Tutorial 2:

Painting Patina
or
How to make realistic sand abrasion and muddy surfaces on vehicles

Due to average level of textures of most addons being created, I have decided to support ambitious addon-makers with this tutorial. I hope this will help people enhance visual aspect of their addons.
I have created sample texture for purpose of the tutorial – it should answer many questions concerning particular stages of work described in the tutorial itself. The texture is pretty self-explanatory, you can download it as PSD file with preserved layer structure. (The texture is fictious and potentially useless– I dont want it to be used in any addon.)
As I mentioned in my previous tutorial, the vehicle’s environment is crucial feature you must consider before starting. There are basically three three environment categories: desert (lots of dust or/and sand), summer woody and winter woody terrain. In this tutorial, I will describe how to make textures for desert and summer woods environment.

Krok 1: Getting Started:
The whole work begins with printscreen of particular model part in Oxygen. This printscreen is inserted into new Photoshop window and is cropped to show the part I want to texture (gray rectangle – Layer 1). Then I create new image in size of the texture (256x256 px), insert the gray rectangle and change its size (without deforming it) to fit size of texture.
The image is topped up by another texture bits as the work goes further – it is always better to utilize the whole extent of texture. I can suggest you to return to the textures already made and use remaining space for smaller parts.
I would also like to comment the question of texture size. Mayn people waste space with 512x512 or 1024x1024 textures while not using all the space such textures offer. Your goal should be to use every pixel of your textures wisely – I have used only one bigger texture on my PzKpfw IV, in size of 1024x256 px.
Another thing I can suggest is to paint textures in their final size and not to paint big textures and scale them down. This would simply devalue amount of detail and efforts being put into painting them.
If the area you want to texture is about 256x278 after you resize it into texture, it is easy to balance the disproportion by slightly deforming the texture to fit the texture size after you paint this area. Beware the greater differences, I will not suggest you to try to deform such textures in the described way.

Krok 2: Basic Background:
This step is a piece of cake, I just paint the area with the basic colour tone. This is the tone which corresponds to the colours the vehicle is painted with in the real life. In this case I choose tan and olive green. Don’t forget to lock layer opacity before filling the area!

Krok 3: Adding Panels:
Let’s add some panels now! I will add some plate or hatch. I will make the shape of the hatch in layer above and fill it with (just to see it) slightly lighter tone of the basic colour.

Krok 4: Basic Shading:
In the Layer 4 there you can see the basic shading I made. The area was divided by the vertical line into two parts of panelling.

Krok 5: Surface Shading and Weathering:
I continue with detailed shading of surface. If you look around, you surely noticed that painted metal plate changes its appearance under the ruthless influence of environment. This is exactly what I try to take note of when creating a real patina. As the time passes, solid coating of the plate changes in following way: central part of the plate gets lighter (weathered) and its border parts get a bit darker. On the edges apparently concentrates more dirt than on unprotected central part. This is what I try to imitate with the tablet pen. I also use some of the „natural“ brushes contained in Photoshop to vivify the shading by few gentle touches.
You can also paint some water or oil trickling. Presence of such effects should be considered carefully – it is natural that the painting will be more weathered and soiled in the lower parts of hull and in the places of intensive crew movement.

Krok 6: Shading and Weathering II – Hatches:
The same as above applies on the area of hatches.

Krok 7: Screws and Rivets:
I crate rivets in special layer. I usually paint one piece, select it and and copy it using ALT (or ALT+SHIFT when I want them to copy in extent of single layer) in desired numbers.

Krok 8: Scratches:
This step is very important! I create special layer containing scratch pattern in order to improve texture appearance after it is converted into 256-colours palette. The solid surface structure is visually „disintegrated“ – this will add some realism to your addons as well as prevent creation of ugly effects that often occur after the palette conversion. This layer intensity should be very fine, otherwise you get everything else except the realistic surface effect :)

Krok 9: Finishing Touches:
This is only step that keeps you from a really nice texture! This step was divided into two separate parts, which will guide you through the final part:

Sand Abrasions: Desert environment is quite hostile in terms of (originally) perfect painting of the vehicle, not to mention activities of crewmen. This lead to partial removal of finishing and uncovering of dark grey steel surface on exposed parts like brinks and margins. I usually add some plasticity to such places (see Layer 9a) – I add soft touch of light gray on the border of „coloured“ area and also right in the space of the graze (metallic gloss).
I also highlight top edge of the plate and hatch with light grey. The thin line is enough.
You should remember a „golden rule“ – DO NOT EXAGGERATE!

Making Mud: Painting mud could earn its own tutorial. Making a good appearance of this trickling mass is quite hard thing to do, and you will certainly need some artistic talent in addition to big portion of enthusiasm and refined technique!
Before you start painting, just remember that wet mud is much darker than dry mud. The „muddy“ model should have the dark (wet) part on the bottom, on the top there will be dried and thiner coat.
First of all, I paint dark part of mud layer, which also determines the basic shape of sparged area.

 Then the new layer is created, moved under the layer of dark mud. This one represent softened transitionally border of the „wet“ areas. The last layer contains final coating, which completes the whole composition. This layer is absolutely most important, it contains the highest muddy splashes, which may be painted flowing downwards. If you decide to paint such effect, you should consider all roughnesses and obstacles the flowing mud may encounter on its way to its Mother Earth ;) In case of our sample texture, I painted some mud over the hatch (only on the top edge) and also gently „smudge“the line between the panels. As a final operation, I use dark tone of mud colour to softly indicate plasticity of the muddy splashes.

And the texture with realistic patina is done :)
I hope this tutorial help you creating better textures for your (certainly excellent) vehicle addons to satisfy the whole community.

I would like to prepare few more tutorials about painting armor tracks, adding realistic Zimmerit effect, making snow patina or folds on uniforms… Stay tuned!

Download texture (PSD)

Marfy/Ivan Buchta

Marfy (Desert OFP) © 2003, All Rights Reserved