Photoshoping textures

Unity Engine
1

Hi

I want to use various images of stone to make stone floor tiles as I am learning to layout scenes in Unity.
My process is to create the tiled floor within a building in Maya to be baked out and imported into Unity. Simple enough…

This is just for learning purposes so I am using images I can find on the internet and the problem is to get an image to the state of the image below.

The image below is reasonably flat and not plagued with specular highlights in contrast to the images I can find with google searches.

I can use images in the style below and my question relates to how to now transform a general photo image in photoshop to match the qualities of the image below.

Any comments?

oh, thanks for the thoughts…

2

There are a lot of methods to use, but color correction and the high pass filter will often give you a very good start.

3

Tried that.

The color correction took away the gray which makes it worse. (At least if that is the same as levels)
The high pass filter sharpened the light areas which made it worse.

It is the kind of oppersite of this which will do the job very nicely indeed.

The closest I can get is to reduce the contrast a lot and then increase the brightness and then reduce the exposure but something else is needed.

Any ideas, anyone?

Thanks

4

Well … the best thing you probably don’t want to hear is: get better source material.

Highpass and color correction really are the way to go in many cases (can’t tell in your case since many problems demand different approaches). Nothing’s better than a useful source texture without many shadows/highlights to begin with.

Have a look at www.cgtextures.com, buy a dedicated texture compilation or better yet: buy a good camera and go outside on a cloudy day.

5

Totally agree with motionblur´s post. In most cases it is bad source material, and that leads to bad textures. Here are two links for you :

http://www.unifycommunity.com/wiki/index.php?title=Free_Textures << Mostly good texture resources
http://designm.ag/tutorials/photographing-textures/ << Little Article on how to photograf for texturing

6

Much Appreciated!

I remember a texture artist on youtube saying “one boxes ceiling could be another boxes floor”.

The probabilities are high that color correction and highpass are the way to go to the next level, so to speak.

What if bad source material lead to some desireabley unique and intersting results. That would be a texture!

BTW. Is there another way to smooth the texture of an image without specifically applying a blur filter?

7

You are right.

I am getting all the results I want with some not so good images to begin with just using the range curves and hightpass with an incredible amount of patient tweaking but it is well worth the effort.

I also tried cloning, duplicating and erasing from the top layer and blending.
Testing images with off the scale highlights I found using a fill layer above with a faded midtone color as a fill can be really useful and especially if above a curve layer with the highlight leveled out.

Job done and case closed.

All the best

8

oh, one of the consequences of reducing the size of the best texture is a crisp smoothing effect on the overall image which tends to enchance the feeling in some resonant way that’s subtle and clean.

I guess that answers my last question.

Finalized