Hi everyone !!

Yesterday, here in London, we have a really beautiful morning, so I went to Victoria park to take some pictures to make textures.
For me it's really important that if I use photographs, that no lights and shadows. It's important that has a neutral light, and always make the shoot in RAW because later I can manipulate parameters.

Here's the first picture. It's a Birch tree (I love the Birch bark because is  really easy to identificate and it's easy link Birch tree with beatifull nature):

First I make picture power of two (It's really important that if you use the texture in UDK be power of two) and remove the elements that are too unique for make a neutral texture. So now I can be a tilelable texture:

As you can see, there's different light and color areas so I work on it to make continuous and neutral all texture. There the result tiled 2x2:

Ok. But it a little bit bored, so make more interest texture. First, normally the bark trees have moss or lichen, so go on. I use a contrast blue channel to make a mask and then blend a moss texture:

Oks, not bad but it's a little bit plane. I work on each map separately and make a AO map. Later mix both maps and multiply with the difuse:

Much better. This map (AO) will be stored in blue channel of normal map.Why? Two reasons. First one, as I said in the last post, save memory. But... why not multiply now and make a difuse map with the AO baked? well... I can do this but, if I keep separately, inside UDK I can manipulate so for me it's better.


Final texture it's two 512x512 DXT1 textures (one for the difuse and the other for the normal and AO) really memory cheap: