A quick overview of the third texture.

Time, patience and good reference. The main reference I had was the Trench coat from Blade 2 and a Boot from the New Rock range of shoes.

The subtle leather texture was gained from a texture CD I have (tweaked and applied as a multiply layer) and the rest...well the rest was from studying the reference either by sight and trying to emulate the effect on all it's levels (light, texture, colour) or using the reference directly and then editing it into the map to suit my purposes.

I used a LOT of layer effects and blending tools. Things like multiply and bevels and drop shadows and the like.

Above all however, is the study of reference. By studying good reference you can, in essence, copy reality for all it's worth to duplicate the effects you need. If you aren't going for reality...you can still use reality as a basis and then work from there.

A good method I prefer to use is the base colour, a multiply layer for shadowing, an overlay or Screen layer for highlights and a 'texture' layer on it's own that defines the grain of the surface. In this example it's leather or skin. On top of that is any other minor details to make up an 'object' as such in your texture. This may be done as a whole or as individual units to build up a complex texture. The boots, in this case, were made up of HEAPS of layers in order to build up the straps, leather layers, buckles and detail that ended up with the results you see before you.

This method has a number of benefits...mainly that of being highly adjustable if you need to tweak base colours. It also allows the surface texture to always reside untouched, regardless of underlying colour or shading.

Save each of your images as .psd's where you can find them. We will be saving these as .bmp's and .tga's in a sec in order to import them into Unreal Ed...but for now they are fine sitting nice and tight in the folder on their own. It's OK, they're adult images now.

Before moving on we will set our textures up to import into the Unreal Editor. There are two ways to do this, either by using a plugin for photoshop to export directly to .dds or import an image into Unreal Editor and convert it there. We will do the latter, as you will need less tools to do so.

The file formats that Unreal can import include the following : .bmp / .tga / .pcx / .dds / .upt

For flat images you can save as .bmp's. For images that use transparency you would use .tga's and use the 32 bit channel to export the alpha information. So make sure that is turned on when you save out.

So first up, open your texture files, flatten them all and resize them to the desired size. Save them all out as .bmp's in your UT2004 folder, You should have the following files, feel free to name them as you see fit of course:

1024x1024 Skin_01.bmp = head and torso skin
1024x1024 Skin_02.bmp = Trench and Boots skin
512x512 Skin_03.bmp = Tech arm skin
256x256 Skin_01o.bmp = opacity channel (not used due to technical difficulty...for now)

I will eventually be making a specularity map too, but I will save that for later.

Once done and you want to jump straight into getting the textures into the engine (or that's all you want to know) jump over to the import section of the tutorial here and I will continue with the import of the textures.