Im after the BEST metal tutorials you know of. Ive been trying to make metal panels for a uni project, based on one i done before.



That was my best one. Later attempts were never as good. Since then ive lost brushes i used, and the bit of paper i had written down the technique on. (dickhead...yeah i know)

Im now having another go, buts its incredibly time consuming. Before i used an image of a circuit board to make the outlines. Now im using the pen tool, or converting selections to path and stroking. And its incredibly frustrating.



Im wasting allot of my time with my current technique, and wish to try another. Something like this would be awesome.



Im sure i had the tut for this one ages ago, or something similar; but cannot find it.

If you have any advice, tips or tuts, recommended forums that i should join, that would be great!

Kaiser does some amazing things with Fireworks, you should ask him to post one of his source .png's

your metall textures are nice




And i didnt even made any big move..

so yeah. here's how i do it these days; only took about 20 mins to prepare, so i bet if you took twice the amount of time, it would be exponentially better. blame the soccer match i'm watching.

pros:
-didn't have to do any hand painting
-did everything with vectors, keeps it nice and organized
easy to make specular/bump etc
-put your lazy computer to work instead of having it sit around waiting for commands

cons:
-will probably never look as good as if there was some hand paint applied
-it's not photoshop



step 1 - I drew a mondrian of boxes, one for "insets" and one for "panels". colored them by depth, then used "combine paths" to turn each layer into a solid vector shape
step 2 - I used "inset path" to give myself more iterations of levels and colored accordingly.
step 3 - applied "inner glow" and "outer glow" to somewhat preshade my panels
step 4 - applied some crusty rusty textures via pattern fill (thankyou cgtextures.com) and then used contrast and saturation filters to reduce the glaring differences. looks like shit, but hold up, not done yet
step 5 - baleeted my filters on each layer, and added new ones with high contrast and complete desaturation. adjusted using "lighten" filters to match with their vertical layer. this gives us a cavity map, which we can use in a moment directly to render a final texture, or you can turn it into normals pretty easily if you'd like the game engine to do it for you
step 6 - deleted filters again, and applied a strong contrast filter and desaturate to each layer. this will be our specular map.
step 7 - open your favoured 3d rendering program, create a plane, apply textures to said plane, add some lighting (here there is red from the "top" and blue from the "bottom" and then render a nice big 2x image. crop rendered image back to the size you'd like. your cake is now complete, do not use the bos to lua conversion page if you are pregnant or suffer from a heart condition.

"metals1.png" should have everything saved as layers.

edit: this is by no means the best metal tutorial, it may well be the worst (i screwed up my preshading)

Doesn't matter really, you can do color range selections in photoshop and layer any of these grayscale images easily.

That was a great tutorial Kaiser, I love the simplicity of your methods that still get great results.

Out of curiosity, what program were you using?

aha i only mentioned photoshop because people always say "why don't you use photoshop"

don't need to screw around with ranges, its much better organized than that. check out the file

waldo i'm using macromedia fireworks, it's a bit like adobe illustrator but geared towards designing web content than to print artwork. i find it's a very handy tool to use. IMO it's only worthwhile for texturing if you use the vector tools rather than the bitmap ones, at which point it feels a bit more like CAD than a drawing utility. even though i'm pretty artsy, i still feel like fireworks is more of an "art tool for non-artists".

Thanks so much KaiserJ for the tut , that was very VERY kind of you!

@PicassoCT
thats not MY texture, i got it from ba

happy to help, good luck man! if something i wrote doesn't make sense, dont be afraid to ask

I wont be, lol. And many thanks again

i dont approve how you post it after i raged coz of texturing.

wombat : i'm thinking of learning to model, what program shall i use?
kaiser : if you choose 3dmax i can help you a lot
wombat : i'm picking blender
kaiser :
wombat : i've got my model done! what program shall i use to texture?
kaiser : i find fireworks is fast and easy to learn
wombat : i'm picking photoshop
kaiser :

but in seriousness you made some very nice stuff, learned fast; didn't really need my help after all. still making things?

nop.

also lol @ these quotes, kinda true

good stuff in the end!

Moved away from the generic metal texture and went for a ground panel instead. It looks fresh and clean so far, but will grunge and rust it up for another version. It took me just over 6hours to do.

Am I really slow compared to you lot?



I found making the "grip" pattern really difficult and slow going. Make a pattern, test it, adjust size/shape, test again and repeat...

Is there a better way to make patterns in photoshop ? As in, something with scailability and distance from pattern tiles? It really pissed me off lol.

shine, yes but that is because we have learned shortcuts over the years.

wot?

Try to ...make it diffrenthish.. give every grey another colour at 5 % and lets take a look on it again. It doesent have to be obvious to the plain eye to look good.

First, colour the metalls you are working with... even just slightly...
Second, if there a layers, and there are 3dimensional shapes bulking out of them, the human eye is expecting shadows, mirroring, all that fency prancy stuff. (Those warnincolours float in the air, when it comes to looking at that stuff close up)


Finally, your texture is every engineers wet dream of a brand new maschine. But stuff gets used, it gets scratched, the dog of the spacecaptains daugther does unspeakable things with it.. and then you stroll along.

Final Finally, there is - if there are lights, the rule, that new metall mirorrs it, and it appears elsewhere, even if just as a slight albedo.

another case for fireworks (change "pattern fill" via handles, just a few clicks) you can do this in photoshop but IIRC it doesn't have handles (can a shooper confirm)

edit: great stuff shine, about 100x better than your first image :) would look nice applied to a crate

Lol thats awesome, and very true knowing my dogs. Usually eating a rabit n then barfing it up all over an expensive rug...

I like the light idea. Weve gone for a blue lit theme in the map so ill have a go at that!

As for what i mean about the pattern..



That's pretty much all the control over it i can. Which isnt much at all.

But i found this and will have a look and report back if its any good.

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/photoshop/c ... F6EF5.html

Ow and i dont have fireworks, never used it!

The "pattern maker" from the link above is utter shit. No joy there!

Anyways, concerning comments above, ive done these...









I tried the blue lights on it, but i couldnt get it looking right.

The yellow sections have been given a bit of a drop shadow and a deeper setting on the bevel, as well as ruffed out edge.

Also went around the main shapes with a babmoo tablet, to add more directional scratches.

Now we are talking! Yep, that looks used and battered. Like everything human hands hold for longer then twenty seconds.

Only critique i got is, that .. those surfacescratches.. show even on the grate holes.

Yep, im a detail obsessed asshole, when it comes to textures (of others) - and if you want you can grab one out of my mod and shove the very same mistake right under my nose.