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| Textures from Plastic Models |
| April
24, 2002 Most of us are not good enough artists to create a new texture by painting one from scratch, but that doesn't mean we can't create excellent quality textures of our own. Look around you - there are probably dozens of interesting textures nearby just waiting to be digitized. Plastic models are just one of many possible sources. In this article I will cover the process of using a normal, flatbed scanner to create custom textures from plastic models. You could also use a digital camera (if it has macro focus ability), or a conventional camera (again with macro focus) and then get the prints scanned (some photo-shops will put your pictures on CD - eliminating the need for the scanner). I will be using model railroad cars, but the same techniques could easily be used for tanks, planes, automobiles, or whatever kind of models you want to use. |
| STEP 1: Define your goals |
| No
mater what technique you use to create your textures,
start by getting a good idea of what you are hoping to
create. Decide if you will need the texture to tile
seamlessly like a wall covering, or if you will need a
group of connected textures to cover a specific object
like a machine or vehicle. Figure out what dimensions you
want the finished textures to have. For my mission pack I needed to create some mine cars to add interest and atmosphere to the abandoned mine section. I decided I wanted a fairly low-poly vehicle with most of the detail "painted" on with textures. I envisioned the car as basically a box 96 long by 48 wide by 48 high, set above a simple beam chassis with railroad wheels. For the box I was going to need a side texture, an end texture, and a top texture, plus a couple of generic textures to cover odds and ends. I already had some good railroad wheel textures, and I won't cover the making of them in this article. |
| STEP 2: Find the source materials |
| It is
most effective to consider models as raw materials -
don't think you must get all of the textures needed from
a single model: through digital manipulation the images
we start with can be greatly altered and end up looking
very different from what they start as. Use your
imagination when looking, and be prepared to consider
other sources for your texture images if you find
something better. I went through my collection of model railroad cars looking for the sort of textures I envisioned for my mine car, and found what I wanted on three separate cars. |
| STEP 3: Scanning the Model | ||||||
Before scanning it is very important to clean the glass imaging surface. Every speck of dust, every fingerprint, every smudge no matter how small will show up in your scanned image. These defects can be digitally removed, but it is much easier to avoid having them in the first place. The models should be placed carefully on the imaging glass, edges exactly aligned so that you won't need to digitally rotate the image after it's produced. A straight edge of some kind is useful for this, in my case I used a 6" aluminum drafting ruler. The scan should be done at a fairly high resolution, so that the initial image you create will be several times larger than the finished product, and it should be done in 16bit color or higher. The working images should be stored in .bmp format. Do NOT store them in .jpg format. Jpeg images get recompressed each time you save, and each time they lose a little more image information. The thumbnails below show my scans for this project. Click on them to see the full size images, but be warned that they are fairly large. |
| STEP 4: Clean up the images | ||
Once the initial images are scanned in, bring them into your favorite graphics editing software. Adobe Photoshop is probably the best one to use, but it is kind of expensive and as you may recall I'm pretty cheap. I use two old products: Photosuite and Finishing Touch. There are a few good freeware graphics editors out there - I like Pixia, and The Gimp. You can also use Wally's editor, which is great for making textures that will tile, but otherwise I don't care for it much (Wally also does not have a twain interface, so you can't scan an image directly to it). Use whatever you like, but at a minimum you will need the ability to copy and paste (preferably by drag and drop), a color picker, an "airbrush" tool, and a number of filters including blur, sharpen, contrast and brightness, color adjusting, and color reduction. Additional tools and filters are a big help, the more the better. Now look at the image you scanned in. Figure out how much of the image you want to use, and crop it very carefully. You can always crop more later, so it's better to leave extra than to crop too much. Do not attempt to shrink or resize the image yet - you should do this touch-up work first. There will probably be some defects you will want to correct. You can use the color picker to select a color from a good part of the image, then use the airbrush tool to carefully paint out the defect, but this is usually not the best way. Copying and pasting (especially if you can do it with drag and drop) is much easier. Look for similar good patches to copy from and paste them over the defects, adjusting the positioning to line up with the surrounding image as much as possible. Minor misalignments and some other defects can be removed by using a "blur" filter - if your image is oversized as I recommended, a little blurring will not be noticed in the finished product.
Most graphics editors will also allow you to "flip" or "mirror" a selected area - which can be handy when one side of the image is good and the other is not-so-good.
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