Writers' Guild Forums - for URU Agebuilders using the Open-Source Plasma plug-in

CREATING A CUSTOM TEXTURE IN GIMP

I thought I'd share a simple technique for creating custom graphics in Gimp to use for age building in Max. I'm going to assume that you already have Gimp and are familiar with the basic tools.

I'm going to need these four images to create the scene:



The goal is to create an old dirty, cracked brick wall with the bricks broken out to reveal the piping behind the wall. Here's how I do it:

I start by opening the Brick image in Gimp:




I then open the Gear image as a NEW LAYER, scaling and moving the image layer to where I want it in the final graphic. I'll then move this layer to the bottom of the layer stack:



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Next, I'll change the opacity of the Brick layer to allow me to see both images overlayed. Then I'll use the lasso mask tool to create a mask around the bricks where I'd like to cut them out. (Disclosure: I'm doing this really fast to create these screen prints. I'm usually much more careful than this :



Once I have my mask, I'll use the eraser tool to erase the bricks in that area, letting the gears show through. I can now work with the graphic at full opacity again.



At this point, I need to soften the edges of the bricks plus I want some shading to create a sense of depth from the bricks to the gears. I'm going to use the Filter Drop Shadow function to do this. I'll invert my mask that I used to erase the bricks so that it now masks the remaining bricks and create two drop shadow layers, each going in a different direction. Once those are in place, I'll again invert my mask and open the Wall Cracks image as a NEW LAYER. I will use the eraser tool to erase the cracks inside the mask; don't need the cracks on the gears :



The final layer is the dirt on the walls. I repeat the process I used with the wall cracks, opening the dirt decal as another NEW LAYER and erasing the dirt inside the mask:



After I've erased all the dirt from the mask area, I'm ready to finish the new graphic off. I'll merge the visible layers into a single layer and in this case, I'll also remove the alpha layer, since it isn't needed for the scene.

I'll scale the image to the size I want it (512 x 512 here) and export as a .png image. I prefer to use .png images rather than .jpg images because .png is a lossless format. The final image that I put in the age I'm working on:



Happy building