the most overused.

17. Perspective Quite simply, perspective is the illusion that something far away from us is smaller. This effect can be naturally occurring as in a photo, or a mechanically created as in a painting.