What will I try to do: explain the process I use to texture metal on realtime object
Method used: Dodge and burn (it's quicker than painting with brush)

Hello everyone I kept receiving mails and requests regarding the process on how do i paint metal, for realtime models.

So, I decided to make this tutorial, which will ( hopefully ) guide you thru the process , let me note that this tutorial was written in kinda haste and some stuff might not be correct :P , but here is the ending result that i will explain step by step:

 

We will start by making a 256 x 256 image, and therefore apply any type of base texture for our metal, I've chosen this one (it is not tileable)



Now I will put in the top a somekind of reference from where our lightsource is coming , in this case, in the upper left corner.

The next step is to create a selection of the thing we want to txture, ill make a somkind of metal box with some stuff on it, therefore i pick the rectangle selection tool ( or the polygonal lasso, since you can get this shape ) and draw a selection. Very nice except that the original selection is hard, what i mean is that everything that you paint on iut will be jagged with the exterior of its selection...we want it to be slightly soft, so when we create the selection we right click so that we can "feather" it out , in this case i used an ammount of 0.5 , see screenie for further detail.



With the selection still up i will pick up the dodge tool and paint in with a very big brush (around 300 pixels) with very low itensity around the 10-15%, then I click on drag, etc it at the area where the lightsource is coming from.


If you cant find the dodge tool, heres an image to help you out.