For this tutorial you gonna need :
- Photoshop (or gimp but i don't use it)
- ]Brick'n tiles
- A large wood texture
- a good helper is the guideguide plugin that generate automatic guidelines.(cs5/6 & cc only)
- some graphical & photoshop skills and understanding.
Making realistic graphic stuff is often really hard. Here i'm gonna show you how i achieve what i think can be called a realistic woodfloor.
This is really as there is a wonderfull software almost doing the job for you. [link=http://www.bricksntiles.com/]Brick'n tiles[/link].
What is really magic with this tool is that it generates a seamless texture. You have easily a pattern who will nicely repeat along x & y without any effort.
Prepare the files
First of all we need to grab a good wood texure. There are plenty of site providing hd texture (cgtexure, sgadmira, deviantart...).let's search ash or maple as NBA woodfloor are mainly done with those woods.
The game also adds color filter so i suggest you not to take a too sharpen color wood. Yes they look more realistic but in game they will be over satured. You can of course adjust that later but the more you are close to neutral a the start the easier it will be
so download this texture and open it in photoshop.
Now you have to ask yourself what size you wanna give to the tiles. I'm gonna use tiles between 30px - 150 px width, and 8 px height.
width just affect the visual apparence. height is a bit more complicate, as you gonna need to use it seamless in a 1024/512/256 or whatever texture, height gonna matter as you need a number that fit with those values ( 8,16,32, 64 etc)
You can also choose to have more variations with the height (or the width) but again it will be way harder after.
Just try and you will find out a good value.
ok for the exemple we said
L = 30 - 150
h = 8
I'm gonna need approx between 10 and 99999999999 tiles. this on you and the variation you want to give to the texture.
I will work with approx 40 as the nba woodfloor variations are not that important There are serious research on giving the woodfloor natural aspects. Usually i use less, more like 10 15 to reduce the variations.
So my texture is 2158/1441. this is way to big. The software gonna die if you make im calculate 30px/8px from a such a huge texture.
So let's reduce the image size. So far i don't show you that as i suppose if you edit graphics you know how to resize an image.
i put my image to 600px width & 401pc height.
now i need to make my tiles.
If you use the plugin this is gonna be really fast ! otherwise you gonna need to put every guideline by hand.
just press on GG like the screen (if you don't see the icon go to Windows/extensions/Guideduide to display the windows)
my texture is 600px width and my longer tile is 150 so i need 4 columns (600/150=4). this is not that important you can have 200 or 250 px columns but so it fits well.
In order to have the row number i usually just divide by 10. this is the same as the columns. it depend on the number of wood tiles you want to generate.
here is what you should have so far.
Now we gonna use the slice tool to make every bloc of the guide lines a single image.
Just go to the slice tool, and at the top of photoshop press slices from guides.
Now export for the web (ctrl+alt+shift s) and select your directory. Put the quality to maximum 100, use jpg or png and save.
Now you have 4*10=40 wood tiles from a single wood texture.
lets open brick'n tiles (install if you didn't do it previously)
GENERATE THE WOODFLOOR
Here you have several options you can choose.
Top left you have the size of the final seamless texture you want and in the bottom you have the editing properties.
Lets have a closer look at that.I will discribe all the tabs.
General
Here you can change the RANDOM ID. every id will generate the same model of texture. place the tiles the same way everytime. Use a random one it don't really matter. It just allow you to chnage the look of the woodfloor and the randomness to make every floor different
for the exemple i take ID 30717
Brick size
here you gonna tell the software what tiles size you want.
i said earlier between 30px - 150px width
height : 8px
So put:
Min Width : 30
Max Width : 150
Min height : 8px
Max Height : 8px
Brick Shape
Put anything to 0 as we don't want space between tiles & no round corners.
Brick Files
This is where you gonna put your 40 images generated through photoshop.
Either you put the 40 or you choose some. This is gonna impact the final variation aspect the woodfloor will have.
For the exmple as it is not realistic i will take all the files but you can play around and try by yourself.
So clic on the "0 file(s) selected.browse to the saved directory and import all images (add files).
Now another important thing here is to set the variation coloring the software is applying.
Put :
Hue : 0 (we don't want him to change the colors)
saturation : 0 - 5 (it depends on the wood, but if you choose lots of tiles images you should need him to add variation saturation)
luminance : 0 - 5 (same as the saturation)
Play around with those sliders to get what you want.
For the exemple as i took the 40 tiles i let everything to 0. If i choose less tiles images. (10 i would put sat to 1 and luminance to 2, again just try it out).
Mortar Files
You don't need that as mortar is the texture who is supposed to be placed between the tiles., if you generate a wall or bricks for exemple.
ok so far just press UPDATE on the top left of the screen. the software generates the tiles. If you put everything like me you should have that :
now clic on the tiles and press Ctrl +a to select everything. Copy it in the clipboard.
back to photoshop
- In photoshop make a new doc from the size of the texture you created (1024*1024 here, be sure to be on 72dpi) and just paste in the doc. this will generate you the wood layer.
- Create an other new document who is 16px by 16px.
Take the pencil tool and draw a black (or dark brown wood color on the top) and a white or light wood color to the bottom. bet sure to keep the background transparent.
-Go to the edit tab and select "define pattern", rename it to 16px lines. You can close that document we don't need it anymore.
- Go back to your texture file and add a new layer (Ctrl + shift + N)
Select the paint bucket tool and change the fill mode to pattern and choose your 16px lines..
press in the new empty layer you created to fill the layer with that pattern. Set the blend mode to overlay and reduce the opacity to 50%.
Zoom in you doc and you see it starts to be pretty realistic. As the lines are still to sharp and to straight, you don't get a natural feeling. To enhance that apply a mask to the layer.
ON mask black hides and white reveal as grey half reveal. Set your forground color to black and choose a grunge brush ( search em on deviantart there are tons)
- Make the same to generate verticals main lines. but change the pattern size to something like 256 or 512 as we don't want as much vertical lines as horizontals one.
Making pattern for lines is a real time savers, if you don't work with pattern and brush you definitivly should start to do it. As using the opacity mask to generate some random effect that increase hardly the real feeling.
As you can see you may find your texture is not that good so far. Way to bright. not enough wood yellow like NBA's. But remember the game often applies yellow or orange filters. So so far i would recommand you to test before adding yellow to texture.
if you wanna see what can be achieved with this technique go to my thread and watch the wood floors are all made with this tecnhique.
viewtopic.php?f=153&t=93994
I made a rough and quick exemple. Just play with the sliders in brick'n tiles to get even more realistic. I just show you the generic proccess of doing it
