mikeblackney

Sci-fi tiles in Filter Forge

Mike Blackney — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 02:21:45 +0000

Making procedural textures can be daunting to begin with, but with a little persistence it can save you masses of time!

Here are some pointers on how I’ve made a batch of techy plate textures.

It does take a number of nodes together to get a good result. The Filter Forge network for the rough base is below-left. The final textures are created with the network below-right. Click either image to view full.

Andre’s Large Cranial Ember

Mike Blackney — Sat, 15 Sep 2012 11:15:39 +0000

~~Here’s my first texture replacement pack for Dark Souls: Andre’s Large Cranial Ember. It just replaces the diffuse/spec/normals for character heads, and the diffuse for hollow heads and bodies.~~

~~Update: Andre’s Cranial pack 2! This version has significantly nicer normal textures, and the diffuse textures have been reworked. It also contains new, higher definition eye textures.~~

Latest: Andre’s Cranial pack 3! Now, with separate textures for men and women, and greatly improved diffuse textures. It’s now much more subtle and realistic than the previous versions.

Andre’s Cranial Pack 4! Now with much nicer, more well-developed textures, and significantly sexier eyes!

To install:

download Andre’s Large Cranial Ember
Install the latest dsfix, if you don’t have it yet
Unzip the package to your Dark Souls dsfix\tex_override folder

I’ve also uploaded the base meshes I used for sculpting the textures. If you want to have a go, grab the head pack from here. It contains two .OBJ models – one has front-facing UVs and the other has side-view UVs. Dark Souls uses two UV sets for heads, and your normal and specular maps need to be baked both front-facing and side-view.

Weapon Kit

Mike Blackney — Sun, 13 May 2012 03:25:03 +0000

Some weapons for Tacticool. Each weapon can be broken up into a number of parts so that players can kitbash their own weapons. There are also a number of different patterns and materials you can apply to your weapons so you can match the weapons to the style of your soldiers.

Procedural Pixel Environment

Mike Blackney — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 13:25:44 +0000

Procedural texturing is amazing fun. Grab Filter Forge some time and have a go.

Recently I’ve been trying to make some simple, convincing procedural pixel art. Here are a few of the latest ones.

Here are the raw textures (click to view full).

This is what the textures look like when applied to a 3d scene (click to view full):

Each texture has 16 colours and was procedurally downsampled from a higher colour, procedurally generated bitmap. If you grab Filter Forge, you can try editing the following Filter Forge filter and try your hand at it: Procedural Pixel Levels

Hope you get something out of this

Competition Fail

Mike Blackney — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 12:57:01 +0000

Before I started entering online art comps I was constantly disappointed when entrants failed to make it to the finish line. I said to myself that surely I’d never be one of those people and that for the sake of everyone interested in my art I’d make sure that I always finished.

Flash forward three years and I’ve finished many fewer competitions than I’ve started… Here’s some of my collected failures

Dominance War V

Chicks Riding Stuff

Gameartisans Chess Challenge – The Knight