Game Texture Development - Corridor / Tileable Textures

 To start this task I loaded a scratched metal texture into Adobe Photoshop with a document size of 512x512. This texture was offset and had the seams removed, making the texture tileable. A high pass filter was used in order to remove any shading discrepancy that would make the tile noticeable.

 Displaying the grid in the view options allowed me to place shapes accurately. The shapes were eventually merged together, having the layer style altered in order to introduce a drop shadow and lower the fill opacity of the layer. This gave me a tread texture on the metal which would look very effective when normal mapped.

 careful planning was necessary to introduce this warning paint on the metal. It needed to be vertically tileable. To do this I made sure each stripe was the same thickness, stacked them and then scaled them vertically until the top and bottom matched perfectly. Once this was achieved I then added scratches on the paint using a layer mask and painted dirt along the edge that would connect to the wall.
The dirt along the wall edge defines where the floor ends and wall begins in the scene.

 This center piece in the texture was created using the pen tool initially. Once the outline was complete I introduced the metal texture and some extra details which add more interest. The black shapes in the center represent holes in the metal. In order to create the effect of holes I used this pattern to create an alpha map, which was placed into a new channel in the document. Saving this image as a 32 bit file will also save this extra channel, thus making it usable in 3D software.

Creating a new folder in the layers section of Photoshop allows me to use the same document for specular and normal maps. Duplicating the diffuse layers I de-saturated them, using the levels tool to alter the values of each element. Care should be taken when creating a specular map in order to gain the correct effect for scratches and or non specular areas of your texture map.

The tread and center piece had normal maps created separately. Duplicating, blurring and setting that layer to overlay allows you to build up depth in a normal map. This method was used here.