Archive for March 2013

Regular textures like the ones shown above are adequate for most jobs, but occasionally you may want to mix it up a bit and create something a little more unique, yet still make it look organic.

So for example, say I wanted to use the grass, rocks and sand above to create a random terrain image. Now, I could go into Photoshop and create a mashup of these three textures, but once I'm back in modo, if I had to cover an expansive area, I'd still have to contend with the tiling issue, and in the real-world, having tiled rocks and grass just doesn't cut it. That's where texture bombing comes in.

Texture bombing is a procedural technique that helps reduce regular pattern artefacts. We do this by first placing a bunch of different textures into a Group, and then using modo's Texture Replicators, a small copy of one of the Group's images is randomly placed at each vertex across the mesh. From there you can further randomly scale, rotate, and blend the textures together to make the surface appear seamless and quite natural-looking. 

James has recorded two videos on Texture Replicators. The first shows how to make a seamless grass plane, and the second explains texture bombing where you use multiple texture images under a single material.

MutantPixel (James Darknell)

Making your own unique tileable textures is not all that difficult or time consuming and you don't even need to go out to photoshop. In fact, it can all be done within modo using the paint tools, and you can do it in less than 5 minutes!

That you are already familiar with modo's UV mapping and painting tools. (But if not, and you have any questions, please leave a comment below)

When modo first opens an .lxo file it tries to look for any texture images attached to that scene. If you happen to move your scenes across different machines that have different paths set-up, modo won't always be able to automatically find your texture files. Instead, sometimes it will ask you whether you want to search for them.

Because modo stores image textures under the \Library\Application Support\Content\Assets\Images,  if you try to locate a file saved here using Spotlight, you'll get no results because that folder is restricted from being searched. Two ways to get around this...

• Navigate to your Contents folder and then perform the search, narrowing it down by folder and file name. I actually have a link to my images folder in my Finder sidebar
or
• In the spotlight search bar, type in  Filename:"brick_bump.png"  

Have you ever replicated an item only to find that its textures didn't copy across?