Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The Modding Workshop => Topic started by: brandx0 on December 17, 2008, 05:48:49 pm
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Just thought I'd share this with you guys. It's a great way to streamline making your own maps easily by doing the normal, diffuse and shine all at the same time in photoshop (the normal it produces will be a greyscale bump map, but you can then convert it)
Link (http://swc.fs2downloads.com/files/Template.rar)
So, let's give ya a walk through of this thing.
Layer Comps
First off, you'll need a version of Photoshop with Layer Comps, I have no clue which versions do and don't have it, though I use CS3. Make sure to have this dialog open as you'll be switching a lot. Open up your layer comps and see that you should have 3 boxes there, "Diffuse" "Normal" and "Shine" Click the little empty box beside each to switch between these. Each layer comp has different blending settings, opacity and layer effects that suit various different map types in their own way. One important thing to note. If you do any modifying of the layers themselves such as opacity changes, blending changes, or creating new layers, you'll have to right click on the layer comp you want to update and hit "Update Layer Comp" or you'll have to manually redo this every time you switch between Comps. Note that this does not include actually drawing on the layers themselves, only changing the way they're blended.
Now let's take a look through the layers themselves:
Construction
First off you'll see one called construction. This is where you should paste your UV template created from whatever program you use. The layer is set to overlay on top of the rest of the layers so you can still see everything without needing to adjust the opacity or turn it on and off.
Overlays
Next you'll see a grouping called "Overlays". The top layer in this is called "Lightmap". This is where you can paste an ambient occlusion map to lay on top of your diffuse map. I personally like to have one on their and then later turn it off when the texture's done and bake myself a new diffuse with the AO on it, but you can leave it like it is and you'll still get good results.
There are two other layers here, "Overlay 1" and "Overlay 2". This is where I put any kind of panel looking maps to vary up the colours on the diffuse. Overlay 1 darkens the map, Overlay 2 Lightens it. I've included a sample panel map here. Adjust the opacity of these to achieve either more or less panelling to the texture. I've also set this up to show on the Shine map as well, once again to give a little bit of surface variation. It's your choice whether you want to use this or not.
Normal
The next folder is called "Normal" and this is where you'll create the normal map. There are 4 layers here:
Panel Lines: This is obviously where you can put your panel lines. They will have a slightly washed appearance on the diffuse map and dim the shine map slightly.
Up 1: This is where you can put any raised details. On the diffuse map they will shadow the surrounding area.
Down 1: This is where any lowered details go, on the diffuse they will self shadow.
NormalBase: This is just the background base colour of the normal map. By default it will be Photoshop's "55% Grey" (RGB 115, 115, 115). Thus you'll need to colour your other layers accordingly (darker on Down 1 and Panel Lines, Lighter on Up 1)
Now the idea of this is that you can create new layers on top of these to be either deeper or more raised, and these will continue to shadow depending on the other layers. Let's say you have a large raised panel, and want some smaller raised panels on this. Make a new layer (I'd suggest calling it "Up 2"), put it above Up 1 and copy and paste the layer style of "Up 1" onto it for the diffuse, normal and shine (Don't forget to update each of these as you do). Now in the diffuse, these smaller details and panels will shadow as well. If you do everything on the same layer, only the outermost details will shadow. For an average map of my own I generally have between 3-5 up layers and 1-3 down layers.
Diffuse
This is the easy part, just paint up any diffuse colours you may need. I include 2 layers, "Diffuse Base Colour" and "Diffuse Set Colours". The base has a colour overlay effect to it, so that you can change the background easily without needing to select and fill with different colours. Set colours is a layer I generally use for things that I know aren't going to change colour, such as windows and engines. I then start adding new layers such as "Diffuse Markings" etc so that I can change these details as I like.
Shine
The last group is "Shine". This only has one layer in the template, "Shinebackground" which I use to put in the basic overall level of shine. I then add new layers (Don't forget to update your layer comp for Shine when you do) for areas that are more or less shiny on top of this.
And that's about it. When you want to save your individual maps, simply select the layer comp you're saving and it should auto update to create a really nice effect as long as you've remembered to keep your layer comps updated.
And that's that folks! I hope everyone finds this useful, and if you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask me!
EDIT: I've discovered where Layer Comps came in, they were introduced in Photoshop CS, so if you have an earlier version this won't work for you. For a more in depth Tutorial on what Layer Comps are and what they do, see Here (http://www.photoshoplab.com/learning-layer-comps.html)