CREATING GAME ART FOR 3D ENGINES- P5: Iwish to thank the editing team at Charles River Media (Emi Smith, Karen Gill, Jennifer Blaney, and Jenifer Niles) for their help in getting this book publish-ready. Thanks, too, to my technical editor, Mike Duggan. Also deserving recognition are the guys who make the Torque Game Engine available, GarageGames, who directly or indirectly made this book and the accompanying CD possible. In particular, I want to thank Joe Maruschak at GarageGames for the great articles and forum answers that have helped me and many others get a handle on this engine. I. | 98 Creating Game Art for 3D Engines layers pallet as often as you might think consider working without these tools while you are painting your images and using the I key to activate the ink dropper and the B key to switch to using the brush. Use the Alt Tab key combination to bounce between 3ds Max and Photoshop. Using Layers for Flexibility Layers tend to be underused in Photoshop. Just as in other software solutions layers add power and flexibility to your design process. With layers you can move and manipulate different aspects of your design separately. Without layers you commit too quickly to different changes and lose the flexibility to make further changes long after the design is completed. Using Layer Effects There is a tremendous amount of power available in Layer Effects. Highlights drop shadows bevels and other effects can be set up and saved as a Layer Style and easily applied to any other layer in any file. Using Layer Effects you can almost instantly create shadowed and highlighted textures that look 3D. Many of the textures in this chapter utilize Layer Effects. Using Layer Masks for Nondestructive Editing When we erase a portion of an image for any reason as soon as we save those erased pixels are gone forever. By using a Layer Mask we preserve the entire image. If you erase too much Layer Masking allows you to paint it back in even a year later. This is because the Layer Mask allows you to paint-add or paint-subtract on an image using any size style or opacity of brush you prefer. Layer Masking is described in more detail in the later section Texturing the Oil Drum. Using Actions to Save Time We can minimize repetition in Photoshop by using actions. Actions allow you to record commands and then repeat that sequence of commands automatically as needed by clicking a button. One of the processes that takes a lot of repetition is the saving out of a PSD file so that you can check your texture in 3ds Max. Although you cannot use the native PSD file for
