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Hey everyone,

I have finally got around to starting my theme'd track that I was going to do for the expo. Gotta love the timing

Well i've started doing the theme and now I need to make some more textures which I have no clue as to how others make. The type of effect I want is the lighting effect, like in Phin's Alphaville and OP's Dark Star. (darkness with it lighter in the areas where light would shine) How do you do it? (tools, tips, ect.) For now, i'll just leave it blank with the current ground texture, but I'd love to be able to texture that part with the actual textures.

Thanks for any help.

Preliminaries: What paint program do you use? Do you know how to use selections, layers and the like? In the absense of any ready made plugins, which I know nothing about, I would be inclined to try mixing selections and certain filters, retouching tools or simple brightness adjustments.

A quick and dirty method of making a focused spot of light on a surface: start with a base texture, make an elliptical selection on it, invert the selection so that everything but the ellipse is selected, feather the selection to soften the edges, adjust the brightness down, apply the changes to the image. You now have a bright spot with the full color of the original texture, but everything else surrounding it has been dimmed, resulting in what looks like a very simple spotlight effect.

This is just an idea, there are probably 1000 ways to go about getting different effects, using various tools and techniques. I'm eager to see the replies you'll get.

The stuff I did in alphaville took me ages before I settled on what's there now. I went through all sorts of methods that resulted in tons of lighting variations, each with their strengths and weakness.

I did what winterkill describes. Also, I did several different flood fills, I did pattern and texture filles, I overlaid many versions of the same textures layering them for different effects, and I tried a ton of <a href="http://mtm2.com/~mtmg/downloads/misc/paint/plugins.zip" target="_self">plugins.zip</a>.

I used paint shop pro v5 and v7. I found the built-in effects of v7 to be pretty good but hard to figure out and get consistent results, and I couldn't get the light to stay within the bounds I set for it. Eventually I made a hugely oversized texture, applied the lighting effect I wanted then tortured myself to cut it to length so it would tile. Then I made a second version with the exact same settings but with the light source turned off. This one I cut so it would tile then blended it back into the first. I don't think I'd've gotten proper tiling without the extra step. I tried using photoshop but didn't like the results.

While we're here, the space roads were technically easier to create but the resulting designs and appearances were equally hard to settle on. I rejected so much stuff it's not funny. I think eighty percent of Alphaville was spent on texture work.

And for all of it, you're working with extremely dark textures so glitches and imperfections are nearly impossible to see on the monitor, which tends to be too bright for this kind of work. The darkest area of my roads are less than ten percent daylight. Also, I worked mostly at night with the lights out so there were no reflections on the monitor, and I often edited in full screen mode so I could eliminate sidebars and menus. The slightest extra light caused problems for seeing.

A bit of history. I believe OP's textures originated from sierra logging run, and big credit to him for pulling it off. Also, MIYH clued me into ideas long long ago but we never put anything into practice. Most of the road textures in Alphaville are derivative of his zilla work - they are just too good and they were too convenient to pass them over.

I have made a few of these types of textures using the "lighting effects" filter built in to Photoshop. From Phineus's description above, it sounds like Paintshop has a similar filter. I recently bought Photoshop Elements for my wife (I am really impressed with PE for the price), it also has the "lighting effects" filter.

You can see a bit of the filter in action at this site
http://www.webreference.com/graphics/column15/

Check out the Texture Channel page, this is a really neat effect, a form of bump mapping.

Making this effect look good in the game is the hard part. Phineus did a fantastic job on Alphaville, so take his advice and don't expect to show this kind of effect on only one texture square, I don't think you have enough pixels to work with. I think Dark Star had a more defined line between the light and dark areas, which seemed appropriate for the setting, and could have been done with the technique Winterkill described.