Create a texture set for games

Matthew Trevelyan Johns shows how to create multi-purpose tiling trim textures for games

Matthew Trevelyan Johns With a professional career spanning over seven years, Matthew now enjoys working as a senior environment and vehicle artist for Cloud Imperium Games. www.artstation.com/ artist/trevelyan

The ability to create textures is a vital skill for any video game environment artist. Coupled with the advent of physically based shading in most modern game engines, it’s now possible to recreate a myriad of realistic materials and apply them to the beautiful virtual worlds we create.

An environment you hope to recreate can feature literally hundreds, if not thousands, of unique texture details. It might be possible to create textures and shaders to represent every minute detail, but for every unique texture and shader loaded into a game engine, there’s an incurred memory cost. While this might not be so important with pre-rendered scenes – the type you might see in a cutscene for example – when creating content for real-time rendering, these memory costs are very important. Too many polygons, textures and shaders in a level can translate to huge loading times when starting the game – or result in the level not loading at all!

With that in mind, an environment artist will often need to create multi-purpose textures that not only have portions that can be tiled over larger areas, but also have smaller, unique details and trim patterns. When combined with clever modelling and UV mapping, entire environments can be textured using just one or two of these textures in conjunction with some shader variations.

Here I’ll create an example set of sci-fi wall panel textures and demonstrate how they can be used when texturing a 3D asset. For all the assets you need go to creativebloq/vault/3dw206 Gather references of interesting and unique elements and those that are recognisable, to get

a sense of reality