Old dog, old tricks

I find myself in a weird spot with my 'development' of games.  I'm in that familiar place where I don't learn anything new, don't do anything new, and generally let my projects languish.

I'm in a rut.

It's happened before, many times over.  Part of indy gamedev is that it's really daunting.  Usually you're flying solo on a project.  You have to be orchestra, band, stadium, and instrument-maker.  Or in this case:

• Coder - LUA script is easy but I'm rusty AF.
• Modeller - my 3d modelling skills are .. minimal at best.
• Artist - I'm a terrible artist
• Designer - My designs are so-so.

So I have a LOT of hurtles to overcome.   My biggest ability on this list has always been scripting/coding but I find myself unable to dedicate the time to make the code I want to make.  The CPU cycles required for coding are a lot higher than say 'dreaming of art pieces'.  At least for me, your miles will inevitably vary.

Tools help a lot.  I use a number of free or cheap programs:

• notepad++ for coding/scripting/note taking
• blender for modelling (admittedly I hate blender, it's a ****ing nightmare of hotkeys)
• drawing/art  I use paint.net
• and for design I use Game Guru or s2engine.

As such though I find myself wanting in a lot of respects and decide to try to learn things that other people take for granted.  I've happily learned how to do alpha masking, transparencies, and now I can even weather a texture.

It's a pet peeve of mine that so many models I buy/own/obtain look pristine.  To me, in any game, it's going to be incredibly rare to see a perfectly painted model.   The more gritty and grimy - the more realistic it gets.

It's a simple enough technique to do.  First you need the alpha mask plugin for paint.net.

After you have that plugin you open your texture file.
For this example I'm using a free steel seamless texture.
Here's the original:

Not bad, but let's make it look really old.

The above texture is to some extent pre-weathered but I want to really add a layer of decay to it.

First you open the file in paint.net.  Then you want to CTRL-A (Select all) then CTRL-C (copy).

Go to the edit menu and choose 'paste as new layer'.

At this point we're just using the paste as a guideline for size and position.  This is more useful if you are using like a rectangular copy tool or something but *Shrug*... this is an example after all.  Then simply render clouds over it, use the alpha mask tool, and merge the layer down.  There's a bit more than that - you can find tons of examples everywhere if you google for 'weathering a texture in paint.net'.  But the end result looks like this:

Not great, but not bad either.

I use this technique for touching up some of the models I work on so they look more .. real.

You can also add color by simply modifying the levels slider on the cloud layer before alpha masking/merging layers and getting something like this:

Now with a nice rust color!

The negative of using this particular method is you run into errors with the seamless wrapping so usually I'll do a cutout of an area instead and just work over that.  The basic principle is the same.  Use the lasso to copy an area.  Paste it into a new layer.  Use clouds to generate fractal-style art on it.  Transparency it, then merge it down.

I'm not going to win any art awards, am I?

While it looks ... cruddy ... like this once you add normal maps and what not it tends to really improve the quality of it's 3d appearance.  Example:

Or even the 'rusty' texture can look good when UV mapped over a non-repeating surface:

Little things like this are how I keep myself entertained and skills from diminishing.  I'm an old dog, learning other people's old tricks.  At least though they're new to me and that keeps me satisfied.