Add grunge to bring maps to life

[natty dread]

Wow. All this time I've thought "grunge" was some kind of advanced PS effect... now I realize I can do them myself! Thanks Beals!

[captainwalrus]

I have used grunge textures for many things and i have liked the way they turned out, but I have a hard time finding good grunge textures that work well on maps.
Does anyone have any good sites besides deviant art (which sometimes gives you viruses, btw) or just Google?

[natty dread]

I googled "grunge texture" in google image search and found several good ones (i think).

Click image to enlarge.

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[captainwalrus]

One of the main problems is size.
The second two are both too small for a large map.

[natty dread]

You can increase the size to 4x by tiling 4 mirror images in a "circle"... like this:


Original ------ Flipped horizontal
|
|
|
Flipped vert.------Flipped horiz. & vert.

[captainwalrus]

You can increase the size to 4x by tiling 4 mirror images in a "circle"... like this:


Original ------ Flipped horizontal
|
|
|
Flipped vert.------Flipped horiz. & vert.

Are you sure? I have tried similar things, and it often doesn't look good. A lot of Grunge textures are darker around the edges, and so they can't really be grouped together and look like one piece.

[natty dread]

In that case you only select a part of the grunge texture, so that the darker outer edge doesn't go in the middle.

In the case of my example, where the original is in the top left corner, you select a part of the texture that leaves out the right and bottom edges.

here example

Click image to enlarge.

[captainwalrus]

No offense, but I would never use that in a map, unless I am going to have it at less than 20% opacity. It doesn't look natural

[natty dread]

No offense, but I would never use that in a map, unless I am going to have it at less than 20% opacity. It doesn't look natural

That's just an example. It's just to show that the process is feasible, if you pay a little more attention to the details than I did with this one...

Of course you can also make your own grunge textures. Take a digital camera and take a photo of any surface that looks interesting... then play with the HSV settings, possibly invert colours if it's too light or dark, and there you go... I'm going to try it today.

[natty dread]

OK here my first attempt at making my own grunge texture:

Click image to enlarge.

[captainwalrus]

That is pretty nice. How did you do it? Most of the time I get mine from pictures I take. There are a lot of grungy things out there (sidewalks, rust, rocks, etc) and if you have a nice camera you can get them to transfer pretty well.

[natty dread]

That is pretty nice. How did you do it? Most of the time I get mine from pictures I take. There are a lot of grungy things out there (sidewalks, rust, rocks, etc) and if you have a nice camera you can get them to transfer pretty well.

Took a picture of my kitchen floor

Actually I think this would look better if it was shrunk down by 2x or so.