I'm actually doing somthing with the engine now

I've been making my own textures and using them in the world editor.
Ok, so its not exactly the most technical or experianced anything. infact its like a step up from opening the application. but whatever, progress is good, however small.



The main problem with creating textures in photoshop, is the tiling effect you get if you dont carry on a pattern flawlessly until the outskirts of the image. Otherwise your screwed. it looks horrible and such. SO I made alot of textures and tested them in the world editor, ended up scrapping 75% of them, because they were either tiling, or the grain effect had gone weird and was all multi-colourful (I think that was because I possibly turned monochrome off on the noise or grain filter for a while). But i did get a few decent textures down.

Spent about a minute making a texture testing map, just screwing around with the terraform editor. The harder part came when I got to the texture eitor. After testing a few dozen textures I'd whacked out over a couple of days, just messing around in photoshop, I tried mapping them out, just seeing what came up. I'm not very understanding of the variouse types of placement, so I just fiddled around with the points and tried to get a decent effect.



This somtimes proved harder than it looked, mainly cause some of the time the textures just wouldnt appear, they'd be there but they would be under each other. So I'd remove one and then the next one would come and blah. Disastrouse.



Next up came the problem of rock textures. Whch I still cant get down right. I mean I used this one tutorial and it relied on the lighting effects, which promptly screwed up any chances of getting a decenttxture it seamed. Tiling all over the place, no matter what I did. And the only semi rock texture style thing I had done is kinda half decent and strange colour wise, looks more like volcanic rock than anything else... For now it will pass and When I can be bothered I'll find some new tutorials and attempt to create some seamless rock textures out of that. For now it really isnt happening that much.

But apart from the rock texture barrier I think I got things done alright, as seen through the various screenshots posted throughout this entry.




On another note, I started a very basic model for the Snus, mostly to get an idea of how I would model the multiple legs, but Its alright and I carried on. Its so far incomplete and very basic. But its a good start none the less.

And I have made a few interior models, for the the enngine, I'm just having trouble texturing them right now. I have made an outpost/fort building, a hut and a Teepee. None of which seem to want to texture. The next step after that of course will be actually adding them to the engine. I dont know what file formats Torque uses apart from .dts, which I cant export to from Wings or Blender.