Revision as of 20:13, 17 August 2012

• Before making your own textures, you should check out
  • CG Textures (Limit of 15MB per day for free accounts)
  • 10ravens (Limit of 60MB per day for free accounts)
  • public domain images
    • Make sure the texture you use has a license you like, and are able to use properly.

Using GIMP

• First, download The Gimp
  • It isn't possible to tell you how to make any texture you want in one tutorial.
  • Instead, google how to make the texture you want in gimp, there almost certainly is a tutorial out there somewhere. You may want to try the Gimp Talk forums to begin with.
    • With some textures, there are things you should do to them to make them more realistic, such as adding dirt. Keep that in mind.

• Then you will probably want to make it seamless.
  • In Gimp go to Filters → Map → Make Seamless, and Gimp will make the texture seamless by modifying the corners.

• An alternate way to make textures seamless can be found here and a different version of the same tutorial can be found here
• As for size: your texture should be 512x512 at a bare minimum. If the texture is too large within Sandbox, you can always use /vscale to fix it. Always use powers of 2 (512, 1024, 2048) for dimensions, and your textures should generally be square.

• Now you should save it and you are done!

• If you want, you can continue and make shader maps for your texture.

Using a generator

• There are many great texture generators out there to use. Here's a list of some good texture generators, all should be free.
  • FXGen
  • Neo Texture Edit
  • Blender also has a very good texture creation program.
  • Allegorithmic MaPZone is a very powerful texture creator. If the site does not load, it's likely down, as it was for a few months. You may have to wait and check later.