CG Cookie - Texture Painting an Ax

sketchfab

Texture painting is a fundamental skill to master for 3D artists, and it's particularly useful when creating props like axes. First off, make sure you've got your axe model ready to go. If not, take some time to create one – we'll need it for our tutorial. Next up, head over to your texture painting software of choice (we're using Substance Painter in this case). Create a new project and set the resolution to something decent – 1024x1024 should do just fine. Now that we've got our project all set up, let's get started on the axe texture. To begin with, you'll want to create a new layer for your texture. Go ahead and click the "New Layer" button – it's usually located at the top of your screen. Name this layer something like "Base Color". Once that's done, select a nice earthy color from the palette (we're going for brown here) and paint over the entire axe with a soft brush. You can use the 'P' key to switch between brushes if you need to. Next up is adding some shading to your texture. To do this, create another new layer (just like before) and name it something like "Shading". Now that we've got our shading layer set up, let's get started on adding some depth to our axe texture. The first thing you'll want to do is add a gradient map to your texture. This will give us a nice, subtle color transition from light to dark. To create a gradient map, head over to the "Gradient Map" section of your software and click the 'New Gradient' button. Select a soft blue-gray color for the light end of the gradient (we're aiming for a nice, subtle look here) and a darker, more muted brown color for the dark end. Once that's done, adjust the gradient map to fit your texture perfectly. You can do this by dragging the gradient map sliders or by using the 'P' key to move it around on the screen. Now that we've got our shading layer all set up and looking nice, let's add some additional detail to our axe texture. To do this, create another new layer (just like before) and name it something like "Detail".