Official Graphics Texturing thread

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    • Legacy Citizen 3
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    • Legacy Citizen
    Hey everyone, Beetlebear ( the artist of starmade ) here with a helpful thread on how to begin texturing your game, or at least understand how it all works.

    I'm going to divide things up into topics and cover them one at a time. Feel free to post comments and share, I'll make a master thread eventually that links all of these articles together.

    First up is the texture file specs, we will be covering the actual size of the starmade textures, which areas you should put your texture in, bleed and sizes.

    The default size of the main texture file is 1024x1024 . I've made a template for you to download HERE .



    This file may contain up to 256 individual textures, for use in starmade. The other files are exactly the same but are used for other purposes like factories and computers.

    Let's take a closer look:



    Bleed is extremely important. With bleed that does not match the edge of your blocks, you will get weird lines across your blocks in game. The only thing that needs to be remebmered here is that the texture within the pink and black border should "bleed" out into the gray area with whatever colors are inside the area.



    Our texture size is 54 x 54. I created a file at 27x27 which is 54 divided by 2 and made the above texture. Before spending too much time I create a pattern of the texture several times and test it before figuring out what looks best "tiled".



    The tiling pattern looks good! So now all we need to do is place it in our file where the grey hull texture would be.



    Here, I have added the texture itself. Textures are exactly 54x54 inside of a 64x64 area, the extra 5 pixels on each side, top and bottom are all the bleed. Let's add some bleed to this texture by filling in the bleed area with the textures darkest color and extending everything else by 1 pixel towards the bleed area.



    Save your t000.png file into the Data\textures\block folder ( NOTE: Back up your old t000.png so you can use that when you're not working on textures ).

    Now let's go check it out in game:



    I don't think I've forgotten anything. Go make those textures!

    - Kevin "Beetlebear" Collins
     

    schema

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    • Schine
    Just to explain, why bleed is in StarMade:

    StarMade is using MipMapping, a technique that automatically creates smaller versions of a texture while interpolating over the pixels.

    This is used to handle the ugly effect unfiltered textures make when viewed from far away. The texure starts to flicker and it\'s very unconfortable for the eyes.
     
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    I\'m surprised that the game doesn\'t automatically bleed off the edges of textures instead of requiring a deadspace in the texture file. I found this very unnerving when I was first working on replacement textures and found white borders on ever block. I\'ve never had to do something like this before for pixel art, so it was a shock.
     
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    Would it be possible to use a smaller resolution texture?

    I was attempting a texture pack that used 32x32 resolution for each block, as 52x52 is kinda weird to sprite for honestly. Would that still work? As I\'ve already sunk two and a half days into spriting and would have to completely restart if not. :(
     
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    Well, I gave it a shot out of curiosity. What follows is a bit upsetting and odd looking:

    http://en.zimagez.com/zimage/oofguessnot.php - Looks like zimagez links are bit odd on here, so I have to link it instead. Sorry for the inconvenience. :(
     
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    Ah, the borders make more sense now. This will help prevent problems and reworking for my minecraft>starmade texturepack adaption.
     

    therimmer96

    The Cake Network Staff Senior button unpusher
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    This is a really dead thread, there is one by Kupu(the new texture guy) http://star-made.org/content/texture-pack