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Skills Expanded

Texturing Low Polygon Weapons in Photoshop

by Eddie Russell

While today's game systems have made drastic improvements in terms of asset resolution, there are still limits. Software required: Photoshop CC v14.1.2.

What you'll learn

While today's game systems have made drastic improvements in terms of asset resolution, there are still limits. Sometimes creating texture maps for low resolution assets can be a challenge because less polygonal detail often means more detail that the texture artist has to come up with in their textures. This course goes over the process for painting both diffuse and specular maps for our low polygon game weapon. To start things out, we will dive in and begin to paint a base texture for many of the surfaces on the weapon. Whether it's a tarnished metal surface or a painted surface, we will learn how to add texture in layers starting at the bottom. From here we'll continue to add detail to our diffuse texture by painting things like scuffs and scratches followed by dirt. After completing the diffuse, we'll move on to the specular map where we'll learn how we can repurpose and modify some of our diffuse layers to map out the specular highlights on our weapon. To wrap things up we'll learn how to flatten and save our texture maps out of Photoshop. After completing this course, you will have a fully textured game asset that is ready to be brought into your game engine. Software required: Photoshop CC v14.1.2.

About the author

Eddie began teaching creative professionals over ten years ago for Digital Tutors. In 2014 Digital Tutors was acquired by Pluralsight and he continued his focus on creating high quality training for artists in both the film and games industries. With a background in graphic design and illustration Eddie has always been focused on visual appeal. This can be seen through his courses in which he shares secrets for achieving production level quality for concept art, illustrations, textures, mater... more

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