In checking our notes, we made the lower edge of the tile beside this one (246) the RGB values of 172, 125, and 71. Set these values and blend it in from the bottom edge up a little ways into the image. Go ahead and save this as "Text247_altered.bmp."

The next texture we want to alter is the one that goes just below the last one. This is tile 168 and which is the file "Text168.bmp." Go ahead and load it in. If you check the Orientation for this tile you'll see that this tile's texture has been mirrored horizontally compared to the others, however, since we're going to make it all one color, we won't need to be concerned with its orientation. With your current RGB values set to 172, 125, and 71, select the Brush tool. Run its Size up to 8 or so and set the Zoom to about 500%. Set the "Transparency" value to 0. Go ahead and paint this entire image. Save this texture as "Text168_altered.bmp."

I'm going to skip around to the back of Lara now. I'll leave it up to you to complete the edits of the textures in between. My object is to teach you the mechanics of creating outfits and not to teach you how to be artists. To actually create professional looking outfits takes a lot of editing and re-editing. Eventually you'll find that you can even scan in images to use for textures.

I'm going to help you modify the textures for tiles 250, 252, 251, 171, and 172. I've picked these tiles because you're going to find them a bit difficult to interpret since the textures for the triangular tiles are going to be clipped and rotated. You will find it difficult to determine which pixels make up Lara's cuffs. Take a look at the second page in your "Orientations" section. In the upper right drawing you can see which tiles we're going to be modifying.

There will be times when you won't be able to figure the images out without a lot of experimenting. What I'll try and show you here is one means of attacking what might seem like an impossible situation. First I would like you to load in the texture for tile 250. This is the file "Text250.bmp." After you load it in see if you can recognize any part of it as being a part of Lara's pant cuff. Pretty difficult isn't it? If you check your "Orientations" section and look at the second page you'll see that tile 250 on the back of Lara's left leg is triangular and that the texture gets clipped from its upper left corner down to its lower right corner. Notice that just the upper right portion gets placed into the tile. (This is determined by the way the colored lines are oriented in the drawing.) Add to this that the triangular portion that gets placed into the triangle also gets rotated to the left until the side that's formed by the clipping rests on the top of the texture that's in tile 171. Now let's try and find a way to attack things.

In looking closely at the orientation of the tiles in our drawing, it can be seen that tiles 171 and 172 on the back of Lara's left leg are oriented the same as our key is. This means that the StrPix3 should display these tiles properly. Let's take a look at them.

Close your VicMan program and boot up your StrPix3 program. Load in your "Starter.WAD" file from your "Laras Closet\Starter" folder. Click on the mesh text window and select Mesh#18. This is the mesh containing sections 171 and 172. Hold down the Control key and click on the tiles in the upper half of your mesh. You should find the ones facing you are textures 171 and 172. If not, rotate the mesh until they are facing you. Once you have them visible, change to the "Textured" mode. Notice how all of the bottom edge of her pant cuff and half of the top of her cuff are part of these textures. It appears that the triangular tile that sits on right hand tile (172) must have most of the remainder of the top of the cuff inside it. This tile according to our drawing is tile 251.

There's one other thing to notice. The one triangular tile on the right (251) that seems to contain most of the remainder of the upper edge of the cuff is also oriented properly. Its blue edge is at the bottom and its red edge is on the right. Therefore it should also display somewhat properly in StrPix3. These upper triangular tiles are inside Mesh#33. Click in the mesh text box and select Mesh#33. Switch to the "Wireframe" mode and then Control-click to locate the tile with Texture#251. Now look at this triangular tile in the "Textured" mode. It's almost all a dark shade of green. Since this doesn't help determine where the cuff is, we need to take a closer look at things.

What you need to have now is a good close up screen dump of the back of Lara. If you don't have one already, stop and use the level created earlier using the "tut1_starter.PRJ" file to position Lara in front of one of the cameras so that you can see the back of her at waist height. What you should see upon close examination is that only tile 171 is actually textured with the upper edge of her cuff. The side where tile 251 is at is simply a darker shad because it lies under her bottom and is moving back in between her legs where it's shaded. The darker area in the triangles can remain untouched for now. You'll want to go back later and do some editing to better show the shape of her bottom. Also notice that tile area 171 and triangle 250 have light colored areas that represent highlights on her jeans. That is, the flat surface down this side is highlighted and the curved surface of her cuffs are darker. In this tutorial we'll remove the cuff and highlights as we add to the length of her pants. You can go back later and add highlights.

Armed with this information, let's close StrPix3 and boot up our image editing program. The first texture we'll load is the one used to texture tile 171 since that's the texture that was seen to have most of Lara's pant cuff in it. This is the file "Text171.bmp." Load in this texture from your "Laras Closet\Workspace" folder. If you set the zoom to about 300% you'll be able to see Lara's pant cuff. Sometimes zooming in too close to an object makes it difficult for your eyes to tell what the object is. It's like looking at the moon through a telescope -- all of a sudden it no longer seems to have a face on it.

Now zoom in to 1000%. We can see the highlight area on the left. The dark streak across the top is the top edge of her cuff and needs to be removed. We'll erase the highlights for now. As mentioned, you can add them later. The other shades of green seen to the right of the highlight are due to the fact that the color of her pants gets darker as her pants proceed around and between her legs. Let's try and repeat this graduation as we texture this tile both horizontally and vertically.

Look at the highlight and then at the colored pixels to its right. Including the highlight, you will see a total of 4 shades of olive. I want to keep track of these colors and so I use the Eyedropper to record their RGB values. From light to dark they are...

[160-116-64], [132-104-56], [116-92-44], and [108-76-32]

We can use these colors as we alter this image.

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