Hello fellow painters!

Welcome to what might be my first blog ever dedicated 100% to TMJ.

Today i will not only give you instructions on how to create tiles with the 3DSPaint TMJ tiler, but i will also ask you to put everything i will say here, in action.

For the newcomers; TMJ is an MMORPG project for the 3DS and DSi browser, the project started with he DSi browser but now part of it is being made in the 3DS browser too. This is a game being built not only by this site's owner himself, but the community as well. Many members offered help, and today still help, but many others left the project right after joining it.

According to Hullbreach most of the game's engine has been written, now we need artwork to be done. Tiles and Sprites mainly. This is why he made the TMJ tiler, for the 3DS. There you can make tilesets, with the 3DS browser.

Okay enough with introductions, lets do the real thing.

So what we will be designing today ?

Walls. Stone walls.

We need a large variety of these for the game, since it takes place in a magical medieval world. I will teach you my way to make these, but feel free to take any elements from my method and make your own, you are free to make it with your style and feel, I'll only give a little base for you here.

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These are really not hard to make, although it might look hard, you just need to pay attention to a few details.

Remember: Use the 3DS TMJ tiler for making, or the instructions might not be useful

Lets start off by creating the shape of a few stones, the rest will basically be created by itself once you get the feel of the thing, go with the flow.

Here you only have to make sure stones in the sides more or less complete each other when the tiles get put together, just like a puzzle. This little square will be put next to others, in the sides, up and down, so what you will be drawing in the corners here needs to basically fit itself.

Use a dark-gray color to drawn the shape of the stones, we are making stones and not charcoal, this is why Black will not be a good idea.

Now lets fill in the shapes with gray color variants. Remember, try to pick colors as close as possible to each other, but it doesn't need to be 100% accurate. If you change the gray-tones a little in some stones it won't ugly, it will make the work look more dynamic. So if you feel like it, play around with color variations, but not too much!!

Start with a darker color, lighter than the shape's color! Fill around the shapes first, and go filling inside, gradually with a lighter color. After 2 or 3 variations, fill everything else.

After this step, lets fill the remaining spaces with more shapes, lets try to not touch the corners as this will give us more work to make the tile match itself, and lets stay at least at 1 pixel of distance from the stones we already made.

The shapes need to have a considerable inner space!

Now lets fill the smaller stones we just made, just like the bigger ones but in smaller scale. You don't need to be incredibly detailed here but do as you wish. Remember: Inside color always lighter than the shape's color. I'm also going to fill the tile around with more gray details so the final shadows won't be too strong.

Alright! Its almost done now!

What i will do now here is make the shadow between the stones, with black. But you can also use dark-gray variants for a lighter effect in the end.

Fill in the remaining blank pixels with black, and play around with the shapes. The details you did earlier will now be highlighted by the strong black, keep in mind that you will maybe need to work around the shapes, filling more than the blank pixels only.

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Okay, lets glue the tiles together. Remember when i told you to be careful with the edges of the tile? So it would match up wen glued together? Its now that this comes in action.

This is the final texture (click for a very slightly zoom):

It seems this one is a very dark stone wall...Would be nice if someone in the design team used it in a cave dark cave full of ghosts, wouldn't it?

PS: I made final adjustments in the final texture, tile sets with too many details like this one sometimes need a final brushing in the colors to match each other, since i was careful designing each stone on this one, the brushing was fairly easy.

To make this i used the TMJ Tiler beta On my 3DS Browser.

The final adjustments and textures i used MS Paint (windows XP). Very simple right? Yeah, i like to keep it simple, nothing fancy.

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To the contest Now!


You have the tools and now instructions.

Submit stone wall tiles or textures (you chose) to enter, the tiles HAVE to be made with TMJ tiler beta, i will not accept anything else.

You can either send me single tiles (submit how many you want), or glue them together and make the final adjustments like i did on the sample in this blog, and then send me. For those who send single tiles, i will tolerate missing details until a certain point, so don't worry if you don't have access to a computer and can only make the tiles on your 3DS.

How to show me your work: You can send me a message with the link to the tile picture, here in 3DSpaint.com, if you are going to send the final texture, upload to tinypic.com and send me the direct link, like "http://i42.tinypic.com/if0ob8.jpg", or any other hosting service even facebook will do, but send me the direct link.

If you can't send me the link, message me telling where is your tile set (album name), i will check it manually in the tileset gallery.

If you can't message me here, comment on my profile telling me to add you and send me a friend request.

THE WINNER: Will get 20 SAVII BUCKS and 100 Savii Points

I will evaluate detail, originality, creativity and the final texture.


Have Fun! Remember, by joining the contest you'll be contributing to TMJ's development!


THANKS FOR READING

Winner will be announced this weekend if enough people apply.