Quake3World

next tex pack..... *drum roll*



eq2.


you should make a full texture pack when u finish, with full shaders and all.. because i might use it, they're all looking really nice.

@Sock, thanks.
Quite an amazing feat of approximation that is "good enough" for textures of this nature. One of the shots shows the slight color difference and in-game it is also noticeable. I was trying to be exact, plus experimenting with what the "recoloring does", and lacking some practical experience obviously.

Interesting quick way. Alas I am not able to reproduce your result:

• Open grate.jpg.
• In PS7: Image menu, Adjustments, Desaturate.
• Then: Image menu, Adjustments, Brightness/Contrast, Brightness slider to +100.
• I can thus match the "brighter" gray (that used to be the main orange), but now the black grates are no longer black.

I seem to be missing something here. What? Sure I can magic wand the black areas that are not perfectly black via magic wand (tolerance 10), invert selection and up the brightness by 100, to avoid this.

But you do not seem to have done it that way? What were you using to desaturate and brighten by 125%?

I am asking because I'd want to try this on my other textures that use more than one orange tone.

@Aeon, sadly this is where having the latest version of Photoshop helps (CS+) because it has better tools that PS7. The Brightness/Contrast feature in CS does not destroy the black outline but instead concentrates on the lighter colours instead. I am sure some people here will think I am a fool for saying this, but I actually bought PS a while back and I must say it was the best money I spent in a very long time, but I am sure there other ways to get the software. There really is nothing else that compares to PS on the market.

The pre PS CS+ way is as you said, 'magic wand' or 'colour select' (I think this is a ps feature only and a million times better than magic wand) the dark/black colours, cut to a seperate layer, increase the brightness of the base image by roughly 125% (probably need 2 passes) and then merge the black outline back on top. (What you were effectively doing via your 3 stage shader) All of this can be done via macros if you really want to save time. You don't need to get the colour exact just very close because this method does allow the designer total freedom to colour the tiles as they want. This will make designers very very happy

What was wrong with your 3 stage shader method is you are wasting performance with something that should be done by the artist in the art package only. If you want to add any glow effects you are now moving into 4-5 stage shader effects and they really do hurt performance in wide open areas. You just need to package the end result, example shaders and the designers will do the rest. I highly recommend you don't start distributing complex shaders when they can be very simple.

On older versions of PS, try playing around with the levels instead of brightness/contrast. You should be able to pull off a similar effect while retaining the darker bits.

@Sock,
thanks for clearing up the PS issue. I thought I was losing it. I don't shy away from a bit of extra work, but I'd hate not know about a better method.

You don't need to get the colour exact just very close because this method does allow the designer total freedom to colour the tiles as they want. This will make designers very very happy

True, about the exact colors, but presently I am building the set for myself, the universal usage, i.e. on the fly coloration will then be an added bonus. BTW, was a colorable texture set ever done? Probably not, no one uses a basically two color texture set in normal maps.

What was wrong with your 3 stage shader method is you are wasting performance with something that should be done by the artist in the art package only. If you want to add any glow effects you are now moving into 4-5 stage shader effects and they really do hurt performance in wide open areas. You just need to package the end result, example shaders and the designers will do the rest. I highly recommend you don't start distributing complex shaders when they can be very simple.

Hadn't thought if it that way. Well the shader was for a light source and with "only" 3 stages, plus was colored, so that should be OK for my use, since I like the glow effect from the Andromeda texture set. Once the set is "done", I can go in and use your simplified shaders, and distribute the whole set as gray scale textures without the glow.

I guess it is problematic to create what you need, and at the same time to make it as usable as possible for everyone else.

Edited: Pointless waffle!

Bleeding of one texture edge to the other side of the texture, is probably a know pitfall for folks creating textures, but can something be done about it?

• 

As you can see the "end piece" a) is connected to the "med piece" b), created this ugly black thin seam. These brushes are set to grid. And the editor also shows the issue. The problem is with texture a): The black edge on the left side (indicated in green) seems to bleed ever so slightly to the right side.

I am including the tga (full quality) textures:

• Download: temp_aewall_texture_bleeding.zip (2.22KB) @ hugelaser.com

What am I doing wrong? Or is this simply a known issue forcing texture designers to have a one pixel overlap on all sides of the textures? If so, this would not be an option in this case using this rather simple design.

Based on Speedy's Andromeda texture set, here the template_ae trims:

• [lvlshot]http://aemap.hugelaser.com/misc/temp_ae_textures10.png[/lvlshot]

Not sure how useful these are. All of them created with colorization (of a gray version) in mind.

And the light sources presently available:

• [lvlshot]http://aemap.hugelaser.com/misc/temp_ae_textures11.png[/lvlshot]

IMO, that should cover all relevant light source sizes.

looks great, any idea when they will be available?

Well they definitely look great.

Just out of curiosity though, what is the goal of this texture pack? Is it to beef up evil's work with some extra placeholders he didn't think to add, or to make a really cool yellow/brown themed full texture pack? Unfortunately I don't think it's possible to do both at the same time.

@Pat,
good question.

Presently I seem to be re-creating a flat version of the Andromeda texture set by Speedy, primarily creating those textures I like, and hope to use in my map (aegrid, should that ever come to exist): Orange textures, with detailed glow/blend effects (borrowed from id, and Speedy), no colorizing.

The other goal will be to create a new template set, for Sock , that indeed expands evil's work, to be used for template mapping, with the additional bonus of letting the artiste colorize the textures. The idea would then be to go through the former set, and pick those textures that should help when creating a template map, probably dropping the more detailed textures, using a cleaned up simplified set of shaders.

As it is now, I am providing some alternate textures for fKd's temp01 map

Making them avaliable for everyone would be a blast.

Wanna make with those textures

I think I am done "tracing" textures... there are probably many other textures out there that could be useful, but those will have to wait. More template_ae trims:

• [lvlshot]http://aemap.hugelaser.com/misc/temp_ae_textures12.png[/lvlshot]

A bit of eye candy, some floor grates, and another wall tile:

• [lvlshot]http://aemap.hugelaser.com/misc/temp_ae_textures13.png[/lvlshot]

Somehow I have the feeling I will not be using many of those textures. I love how temp_aecirc.tga (top left texture) turned out. The Andromeda set is really neat.

I'm getting orange overload! any chance that future (urg what's the word...) collages could be done without the orange background?

wattro,
I also noted that the PNG files seem to mess with the color tone for some reason when shown in a browser... hmmm... what background color would you prefer. I had thought of using white but that would be eye poking as well, and black would make the texture edges invisible.

Why not use (something like) this:
http://www.colorjack.com/sphere/
.. and pick a nice color from there? :]

AEon wrote:wattro,
I also noted that the PNG files seem to mess with the color tone for some reason when shown in a browser... hmmm... what background color would you prefer. I had thought of using white but that would be eye poking as well, and black would make the texture edges invisible.

cold bluish gray. like 3C4C4F or 636266

Neat link btw Tabun. Bookmarked.

yup, something simple like mid grey or something that SM suggested... just not orange! or use a subtle grey scale gradient

I'll simply use the BG color of the forum thread here, giving everyone the illusion they were actually part of the forum .

Recreated all of the original template textures evil lair created (with permission), and also with permission these textures will be available in the texture pack, making the texture_ae set complete. Started to make several textures more detailed, e.g. redid the original JP texture, colored the AP texture etc.

Hope fKd will release another map update with the textures soon, to give me a better feeling how these can be used, and what textures might still be required.

hahahah working away on it now... so much mapping, so little time

AEon wrote:Bleeding of one texture edge to the other side of the texture, is probably a know pitfall for folks creating textures, but can something be done about it?

• 

As you can see the "end piece" a) is connected to the "med piece" b), created this ugly black thin seam. These brushes are set to grid. And the editor also shows the issue. The problem is with texture a): The black edge on the left side (indicated in green) seems to bleed ever so slightly to the right side.

I am including the tga (full quality) textures:

• Download: temp_aewall_texture_bleeding.zip (2.22KB) @ hugelaser.com

What am I doing wrong? Or is this simply a known issue forcing texture designers to have a one pixel overlap on all sides of the textures? If so, this would not be an option in this case using this rather simple design.

Any ideas, suggestions?

here is a wee build showing where im at now, hope this help AEon

http://www.filefront.com/14686053/Temp01.pk3

Don't have a clue on the texture bleeding issue. All I know is that this was a standard "problem" with making skins for models (in a different way, since only edges that were connected on the model, but disconnected on the skinmap would "bleed" like that -- and that isn't a problem at all). Can't think of any clean solution for this, at the moment.

The texture issue is something you wont be able to fix, sadly. The issue comes from the way textures are mipmapped; what you are seeing there is the texture being "softened" as such ingame so it doesnt look pixelated. The only cures for this are clamping the texture coords to the brush (in code), removing the gl call to soften the texture (in code), or making the texture a lot higher res (thus making the texture soften bleed less).

There is another option, and one which will work for this theme very, very well, but not for normal textures. Simply select the face with the issue, and scale it along the one axis a TINY ammount. Keep going until the black line disapears, and will will look perfect. Your lucky with this texture theme. Because its got no actual detail to the texture like your every day Q3 texture, you can scale it quite a bit and it wont look out of place or wrong at all. All you have to do, is simply scale it a TINY SMALL LITTLE ICKLE BABY ammount until the black line is gone, and tada, fixed.

o'dium,
thanks for clearing that up. fKd is using these two textures in the Quad room, in the predictable way (two end pieces one center piece), so the slight stretching should work.

As an easier alternative, one would make the brush 1u larger on the "open" side of the end piece, then simply fit the texture, make the brush smaller by 1u, and everything should still look fine.

fKd,
hehe... it's really cool to see "my" (actually Andromeda traced) textures used in your map. I see that the "deco" textures are especially popular - like placing "paintings" on walls. Amazing level of detail in that map. Seeing my re-vamped JP, made me smile as well. Would be great if that map was released as a texture set demo, before you go for the real texturing. Your map seems to be proving more and more that the texture set could actually be used to build a beautiful map (not just as a temporary placeholder).