Texture Painting - Blender Master Class: A Hands-on Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Rendering - page 160

Figure 11-9: Cleaning up our texture in GIMP: part of the roughly painted texture created in Blender (left); after blending together
and painting areas in GIMP (right)

You can control how much one layer blends
with another with the layer's Opacity setting (see
Figure 11-10). Because my Ambient Occlusion
layer darkened the underlying texture quite a lot, I
reduced its opacity to about 40 percent. The result
of the ambient occlusion layer at this opacity is
shown at the top left of Figure 11-11.

Lock Color/
Transparency

Blend
mode

Link
layers

Active layer
(highlighted)

Layer
visibility

Adjusting Colors

GIMP has a variety of tools for manipulating the
colors of an image, both from its wide array of filters
and from the Colors menu. For example, you can
adjust the exposure of an image—its hue and satu-
ration—and the brightness of each channel using
curves or sliders, among a wealth of other options.
At the moment, our texture for the Bat Creature
looks rather gray because the black-and-white ambi-
ent occlusion texture is multiplied on top. To fix this,
we can adjust the curves on the Ambient Occlusion
layer to introduce some more red, making the shad-
ows more saturated and redder. To do so, take the
following steps:

New
Layer Delete

New
Layer Group

Move Layer
Up/Down

Duplicate
Layer

Anchor
Floating Layer

Figure 11-10: GIMP's Layers dialog. At the top, Mode and
Opacity set the layer-blending mode and opacity. Beneath
these selections are options to lock the color and alpha of
layers. Each layer has options to toggle its visibility and link
layers (so that they stay aligned when moved, scaled, or
rotated).

1. Choose Colors 4 Curves with the Ambient

Occlusion layer selected, which brings up the
Curves dialog.