Organic Textures

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The final Layers palette is shown below. The final texture is shown at the end of this section.

I hope you have noticed, during the steps provided, that there were multiple options at every stage of the creation of this texture that would have given a completely different, but equally interesting end result.
     All masks can be filtered. You can even add textures to masks by using Edit > Fill and choosing Pattern from the Use menu. Textures on masks can then be embossed with a layer style. The two big drawbacks to Edit > Fill are the absence of a Scale option and a live preview. You have to know your patterns from memory, or go back and forth until you get the one you want.
     All masks can have styles applied to them. Note that styles other than the overlays require some content to work on (a white mask won’t work). Use Render > Clouds followed by Levels, or Posterize to “harden” the edges generated by Clouds (styles don’t work well on blurry tones), or add a pattern fill to give the styles something to chew on. On the other hand, as you saw with the first Brightness/Contrast layer used here, the Pattern Overlay, and Bevel and Emboss/Texture styles work just fine on a mask with no content.
     Though I only showed you a Levels adjustment with heavy masking, you can do the same with a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer to add color variation (work on the mask as I did to the Levels mask), or any of the other adjustment types. Note that adjustment layers can also use different blend modes and reduced opacities.
     Though you can’t apply adjustment layers to masks, you can use Image > Adjustment to apply the same commands directly to a mask.
     You can stack as many styled adjustment layers and pattern fill layers as you like. You can add regular layer masks to regular layers and get into filtering those masks. You can paint on the masks with Photoshop 7’s new scatter brushes to add random spotting.
     To repeat options mentioned earlier (they’re important!) the Scale feature in both Pattern Fill layers and in the Layer Styles overlay and texture features give you almost unlimited options for texture manipulation. And the Edit > Fade feature where you can change the both the blend mode and opacity of filtering as it is applied to your base texture is very useful.
     Run through all of Photoshop’s old, and over-used filters one more time, this time looking at them as texture ingredients. The dreadful Chrome filter can be useful when applied to a mask. As you saw, the Watercolor filter is useful for hardening up clouds on a mask. Dig around in the sub-menus within the various filters. In the Texture group, try out Mosaic Tiles. Here is a sample of what you get with settings of 2 for Tile Size, 1 for Grout Width and 8 for Lighten Grout. It makes a good, nubby base layer (shown here applied to a brown starter layer).

I could go on all day. There are so many non-linear options—to choose one direction is to not choose ten others. It makes me nuts.
    The one thing that organic textures are not good for is Web sites. You may have noticed that these fairly small illustrations take a long time to load. By definition, a good organic texture is about lots of local detail. Local detail does not compress well. So use this stuff for illustration or for 3D texture mapping, but not for Web site backgrounds or interface objects.

[Not on the .pdf file. Some 3D texture purists will shriek in horror if you use the Bevel and Emboss style and/or its Texture sub-style on a texture map. In theory, all surface lighting should be generated by the lights in your 3D scene. Your texture map should contribute only coloring. This is because during your 3D animation, the object will move in relation to the light source. Highlights and shadows should move accordingly.
     However, for overall surface irregularities and small cracks or bumps, only a forensic expert or an obsessed nit-picker is going to notice that your local surface lighting doesn’t match the scene lighting.
     If you prefer, you can not use the Bevel and Emboss style (and the Texturizer or Lighting Effects filters), and use bump maps to do your maps the correct way. You’ll have to spend a lot of time building and loading the bump map and then fiddling with your scene lighting angles to show the bumps (and even then they often won’t do so very predictably), and your render times will probably be longer.
     I have found that often, no matter what I do, the lighting won’t bring up the local texture the way I want it—painting it on puts it there without the lighting headaches.
     Be aware of the possible problems and decide, accordingly, whether to use the ‘lit’ patterns and styles. To bring up small surface irregularities—yes, use them.
     Of course, if you are only generating stills from your 3D application, all you have to do is match the light angle in the Layer Styles dialog with the light angle in your 3D scene. You should have no conflicts at all if you do it right.]

If you would like to download a zipped pdf file of this tutorial, please click on the link below, and save it to your hard drive.
Organic Textures pdf
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If you don’t know how to expand a zipped file or use Acrobat Reader, download the file, above, and then go here to find instructions.

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Copyright © 2004 by Jay Arraich.
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