Contents 1 Adding Rust (or other similar effects) to a texture 1.1 Getting your textures. 1.2 Prepping your rust texture 1.3 Applying the rust texture.

Adding Rust (or other similar effects) to a texture

So you have seen the brilliant textures on some of the vehicles on the repo, and you're asking yourself, "gee, how can I do that kinda stuff on my stuff?"

Well, I'm here to tell you.

All commands in this tutorial are for Photoshop CS3, but I assure you, the tools are simple enough that they are certain to also be in Photoshop Elements, Paint.NET, and the GIMP.

They are not in MS Paint. (:F on you for using it.)

Getting your textures.

This step is very important. Without having textures, you will be unable to work on your textures due to their non-existence.

Here is the main vehicle texture I will be using in this tutorial.(Fig 1.) You're on your own with this one.

Some hints for working with game textures:

1. Make every image a square with a power of two. I ignored this rule with this texture because it is part of a larger texture sheet.
2. Try to keep everything under 2048x2048. This is the resolution that most modern and next-gen games use.
3. For sano's sake use .dds textures!

Second is our rust texture. This is what I used. (Fig 2.) There are a lot of things that can work here. Any resolution will work provided it looks good. HOWEVER, certain criteria must be met in order for it to work well.

1. The rust should be on a relatively light background.
2. The rust has got to look good. (you don't want something that looks bad on your truck.)

Right, now that you've got your rust texture and your vehicle texture, let's get cracking. (or whatever it is the kids are saying nowadays, I don't keep on top of things anymore.)

Prepping your rust texture

Right... this is gonna seem kinda dumb. However, this is what you have to do. Take your rust texture and go to Image-> Adjustments-> Brightness/Contrast.

Turn the brightness up to maximum, and the contrast down to minimum. What you will get is something that looks like this. (Fig. 3)

Horrid to look at, isn't it? Well, it won't stay like that.

Applying the rust texture.

Quite simple, actually. Open both your vehicle texture and your brightness and contrast adjusted rust texture in Photoshop. Copy the rust texture onto the vehicle texture as a new layer. (adjust scaling, rotation, etc. so that it looks good.)

Set the layer's blend mode to "multiply."

Voilá, you're done. (Fig. 4)

Here's one I prepared earlier: