dvGarage — a QuickTime-only site dedicated to “building the next generation of visual media artists” — is continuing its weekly tutorial series. This week Alex Lindsay, formerly of Industrial Light and Magic’s Rebel Unit, offers an animated step-by-step process to removing directional lighting for photographically based texture maps in Photoshop.
“It may seem like a simple subject but removing directional light is both a key to creating good texture maps and very challenging to do quickly,” he said. “This process vastly reduces the process time and can often improve the quality at the same time.”
The tutorial is dvGarage’s ninth in the series. It adds to over an hour of free streaming tutorials on the site already that both observe the world from a computer artist’s point of view and try to recreate that world through easy to follow animated tutorials. Other weekly tutorials on the site include building a CG pumpkin, a hockey puck, and a super realistic chrome surface using layered rendering.