Reality Factory Lesson 6: Applying textures to your room

In this lesson we learn how to Focus down onto parts of the game world and apply different textures to the different shapes and surfaces.

Think of holding a cube in your hands. There are four sides, a top, and a bottom. And each of these sides could be painted a different color. This is what your first game room is like. It is a cube and you can apply a texture to all six of these different surfaces. Except the difference between your game room and the cube is that you apply the textures to the inside!

This lesson focuses on highlighting and applying textures to individual surfaces in your game world. Now this works for everything you would create in your world -not just the walls. If you created a staircase, a table, a picture, a bannister, a trash can or anything at all you would apply textures to it.

Okay,you have played your single room game and you have exited. Now you are back to the reality factory game creation screen. Single click on the 3d view and the lines of your room are highlighted green. This means that the whole room (cube) is selected.

But we want to apply individual textures to the different surfaces of the room. In the game these surfaces are called "faces".

Now that your room is selected all you have to do is hit the pagedown button on your keyboard. This digs deeper down into the selected object and allows you to select individual faces. The lines turn violet in color. Now you can select individual faces by clicking on them.

In this image I have selected the flat wall or "face" that is directly facing us. What happens is that whole face is outlined with the violet lines and the other faces in the room return to green. This means you can edit that face now. So, click on the textures tab then select a texture and double click it. The face you selected will turn to a new texture.

Now that surface has changed to the new texture. I chose cunieform.

Note: sometimes you have to refresh the 3d view screen to see your change take place. You simply hit the little button called rebuild textured view. It is directly to the left of the build button.

Go ahead and place textures on all the surfaces in the room. Experiment a bit with things to see what looks good. Try putting all the walls the same then try the walls all different. Don't forget to do the wall you can't see in my pictures. This is the wall closest to us. To look at all the walls just click/hold and drag your mouse in the 3d window and you can move around the room.

Side Note From Will: Texturing is very, very important in games. If you want to learn more about making and manipulating textures to make your games look great I have a texturing and tiling tutorial that I will be posting to this site soon

To get out of the face editing mode all you have to do is hit the pagedown button again and the game reverts to having the whole room selected.

When you have gotten this room the way you like it go ahead and press the build button again and then play your new game.

Let's continue with the make your own video game lesson: Lighting