i INTEND ON MAKING THIS PACK IN AN open way so i'll be posting everything i do here. I kinda wanted to make a mini texturing tutorial because i think a lot of the hand painted textures we already have can be greatly improved if bumpmaps, normalmaps and specular maps were properly done. I promise it will be a pretty short read.
MINI TUTORIAL PART 1 (THEORY)
A quick explanation of what bump maps and gloss maps do:
The texture itself should only define the colour of the material, so a blue wall should have a blue texture, however, because players tend to turn off lighting effects to improve framerate you have to pay attention to how the texture looks on it's own.
The bump (in xonotic texturename_bump.tga) is a greyscale image which defines how raised or depressed each point on the texture will appear to be. Brighter areas appear raised off the surface while dark areas appear to be pressed into the textured surface. For example a dark spot on a white bumpmap will be rendered as a dent in the texture.
The gloss (in xonotic texturename_gloss.tga) is a greyscale image which defines how shiny/polished/reflective a surface is. Metals, bathroom tiles and anything polished is shiny and will have a bright gloss map while rust and dirt will have dark gloss maps.
MINI TUTORIAL PART 2 (A SIMPLE BUMPMAP)
Making seamless materials is so tedious that i decided to make tiles/panels. All i want is the edges to appear slightly beveled so my bump map needs to start dark (depressed) at the edges and brighten (rise) a little as it comes in from the corner. To do this in photoshop i simply made a bright square the size of the texture and applied a black inner glow to darken the edges (image below). The gimpers can achieve a similar effect by making a bright square with a black border then using a Gaussian-blur to smoothen the edge but, to be honest, the photoshop way is better.
That's it for the bump map i use throughout this. A bright square with dark edges makes instant tiles.
MINI TUTORIAL PART 3
Just a bunch of pictures showing how changing the colour map and specular map turns out. I used gimp for the screenshots but xonotic looks almost exactly the same.
1. A nearly flat grey texture with a bright _gloss image so it is very shiny and the _bump map makes it appear so smooth. Pretty boring:
2. Same _bump and _gloss but the texture is tinted blue this time. Still boring:
3. A copy of number 1 but this time the _gloss is darker so the material doesn't appear a shiny. Falling asleep:
4. A copy of number 1 but this time the _gloss has more contrast and a little grunge style to it. Looks like metal now:
5. A copy of number 4 with the blue texture from number 2. Blue painted metal:
6. Let's mix the blue texture and grey texture to match the _gloss channel. Now we have blue painted metal with the paint being worn off:
Of course this is just the basics for those who didn't understand what _bump and _gloss do. Making more complex textures really comes down to mixing-and-matching simple base materials (like rust, rubber and paint) in much the same way as we combined material 2 with material 4 to make material number 6.