10 steps to creating Textures

Step 1
The first step was to find an image to use. I went to www.flickr.com (because it has tons of high resolution photographs.) needed to find an image that was positioned 90 degrees to the cameraman. I done a search for snow and found this image.

I know this image is not 90 degrees all over but some parts are and this image is quite plain. I needed a snow texture. This image is very large in size so it was easy for me to select a square area in the bottom left of the image.
Step 2
The next step was to open the image in Photoshop and resize it to a multiple of 2 (64, 128, 256 etc.) I used the crop tool to make a square section in the bottom left of the image. Then I went to Image ->Image Size and changed it to 512 X 512 (pixels).

Step 3
I was ready to make the image tileable now. To do this I must separate the image into 4 equal sections and put them to the opposite corner (upper left becomes lower right). Here is how to do this: go to filter -> Other -> Offset and set both offset values to half the image size. In my case this is 256 px

Step 4
You can clearly see in the image now that there are some dark parts and some light parts. I must now add an adjustment layer. To do this I select the layer button on top of my stack, press the adjustment layer button at the bottom and select hue/saturation. I then set the saturation to -100
Step 5
Next I used the dodge tool to lighten up my image. I set the target to shadows so it would have most affect the dark parts of the image. I set the exposure to a low number (30), this allows you to have much more control.

Alternatively I could use the burn tool. This affects the bright areas of the image and makes the darker. In this case I would set the range to highlights so it wouldn’t affect the darker parts.

Step 6
Next thing to do is to remove the horrible seams in the image. I used the Clone Stamp tool. First I alt-clicked to mark start point. Then I drag over the canvas to remove the seams. The clone tool can make the image blurry so it’s important to remove blur if one section seems more blurry than another. Next go to Filter -> Sharpen -> Sharpen, This will further remove some blur from the image.

Next I just had to save the image as a truevision targa image. Now I’m ready to make a normal for this texture.

Step 7
Next I opened the software crazybump, I opened the .tga image I just saved and created a normal. I done this by moving the sliders around and creating the texture I wanted to use. I then saved the Normal as a .tga image too.

Crazy Bump Creating Normal
Step 8
The next thing to do was to open UDK and create a new material. I right clicked in the content browser, selected new material. I called it Snow_material and saved it to my package.
Step 9
The next thing to do was to open UDK and import these too Images. I opened the content browser and opened my package. I right clicked and selected import then selected images I created. I saved them as Snow_Texture and Snow_Texture_NRM. It is important that there are no spaces in the names of materials and textures in UDK
Step 10
The final step was to open the material editor for ‘Snow_Material’ and add in the textures. I selected the texture in the content browser and opened the material editor, I held down T and right clicked this brought the texture into the material editor. I then repeated this for the normal. Next I made a connection from the texture to the diffuse port and from the normal to the normal port. I saved the material and it’s now ready to be used in the game.