You can always ask Bazzwano on BU. He's making his custom assets for his next ctf-pipeline level so that implies textures & stuff.

All post he made about his custom stuff are very nice - awesome so you better check it out.

I would help you out but I'm to noob & my knowledge is limited to materials, not texturing.

I'm no expert however here's a very very simple description;
You'll need a decent paint program like photoshop or Paint Shop (I use photoshop myself) and some kind of bump/normal map generator like Crazy Bump or MapZone. (I've used Crazy Bump in the past)

Now either create a texture from scratch in photoshop or take a nice detailed photo of grass or a close up photo of a rock and run it through your paint program.  Keep the dimensions in a square format (1024x1024, 256x256 etc..).


Once you have your base texture load Crazy Bump and load the image into it.  Screw with the settings until you get the look you're after.  Save each texture map (normal, bump and 'other') and probably name them all the same but have something in the file name like "_NML"(normal), "_DSP"(displacement) and "_OCC"(Occlusion) etc.

Load your map and import each texture into the editor.  Create a material only for the base texture.
Load that material so you're in the material editor. Right click in the whiteish background of the 'material components' area and select 'New Texture Sample'. 
In the sample properties (at the bottom) tell it to use one of your maps.  Next chain that 'texture sample' to the correct tab in the main material. eg.. Normal to your '_NML' texture.
ALso fiddle with some of the settings

There's more to it than that but using the above I was able to create the material shown below;




I'll try and find the original photoshop and material files for the above and will post them so you can see what the original looked like and how I got it to look like the above.

Hourenses also has quite an extensive set of tutorials on creating materials.
There's also a plugin for Photoshop to create normal, offset maps etc.. 

I haven't used mapzone but I might check it out as it looks 'interesting'.






-- Edited by Lord_PorkSword on Thursday 26th of November 2009 05:14:05 AM

ACK! I deleted my post before posting...

@Stevelois/B;!tz~
I have seen Bazzwano's thread on BU and I know that Remus has the skills to make extremely nicemaps. But, in my experience, the people that tend to know what they are doing, tend to have little or no time to help those who don't.

I came across this when making the Blender Portal site. Everyone who could make nice static meshes for UT 3 using it, gave very little, to no help in creating that portal.

@Lord_Porksword
Nice effect you got going there. I have heard of crazy bump and MapZone (which I have downloaded). Like I mentioned, I only have GIMP (though I do PS Elements, I am not fond of it or Adobe for that matter). Ranting aside, I guess I am looking for techniques and general info right now. I can then take that and see if I can learn it in GIMP.

For what it's worth and to not sound self-righteous, I am only interested in "open source/legally free" software such as Blender, GIMP, etc. While I can look at most maps and see how they were made, looking at game textures (or similar), I can only guess. That is what I am trying to change. I want to start simple and work my way up from there. The main goal is to be able to add a bit more "custom" to my levels.

-- Edited by Odedge on Thursday 26th of November 2009 07:55:03 AM

Lord_PorkSword wrote:

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I'll have to checkout Gimp and Mapzone. If I can work'em out I'll post a tut on it. I was thinking of making a UoF stone material so I'll see how I go.

For now have a look at the file below to see how I made the material.
BFG Metal
This file contains the components that I used to make the material.  Hopefully it'll give you some insight on making one.

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I will check it out.  If you familiar with Photoshop, GIMP should be fairly easy to understand because it's more about the "techniques" and terminology than anything else.  There is a Normal plugin for it, but when I try it out and import it into the editor, it just makes my material darker, instead of giving it some "depth".

I checked out the materials in your pack.  I understand the basics of the material editor (much more than creating textures) and understand what those 3 materials are for.  Creating the base textures is a different thing.

For now, if I could learn enough to make textures to use in a HOLP map (90% BSP), I would be happy .  I was thinking something a bit more "hi-tech", like DM-YRO 3, but not so white.

With HOLP maps, textures are really important to give the map it's details, so it's a good project to learn how to create textures for it.