Texturing maps with photoshop without tga splitter

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Sgt.Killboy
Posts: 59
Joined: Thu Mar 24, 2011 6:16 pm

Texturing maps with photoshop without tga splitter

Post by Sgt.Killboy »

Well...i was just taking a shower...5 Liters coffee running through my guts, when i got hit by some kind of weird lightnin....and had an idea.

This tutorial is all about texturing or better re-texturing your BF42 map with Photoshop, making it look a little better and exporting the textures without tga splitter n stuff.

I use Photoshop CS2 for that.

Let's start:

First of all, I dont really like the detail.dds file of my map and want to replace it with something thats nicer. So I open the detail.dds in Photoshop (PS from now on) and resize the image from 512x512 to 1024x1024.

Okay...looks creepy.

Then I open a nice highres Texturefile...in this case I took a marble texture, since I was just working with It for the following painting part of this tut. In real life some sort of sand or so would work much better in BF42.

The problem we have now, ist, our marble texture is 1280 x 1024...So lets adjust this by resizing it, and making it a 1024x1024 file. Once we have done that, we will sit in front of the next problem:

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As you might see, the texture isn't seamless, means if we'd put the left edge to the right edge, we will get a seam. There's an easy way to get rid of that:
(sory guys...as mentioned in another tut, I use a german PS version, so try to follow the picture)

First drag the 1024x1024 marble texture on my detail.dds. Then duplicate the layer. Working with the duplicate now, go to filters - follow the image - follow the image:

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Somehow I cant see the image in my post...heres a link:

http://img228.imageshack.us/img228/9744/marmor2.jpg


The pop up thats now popping up will ask you for the size settings. As we are working with 1024x1024, we need to use 512.

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What now happened is to complicated for me to exlain, so take a look(i did this with grey edges, to make it easier to see):

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So now we got this weird looking layer, the original layer and thehehehe creepy detail.dds. Going on with the duplicated layer thats on top of our stack. We will have to get rid of the cross thats in the ceanter of the layer. So lets use the eraser tool (Ctr+E) with soft edges and erase the inner cross

half way done:

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lets erase the rest.

Collapse the layers to one..for testing purpose use a larger file in PS and drag the collapsed layers 3 times to that testing file.

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fine...fits...now save it as detail.dds....done.

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NOW FOR THE PAINTING / EXPORTING THING
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I use all .dds files of the map, so i open them in PS first. The textures are 1024x1024, so we will need a new image thats 4 times 1024 in squhuhuhuare (way to much coffee) (4096x4096).

First of all we need to know, how the .dds files need to be put together. The files are named 00x00.dds and so on. On this image you can see how they are placed on a map:

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00x00 means upper left corner 01x00 means the square on the right side of 00x00. 02x03 means the 3rd collum and the 4th row so thats one aqure left of the one in the lower right corner...i hope :D wich is 03x03.

I use the snap to almost everything setting in Photoshop to make it easier to place the tiles. What we need to do now, is t use the ruler and the lines you can pull off the ruler.

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I put one line after the other until I get a grid.

ATTENTION! You need to work 100% correct here to get the result we want!

Once all tiles are in place, we need a new layer (where we want to paint on) then start painting. I want to paint rocks, so I use what kind of texture? Right! Marble. ;)
I paint the marble texture by using the stamp tool (Ctrl+S) with soft edges. I pick the texture with the stamp tool from the marbletexture image, and paint it on the other pictures (with our dds tiles) on the new layer.

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unfortunately the cursor doesnt show up in screenshots

Lets assume we're done with that. How do we get that large 4096x4096 file exported to 4 x 4 tiles. Well...thats what I figured, when I took the shower. We can simply use the slice tool in PS (Ctrl + K). Lucky us...we used the "snap to almost everything" settings and the rulers grid. The slicing tool snaps perfectly.


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Since I am a dummy, I forgot to save a pic of the slicing, so this is just a faked figure!

Once we got the slicing done, all we got to to is, to export the file (in german PS it's export for web). Lets save it in png format or so...

What we now got, is this:

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A nice folder with our tiles. All we need to do, is to resave them to the good old .dds format.

;)

Wow! I need to smoke...hard job writing a tutorial with one hand and drinking coffee with the other one!
My anger management class pi**e* me off.
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