Brushed Metal Textures

by: M

In this tutorial, you will learn how to make a simple texture, import it to UnrealEd, and apply it to a surface. You will not learn advanced texture placement or other advanced texturing functions of UnrealEd.
This tutorial assumes that you own and have experience with Paint Shop Pro 5, but this tutorial will work with other graphics programs as well. It also assumes that you have basic knowledge of the UnrealEd Beta.

Creating the Texture

First, open Paint Shop Pro 5 and create a new image (File-New) that is 400x400 pixels and 24-bit color. Flood fill this image with a solid, dark grey color. Now add noise to the image (Image-Noise-Add...), and type the number 100 into the "%Noise:" field. Select all (Selections-Select All) and make the image grey scale (Colors-Grey Scale.) After doing this, you will have grey noise, but not brushed metal. The next two steps are very important. To add the brushed look, apply motion blur (Image-Blur-Motion Blur...) to the image and type 25 into the Intensity field. You can also change the direction of the motion, but it is not necessary. Now, soften the image (Image-Blur-Soften More) and you have brushed metal. This effect may not look perfect, but feel free to apply more motion blur or softness to the image until you get the effect you want. To get the texture to look good tiled, select a chunk out of the middle of the image and make it a seamless pattern (Selections-Create a Seamless Pattern.) Now resize the image so that the dimensions are equal powers of two, preferably 256x256. Finally, save this image as a Zsoft Paintbrush (.pcx) Version 5 file in you Unreal textures directory.

Importing to UnrealEd

Load up UnrealEd if you hadn´t already while working on the texture, and make sure the Browser is on the Textures menu. Click the Import button on the bottom of the screen below the texture browser and open your texture that you just created. Keep all the information on the window that just popped up the same and click Ok. This will create a new packet called "Untitled" with your texture in it. To apply this texture to a surface, simply highlight the surface and select the texture from the texture browser.

Important Notes

For a texture to be imported into UnrealEd, the texture´s dimensions must be equal powers of two. For example, 32x28 will not work, but 32x32 will. Common dimensions include 512x512, 256x256, 128x128, and so on.
This tutorial was to introduce the beginner to importing textures and applying them. I am planning on doing an advanced texture manipulation tutorial later that will include resizing, aligning, detail maps, and other advanced items.
If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions on this tutorial, please send them to me, [email protected], not the webmaster of this site.