What is GIMP?

GIMP is a cross-platform image editor available for GNU/Linux, OS X, Windows and more operating systems. It is free software, you can change its source code and distribute your changes.

Website: https://www.gimp.org/ GitHub Repository: https://github.com/GNOME/gimp License: GNU GPL v3

GIMP is a powerful program that can be use to create textures for Terasology items/blocks. GIMP is packed with a lot of tools that can make your design process easier, faster, and better. GIMP is usually used as an alternative for Adobe Photoshop because it's more lightweight & free!

Installation (Windows)

Installing GIMP is extremely easy, all you need to do is follow this simple steps.

1. Go to https://www.gimp.org/downloads/
2. Choose the operating system that you are using (In this case, Windows)
3. Choose your download method (Torrent/Direct Download)
4. Launch the installer and then click 'Install'

5. Follow the steps shown in the launcher
6. You are good to go!

Installation (Linux)

It's very likely your Unix-like system such as a GNU/Linux distribution already comes with a GIMP package. It is a preferred method of installing GIMP, as the distribution maintainers take care of all the dependencies and bug fix updates. Please note that many distros decide to pin a specific version of GIMP to their releases.

GIMP can also run on Solaris and is available for the BSD family of systems such as FreeBSD and OpenBSD.

Please refer to the documentation for your Unix-like system on the installation of software. Source: https://www.gimp.org/downloads/

Usage

Setting-Up The Workspace

Once you've run GIMP, you will see this screen.

The small window on the left contains your tools, colors and tool options and the small window on the right contains the layer and brush selector.

Now, we need to create a new image first before we could start creating our texture, you can do that by clicking File -> New... then you will see something like this.

The maximum size for icons in Tesarology is 128px x 128px, so let's create a new image with that size in mind.

And.. Voila, you now have a blank canvas to work with.

Creating a New Texture

Now you have a blank canvas. What next? Of course you want to start creating your texture right? To do that we can use the huge arsenal of tools available at GIMP.

If you want to create an item with a tranparent background (Which I highly suggest) you need to make sure that your background looks something like this.

Those checkered box indicates "transparency". So when you export the texture to a .png those checkered box will be transparent. Sometimes when you just created a new image, it starts with a white layer. If you want it to have transparent parts you need to delete the white layer using the "Trash Can" icon below the layer list box.

Now, feel free to use your creativity and imagination to create the best texture/icon ever created!

Exporting Image to .png

So.. I created this sausage-ish kind of textures/icon and I want to export it as a .png file. How I can do this? It's extremely easy.

Just click File -> Export As.. and then you will see this pop-up window.

Now, type-in the name of the file (Make sure it ends with .png) and then from the dropdown list on the bottom right select PNG image (*,png) and then click Export and if there's another pop-up, click Export again.

And there you go! You have a .png file of the texture you created! Here's the final result. :')