Part 2.5: What to do if the Alpha isn't Straight.

Okay, for this part we're going to open up the other Cazy Hair I had you download, in s3pe. That would be Cazy_144. Find the Diffuse texture again and Export it like you did before, then open it up in Photoshop.

Next go over to Shock&Shame's Texture again and Copy it then paste it over the Cazy texture like you did before.

 Goto the Channels tab and make the alpha visible again. You'll see that this time one of the hair "pieces" in the Alpha is a little curved and our texture looks a tad bit weird on it. This means we'll have to tweak the texture so it fits in better with the Alpha.

Go back to the Layers, making sure you leave the Alpha channel visible this time. It will act as a guide when we warp the texture.

 So first we're going to make a Duplicate Layer of the Shock&Shame texture that you just copied and pasted. Right click on the Shock&Shame layer and then choose Duplicate Layer from the pop up menu. This will make an exact duplicate of the layer. You'll see why we do this near the end.

Now click on the Rectangle Marquee Tool. It should be the second tool down on the Tool Panel, which is the skinny vertical bar on the left. With the Rectangle Marquee Tool selected, hold down the left mouse button and make a big rectangle over the curved piece just like shown in the picture.

Once you have the area selected, click on Edit from the top menu then choose Transform > Warp. This will make a type of grid around the selected area. We're going to use this grid to warp the texture so that it looks more curved and is more in line with our Alpha layer. 

To move the texture, click anywhere on the grid then hold your mouse button down and drag. We'll start by moving the top left corner over a little to the left then we'll do the same to the next line over.

Then we'll go one row down and move that line over to the right . See how it's starting to make the box a little curved on the top? We basically want the grid, and therefore the texture to resemble the way the Alpha piece curves. Which means the top and bottom parts of the grid need to be pulled to the left and the middle part of the grid needs to be pulled to the right. It's important here that you keep an eye on the texture and make sure it doesn't look too stretched or anything. If you make a mistake you can always hit.. 

...the Cancel Icon (which is to the left of the Check Mark icon on the top menu bar) and that will cancel everything you've done and you can start over. You probably won't end up with it looking perfect on your first try.

Take a look at my pictures and you can see which parts I moved and which I didn't. Try to make it look similar. As you can see in the last picture, the texture is now curved and it conforms to the Alpha...

...much better, which is what we wanted. When you're happy with how it looks, go ahead and press the check mark up to to save your Warp.

Now it's time for clean up and you'll see why it was important to make a duplicate layer of our texture BEFORE we started warping. Why? Well if you look closely at it, you'll see that because we moved the texture over to the left when we warped it, the warped part is visible on a small part of the Left Hair Piece. It's visible at the top and bottom.

Select the Rectangle Marquee tool, and make a rectangle around the offending area. Once you've done that, hit Ctrl+X to cut the selected area out. 

The layer beneath will now be visible through that cut out area. This is why we duplicated the layer, so that we could cut pieces out of the top layers. If we hadn't duplicated the layer first, we would've needed to be extremely careful about how we warped the texture and ain't nobody got time for that.

Once you've done that you should have something that looks similar to the photo. Flatten your image like you did before by pressing Ctrl+F, and then go ahead and save because you've just finished making your Diffuse Texture curved!










Next Up: Part 3: Making the Specular