TEXTURE TUTORIAL 2:
"HOW TO MAKE MACHINERY"
BY DECOY

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Darksaber's X-Wing Station

Thank you.

Please read the Disclaimer and Copyright.

I would like to thank Decoy for giving me permission to post his texture tutorial on my website.

Now I'm assuming you have read my first tutorial and you are still trying to figure out about what the hell I have told you. Well braze your self I'm going at it again and I'm counting on it you already processed the previous nonsense.

This time I won't be using any model or reference picture since we will be making just a normal piece of machinery, which could be added anywhere on another texture. As you will see it will de a normal square box with some stuff in it.. As for the stuff I tried not to just put it in, I really tried give every bit it's place and make tubes and piping actually go somewhere. I tried to give everything a good purpose in my own mind, I hope it shows and makes it more believable.

Once again we will be using lots of layers to get some structure in our texture, this way it will be easier to edit something later.

OK first step open a new document, in my case I used a document size of 256 x 128 with a gray background but your background colour could be anything because you won't be seeing it after the next step. OK now we won't accept a plain gray background here so we going to enchant it a little bit and make it look more like some steel plating, so now give the first layer an appropriate name I will call my layer plating01. Make a nice square filling up your whole document, this will be your actual background so chose the colour you want your background to be. Now go to the fill settings on the fill tab of your toolbox, if it's not there open it in the Window pull down menu. As you will see your fill is solid which is good but to give it some structure we will have to set the transparency of the texture settings. I used the metal texture and set transparency to 10%, but you can choose what ever texture you like, just take a look and see what you like best.

As you can see the difference is very small but we will be making a high detailed texture here so small changes DO make a difference in the end.

OK we are going to use this as a base, we going to make a hole in it, through which we can see the underlying machinery as well as some control paneling and piping on top of the plating. First of all the hole with the machinery is going to be a whole separate part of the texture that's why we have to make it first so we will need borders for that so lets make some on a new layer. Call this layer border01.

I could have chosen a nice and easy square hole but in reality things are never nice and easy so in order to make our texture more realistic we are taking the hard way =O)

Now for the main machinery part we want some steel cylinders so lets make as new layer calling it mach01. Making those is quite easy just make some squares and select them, now go to the fill tool box and choose the linear fill. To change the colours of the linear fill go to the little button with the arrow pointing to the right, in the top right corner of your tool box window there should be an edit gradient option. The rest shouldn't be to hard to do edit the colours by clicking the boxes, add boxes by clicking anywhere under the gradient bar.

As you will see I made a little mistake, Yup the linear fill is filling it out the wrong way OK there is nothing else to it than just make the stuff you want standing up and rotating it later.

When you are done with the fill and you selected all the stuff you wanted to rotate and rotate it 90 degrees CCW you will get something like the above which is no good at all. What you need to do is merge the objects in to one image by selecting all, than right click and merge image somewhere at the bottom. Be careful don't merge layers we don't want that. Now you can rotate and scale the whole thing my using free transform

Well the result should be something like what is shown above. Now just a few cylinders won't do the trick we need some more stuff in there so make a new layer and call it mach02. With a a few squares in a different shade of gray it will become a little more crowed but it still isn't enough.

Make another layer calling it mach03 and make little squares in a darker shade of gray Those will be the lower laying machinery parts, that's why they are to be darker, DUH =O) it should now look something like below.

OK now we have to do some layer moving, beveling and use some drop shadows. First let's move the mach03 layer below the 01 and 02 like this.

Now go to the mach02 layer and select all boxes and go to the effect toolbox. Once again if it's not in your toolbox make sure it will be by switching it on in the Window pull down menu.

Now what I did was select the multiple effects and applied both inner bevel and drop shadow to all the boxes. You will have to play around with the settings a bit because I can't tell you what you like most so just play with it a bit. I didn't like the way boxes covered the cylinders though so I moved the mach02 layer under the mach01. The proper order of layers should be mach01, mach02, mach03 with mach01 being on top. Now it should look like this.

OK we all so want some piping and tubing in there so we make an other layer calling it piping01. I used a dark green colour for the piping here but don't ask me why =O). I used a basic hard line in 2 different widths 4 and 2 pxs, which I set in the stroke toolbox

To make the lines actually look like pipes I applied inner bevel and set it to smooth after that give it a nice drop shadow. The effect should be like this

Now that's some nice shiny machinery we have there, time to put in some shadow and grease. Yup new layer, called shadow this time and time to unpack the airbrush =O) Just trace over the thing and make sure you make it a little darker at the edges because that's where the plating stick over later so it needs good shadow.

Well there you have it, your little piece of machinery, to bad it isn't actually looking the way we wanted because we wanted to have a hole in the plating, through which we could see the machinery. The way it looks now .... well it's just not the right effect but we can change that. Now what you do is bring the border layer to the top of the picture and export the whole thing in a nice high quality so you will get a gif or jpg that looks something like the next picture. After that you safe this document as you #1 version than you can delete all the layers that have something to do with the machinery except for the border layer. This should leave you with just the plating01 and the border01 layer.

Now safe this version as version 2 and open the gif of jpg you just made. It should be quite easy to cut and past the right machinery part to your new version 2 document. Of cause this machinery part will have it's own layer called mach01

The result should be as shown above now with some inner bevel and some drop shadow you should be able to give it a little more depth.

Congratulations, it's far from finished but you actually just finished the first step of a nice detailed texture with some home made machinery =O). It sure needs a lot more tweaking and we have to make it look like one with the plating, but we sure have a nice solid base from here on.

OK let's get on with this, let's see if we can make it look like it actually is part of the texture. Now I started with making the border a little bit transparent that way it looks more connected to the actual plating.

Next we have to put in some additional shading so the actual machinery will look like it's in the hull. Just try to apply the laws of nature a bit and it should look reasonable. This time I didn't use the airbrush stroke but a basic soft rounded stroke set to a transparency of around the 40 %. This brush will let me work a little more accurate. Of course I used a new layer for the shading.

Now to merge the machinery stuff a bit more into the background I decided to try and add some plating details. As you can see I just used some gray here but don't be afraid to experiment with some other colours. Actually the whole first tutorial could be used here to make your body plating nice and detailed.

After that I added some last overall shading to finish it off. And there you have it a nice texture that wouldn't look bad on for example the side of an engine.

Please excuse me for not making this a shiny, multicolored texture but I figured since you where most interested in detailed machinery I'd better keep the rest as simple as possible. Well that's it for now hope I helped