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Basic question about textures

twharrell

twharrell

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293
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us-virginia
I'm about to take a big leap into designing building for FS9 and have decided to try Sketchup. I've watched several tutorials on the subject. However, I have a very basic question. A lot of the tutorials use already created textures from texture sheets, especially photo-real textures. Yet, none describes how these texture sheets are created in the first place. How do I create textures for a building I want to model? And how do people store these textures to use on other models?

Todd
 
The simplest way is to start with a texture similar to the one you want to create and edit that. By the end you won't have much of that texture left, so it's no big deal.

I start by measuring each of my object's walls, etc. - height and width. Then I create areas in the image with the same proportions for each area. Then I copy in a "background" image to use for a given wall (etc.). Wood siding, stucco, brick - that kind of thing. There are many of these types of images available online. Then start pasting in windows, etc. Layering your image (i.e. a PSD file) will make this easy. Again, there are several online sites with images of windows, etc. Or use some of the ones that come with Sketchup.

Other people get a face on view of the wall (or whatever) in Sketchup (use the view menu to get it exactly face on), and take a screen shot of the wall. Then resize the wall image and paste it into your image (this gives you the proper proportions automatically). Continue doing this until all surfaces of the object have been done.

Now use this image in Sketchup to texture your scenery object.

An example of a site with building textures:

http://www.cgtextures.com/

Hope this helps,
 
Hi,

If you look at the SketchUp tutorial I have made, it also contains a texture on making textures:

http://www.fsdeveloper.com/wiki/index.php?title=Build_your_house_using_SketchUp

Of course that is not the only way to do it. My way might even be a little bit complex, but it is the way I prefer to work.

When making a 3D object, I think making a realistic texture is usually more work than making the geometry :).
 
Depending on the airport I model, I try to use actual photos of the faces I can access in real life- Most times you can get at least a skewed shot of each wall. I then tweak in photoshop/gimp to remove any skewness and lense distortion. This, I think, results in very natural looking textures as opposed to the very 'clean/sterile' textures that can result from using textures from scratch or from stock imagery.

The upshot of this is that it will also give you building heights- Since you can get the XY dimensions from the aerial image imported from Google Earth into SU, once you scale your photo-texture of the wall to fit that XY dimension, by the time it covers that wall the Z/Height will be apparent as well (Just be careful when taking photos of very tall buildings as there will be significant distortion in the Z dimension)
 
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