As I mentioned earlier, textures are what make a game object pop in your level. They can be used to add all kinds of different elements we would not take the time to model, as well as color, wear and tear, and lighting information. There are many ways to texture our game object. Basic objects that would like to take advantage of a material in Unreal can apply one in the level. Blender has painting tools available within the program through its texture paint mode. Lastly, there are options available using other programs to create your textures. Our UV map can be exported to a program like Adobe Photoshop or GIMP, where we can paint the textures using the color tools or use photos to create a realistic result. I also want to talk about a new type of tool that has been available for a couple of years now. Substance Painter is an application that allows you to paint textures directly on to your 3D object, much like Blender's texture painting mode, but it has options and tools built specifically for the digital entertainment industry:

Showing off our new crate within Unreal 4

Unreal comes with several materials available for our use through the Starter Content folder and since our UV map is going to import in with our object, it would be as simple as dragging and dropping the material on to our crate. The materials themselves would look great on the crate and would definitely provide the depth and character we would want for our level. However, since the materials are not made specifically for our crate they would not really provide some of the additional detail that we talked about earlier. When we import our object into Unreal in our next chapter, we will first try this route:

Blender's Texture Paint mode

Blender itself comes with a Texture Paint mode. This mode can be used to paint solid colors and images on to an object. The resulting texture can then be exported from the program and applied within Unreal. Using this mode allows us to create our texture for our crate without involving any other programs, but since Blender is not a dedicated graphics editing program, the tools it provides are limited:

Our exported UV map shown inside Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop, and its open source alternative GIMP, are graphics editing programs that can be used for many forms of digital drawing, photo editing, and more. By importing our UV map into one of these programs, we can use their drawing tools to create detailed textures that can be imported into Unreal along with our object. This has been the most common way of creating game textures for many years. Adobe Photoshop is available for a 30-day trial subscription at http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop.html. GIMP can be downloaded at http://www.gimp.org:

Our crate inside Allegorithmic Substance Painter

Allegorithmic Substance Painter, and other programs like it such as the Quixel suite of tools, is a 3D painting program that allows you to paint advanced materials directly on to your object in real time. It has many of the tools you see in Adobe Photoshop or GIMP, such as the ability to mask off areas and use different patterned brushes, but has adapted them fully to the needs of 3D game artists. Substance Painter currently has full support in the Unreal game engine and is a great way to create high-end, detailed materials in a relatively short amount of time. Check out Substance Painter at https://www.allegorithmic.com/products/substance-painter.