This brief tutorial explains how to:
1) make a background metallic looking texture
2) make a rounded barrel effect
3) make bevels
4) talks about battle damage

The purpose:
1) To share my knowledge about gimp to others
2) To help you create better weapon textures and textures in general

This tutorial has been inspired by RougeKnight's photoshop tutorial but is for gimp instead! Thanks RogueKnight!

Alright, here we go.

THE BACKGROUND:

Grab the bucket fill tool and fill you background with any shade of grey or black.
Now go to filters > render > clouds > fog. Change your settings to look like this and press okay. Set the color to a slightly lighter shade of grey. Your background now looks like this. Now to go filters > noise > HSV noise. Change your settings to look like this and press okay. Your background now looks like this. Background complete!

THE ROUNDED BARREL EFFECT
Grab the blend/gradient tool Select the bottom of your image. Draw a line from the bottom to the top, holding control so it is straight. Your image now looks like this.
Now go to edit > copy. Then go to Edit > paste as > new layer. Go to Layers > transform > flip vertically. Grab your move tool (see below) and move the newly flipped layer so its just touch the top of the previous selection. Play around with the brightness (colors > brightness/contrast) so that either the middle is brighter or darker. Your final result looks like this.
Rounded barrel effect done!

ADDING BEVELS

Adding bevels is very easy. You can do this to make indents or pull out parts of your weapon. Simply go to Filters > Decor > Add Bevel and play around with the values. It will either pull out or push in your selection.

ADDING BATTLE DAMAGE

Adding battle damage is fairly straight forward. You use the smudge tool, the free select tool, and the brush or eraser tool. Too add scratches, make a squiggly line with the free select tool and erase it. You can then smudge it. Too add paint chips or larger are battle damage you can use your brush and select one that works. I typically like the galaxy AP brush. Simply change your color to white and click. There are other battle damage tutorials so I wont go much further into battle damage.

That's it! I hope you guys enjoyed my tutorial and find it helpful! If you have any other gimp tips/tricks let me know!

Hmm maybe this could work to make a better metal texture for the tank. The one I'm using right now sucks. I'll try it tomorrow.

Alrighty, sounds good! Remember to play around with the values for different results!

Lol RogueKnight's tutorial. :p

Thank you for this tutorial! I've always sucked at making textures; hopefully, I can get a lot better starting from here! (I've only ever used Pandemic's textures before.)

I've always gotten images from the internet and slapped them in. This is pretty useful but I don't do too many weapon skins.

Noobasaurus wrote:I've always gotten images from the internet and slapped them in. This is pretty useful but I don't do too many weapon skins.

Same here. Or make really bad ones that look really cartoon-y Also, this tut doesn't necessarily pertain to weapon textures, it can be used to make anything metal (i.e. buildings, vehicles, walkways, etc.)

Found a new way to make a metalic look! This one I think works great, but I wont have pictures. First, fill your image with black. Then go to filters >noise > hsv noise and set the values to the following:

Holdness: 8
Hue: 0
Saturation: 0
Value: 255

Then go to filters > blur > gaussian blur and set the value at 3. repeat hsv noise and motion blur, except this time set the blur to 2. You get a nice rough metallic look, imho. Enjoy! I found this out by experimenting in gimp.

A fantastic tutorial; I've known most of this already but I didn't remember this cool stuff about bevels.

Also, with the bevel, orientation is important. To me, when I want an indentation, I temporarily rotate the image 180 degrees and then apply bevel, and then rotate back. To pull out, I just apply bevel to the un-rotated image. We're predisposed to believing the light comes from above and not below, so we interpret these two bevels differently.

Thanks a lot, Loopy53!

I found out how to make scratches.

Dublicate your layer and make the dublicate bighter. Then do a mask on the first layer and fill it with 100% white. Now paint with black tiny scratches in it.

Marth8880 wrote:Lol RogueKnight's tutorial. :p

A more GIMP friendly version, I suppose.

But essentially, yes.

How do you apply it to the weapons??? I tried but i couldn't figure out really how to

model the wepon then make uvs and them apply texture. if u want to replace textures of weapon that are already done u should start with the orginal texture

Some things I made with the aid of this tutorial (not weapons):

Very nice work! I love it!! Glad I can actually see some work made by others with the aid of my tutorial. This now makes me want to write my "SWBF2 Modding for n00bs (beginners)" guide.