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volume 1, issue 23

Today in loonygames:

New!! The Archives have been cleaned up, fead links fixed, and printable versions restored! Also, don't miss the new comments on the front page!

Livin' With The Sims: theAntiELVIS explores the wild and wacky world that is Will Wright's The Sims, asking the inevitable quesiton, "is The Sims the first step toward a virtual life where everyone is Swedish?"

Pixel Obscura: Josh Vasquez on Omikron: The Nomad Soul.

Real Life: Check out our newest comic strip, Real Life! Updated daily!

User Friendly: Updated daily!

Related Links:

DRAW Partner!: Chris Buecheler's article on games and 2D art.

The Texture Studio: Chris' texture home page, with tons of textures for you to download.

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Inside Raven Software: Our definitive history of the company behind Hexen, Heretic and other classics.

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Graphic Content:
Creating a Hand Drawn Texture
(part two)

By Christopher "shaithis" Buecheler


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Offsetting the texture by 128 horizontal pixels shows that the edges don't line up exactly (big surprise there :). This needs to be corrected so that the final version will tile decently.

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Correction is really easy. Just a little dodge/burning, and a tiny bit of rubber stamping, and mr Seam has gone the way of the Dodo.

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I've copied the top section (I know, I'm such a lazy jerk. Actually...it's because I'm way behind deadline for this article due to my vacation and the repercussions that had on various deadlines. Sorry!) and am offsetting it by 128 pixels to help avoid things looking too symmetrical.

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Adding in the bottom shadow, now. Just a simple burn with the tablet.

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Always check your tiling. Here I've noticed that the vertical seam leaves a lot to be desired.

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Using the burn tool, I smoothed out that central seam (after offsetting the texture by 64 vertical pixels). I also took this opportunity to very quickly touch up the shadow area, which had a few seams.

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I decided the image was pretty much ready to go at this point, and resized it to its game-ready size of 128x65. A problem popped up almost immediately...the shadow lines were now too specific.

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Some more touchup work with the burn tool produced a texture I was relatively happy with.

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Just a final tiling test. The texture artifacts a bit heavily, but as trim it's likely to be used in a relatively shaded place, and probably not repeated on top of itself multiple times. This will help to keep the artifacts from being easily noticed.

Hope this was educational for ya'll. I have to admit that it's not my area of expertise (gimme my digital camera any day ;) but it is pretty cool to change things up once in awhile and hand-draw some stuff. Thanks for reading! Next week I'll be talking about the importance of base textures, and why they're often referred to as "glue" textures.

Cheers,

Christopher Buecheler

 

- Christopher Buecheler is a freelance 2D artist.

 

Credits: Graphic Content is © 1999 Christopher Buecheler. All other content is © 1999 loonyboi productions. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited, so don't do it, or we'll paint you white against a white background.