Hi,

Can anybody recommend any photoshop tutorials for creating clothing textures from scratch? I guess it doesn't have to be specific to clothing (or even photoshop) as anything that can tell me how to add depth, wrinkles, shadows, highlights and all that good stuff to a texture to make it look more 'real' would be really helpful. I did try googling but didn't have much luck. Thanks to all the tutorials here I think I figured out how to add textures to the game and now I just want to make something that doesn't look like it came out of mspaint.

Thanks!

I've always just taken textures from clothing in the game. Then just cut and paste what I wanted/needed. Great photoshop tools for this are the patch tool, the burn and dodge tools, and blur. For any little details just do a google image search, like for buttons or zippers.

There's an excellent tutorial for doing wrinkles/folds, along with several others that I haven't read myself but you may find helpful, here: Tutorials:Clothing Tutorials^wiki. If you're making textures from scratch, though, it's pretty much gonna be a whole lot of trial and error. And layers. HUNDREDS of layers. It's kinda fun though.

I rather like laying out my own clothing and taking high-res photos of them for particular details, too. My favourite jeans I made for TS2 were from huuuuuge photos of my own favourite real life jeans. Works much better than trying to work from catalog pics or whatever as you get pics of it flat and smooth and with good lighting, rather than on a model with wrinkles and "dramatic" lighting.

This was how I started off but in the process of stitching everything together I usually ended up with a blurry frankenstein's monster staring back at me. I'm not very familiar with most of the tools in photoshop though so I'll definitely check out patching, burning and dodging.




Now I feel really stupid because I thought I'd seen all of the tutorials here but apparently missed the ones that covered exactly what I was asking for. I agree that it is fun, and part of the reason I wanted to try making my own textures from scratch is because I've always loved messing around in photoshop and trying different things.



This is a really good idea and something that I hadn't even considered. I've had pretty awful results patching together existing textures with my own stuff but I guess it all comes down to practice.

Thanks everyone for the suggestions.

It does take a lot of practise... and a lot of fiddling with sliders to get different layers to match up in terms of tone. Don't forget that you can apply changes like brightness/contrast to a single layer - usually if I'm copying a detail from an EA texture the first thing I have to do is adjust those two so that it fits better with the rest of my texture - and don't get scared off by blending modes. Some of them are totally useless, but some of them are extremely useful.

I'm of the "Well, that's what the undo button is for, isn't it?" school of modding, in case you hadn't guessed. :D