nce I don’t have any scribbles to update with today and I really don’t want to skip this month’s regular updates so instead, I’ll write a little tutorial on how to add textures to paint tool SAI because a lot of search strings leading to this site are SAI texture related. Please, forgive any language mistakes but I’m trying to keep this as simple as I can so that anyone can easily follow it.
It took me a while to figure out how to do this so I hope this will be helpful to someone out there. Also, it might sound confusing at first but it’s really simple if you thoroughly read what’s written here. Remember to backup the every file before you’ll modify just in case you screwed up something so you won’t blame it on me lol.
There are three main steps to adding textures to SAI; create or find textures, copy textures to the appropriate folders and modify the configuration files.
Before starting, you’ll need some good textures to use with SAI. You can create your own textures using softwares like NeL TexGen Editor or download personal textures shared by some generous artists from the links below.
sai-texture.zip (2.03MB) | xxlost.com/material
sai textures pack (1.50MB) | hineck.pxx.in/RERE
Texture/elemap pack (7.50MB) | by parfhelbelia @ dA
Once you’ve downloaded the above files, keep them aside and proceed reading here. You’ll need to learn where to place these files before you do anything.
Please note that there are four type of textures used by SAI:
blotmap for brush border textures.
brushtex for brush stroke textures.
papertex for canvas textures.
elemap for brush form and shape.
Brushtex, papertex and blotmap can use the same texture bmp-s while elemap which is for brushtip shape requires different type of texture images.
Also, keep in mind that textures are 512×512 8bit grayscale bmp-s and blotmaps are 256×256 8bit grayscale bmp-s.
Now, unzip the files you downloaded and browse through them. If there are any file names written in gibberish language or Japanese, please have them renamed properly in English for convenient editing later on.
Pick the textures you liked and copy them to the folders they belong to (brushtip shapes must go to elemap folder and the rest .bmp images can go to any of the remaining three). Now depending on which folder you copied the files to, you must modify the corresponding configuration file as well. For example, if you copied grain.bmp to your papertex folder, you’ll need to add a new line in the papertex.conf file or if you added rock.bmp to your brushtex folder, you must add a new line in brushtex.conf file and so on.
Above are the three configuration files you must edit if you added images to their corresponding texture folders. You must modify;
brushform.conf if you added files to elemap/blotmap folder,
brushtex.conf if you added files to brushtex folder,
papertex.conf if you added files to papertex folder.
Now, once you’ve copied the textures or blotmaps you like, open the configuration files for the folders you’ve edited.
You’ll see that there are already a list of texture configurations. Something like 1,brushtex\Canvas.bmp, 1,papertex\Canvas.bmp or 1,blotmap\Spread.bmp. All you have to do is to copy as many lines as the number of new files you added and edit the texture file names only.
For example;
You added a texture file named watercolor.bmp to your papertex folder. You’ll have to open papertex.conf and add a new line that says 1,papertex\watercolor.bmp and save. Same goes for the other files. Repeat until you’ve added the names of all new textures in their respective configuration files, save your file and give yourself a pat on the back for you’ve just learned how to carry out this task. Spread the knowledge if you found someone else confused about this or link them to this post (´･ω･`)
Open paint tool SAI, you’ll be able to see the new textures in the texture menu or in the brush texture menu. Just look at how pretty the below brush strokes look 8D
Now, for an extra tip to anyone who likes tidy workspaces.
Change default interface font size
Because I’m a neat freak and font sizes larger than 10px freaks me out and causes me major distractions, here is how you can change SAI’s default translation font size from 12px to 10px.
Open language.conf and look for :
FontCaption = 0, 13, "Tahoma"
FontFixedPitch = 0, 13, "Tahoma"
FontVariablePitch = 0, 13, "Tahoma"
FontFixedPitchSmall = 0, 11, "Tahoma"
FontVariablePitchSmall = 0, 11, "Tahoma"
Replace these lines with :
FontCaption = 0, 11, "Tahoma"
FontFixedPitch = 6, 11, "Tahoma"
FontVariablePitch = 0, 11, "Tahoma"
FontFixedPitchSmall = 5, 11, "Tahoma"
FontVariablePitchSmall = 0, 11, "Tahoma"
and you are done! You’ve got yourself a shiny neat SAI with beautiful tiny fonts instead of the hideous larger ones 8D
If you’ve got any questions or got confused anywhere in the process, please don’t hesitate to ask and once again, remember to back up just in case you didn’t like the results and needed to revert to your original settings. Also, if you found out any mistakes in my process or noticed that I’m misinformed about some stuff, don’t hesitate to correct me lol.
Happy texturing!
