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Important Information About Texture Orientation

As mentioned and seen in the StrPix program, orienting the textures properly can be a bit of a task. Knowing how difficult it can be to figure out how to place a rectangular texture into a triangular tile, I've developed a system that makes it quite simple.

First, turn to your "Orientations" section and look closely at the first page. In the center of the page is a square box. The top of the box is green. The left side is orange. The right side is red. The bottom is blue. This is your "Key" that will unlock how all of the textures are rotated, mirrored and clipped. Inside of most of the tiles covering Lara you will see 2 colored lines. If there aren't any colored lines in a tile and if you need to know how the texture gets orientated in that tile, then I'll show you a little later how to determine this on your own. We'll need to do that for the number 167 tiles on her legs. Some of the tiles lack lines simply because I didn't take the time to figure them out. Learning how to determine a texture's orientation will help you to add to your drawings until they are complete.

The rectangular tiles covering Lara are quite simple to figure out. With the first page of your "Orientations" section open, look at the upper left drawing. Look closely at tile 257. It's the one covering her belly. The colored lines on this tile are as follows...

Top line: Green
Left line: Red
Right line: Orange
Bottom line: Blue

What's the difference in this arrangement as compared to how they are arranged in the "Key" in the middle of the page? You should see that the red line is where the orange should be and the orange line is where the red should be. This tells us that the texture has been mirrored from right to left. That is, the right side is where the left should be and the left is where the right should be. On this tile that doesn't matter much since the right side should be identical with the left side.

Now let's consider the triangles. The entire rectangular texture is NOT squeezed into a triangular tile. Instead half of the rectangular tile is clipped off and not used. What we need to know is how the rectangle gets clipped in order to make it into a triangle. The two colored lines on each tile are there to show you this. Let's take a look at one of the triangle tiles. Look at tile 157 which is at the bottom of her belly. The colored lines in this triangle are seen to be a GREEN line across the top and a RED line down the right edge. These two lines form two sides of the rectangle in our "key." Looking at the key, consider that the same colored lines in it are two sides of a triangle. The GREEN line goes across the top and the RED line goes down the right side. Since the third side of a triangle must connect with these two sides, it third side has to be a diagonal line going from the top left corner of the "Key" to the bottom right corner. The triangular section of the "Key" formed by the blue and orange lines is clipped off and discarded.

Once a rectangular texture has been clipped according to the orientation lines shown in our drawing, the texture is most likely still not the exact size or shape of the triangular tile. Next, the program stretches and squeezes the texture until it fits inside the tile. If the texture after being clipped is drastically different in shape and size, the program will create a lot of distortion as it forces the image to fit the tile. The point here is that if you map a new texture to a tile, try and match the two sizes as close as possible.

Modifying Tile Textures

Since we've made VicMan's Photo Editor program available for downloading, I'll be giving instructions based on using that program as well as mentioning some of the means of changing things using more sophisticated image editing programs.

You will not have a Manual for VicMan's Photo Editor, however, there is a Help file that you can read. Click on the "?" on the menu bar and then select Help. Start reading each page, clicking on the ">>" symbols at the top to advance from page to page. It's not real long and it gives a basic explanation of the various tools and features.

I don't care how good you are at using your image editing program, I will still caution you not to expect too much when you see the results of what you create here. At first some of this is going to seem very strange. It's going to be like driving a car with a standard shift for the first time, where everything is very mechanical and difficult to understand. As you read through this section expect to find some of the contents a bit confusing. Don't get discouraged. It can be quite confusing to everyone at times. What we will be doing here is much more advanced than what most people do when they create outfits for Lara. The more you work with these "oddball" texture shapes, the more you'll be able to picture in your mind what's going on and realize where and how things need to be changed.

Go ahead and boot up your image editing program. For some of you this will be programs like Photo-Paint and Photoshop while for others it will be the downloaded VicMan's Photo Editor. The first thing we are going to do is to load in our texture that's mapped onto tile 246. This is our "Text246.bmp." Most of you will use the File drop-down menu on the menu bar where you can select "Load." Maneuver to your "Laras Closet\Workspace" folder where you'll find the "Text246.bmp" file. Go ahead and load the file.

Once you have it loaded you will probably want to zoom in on it to make it larger. For those of you who are using VicMan's program, you will see two windows displaying your texture. In the "Editing" window just below its title bar, click and swipe the number there and key in the number 1000. Press the "Enter" key to zoom to 1000 percent. The window that reads "Preview" at the top will always show you the entire image. This window is used to select the area on the bitmap that the other "Editing" window is to display. When you click, or click and drag your mouse in the Preview window you will relocate the area being displayed in the Editing window to that location. To display the very upper left corner of the bitmap in your Editing window, click anywhere in the Preview window and drag the mouse up and off the left hand corner of the image. At the top of the "Editing" window it will show X=0 and Y=0.

Let's take a look in our "Orientations" folder and see how our image is orientated and check to see if it gets clipped from being placed in a triangular section. On the first page of the Orientation section you can see that tile 246 consists of two sections on the front of both of Lara's upper legs.

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