Easiest Way of Making Doom Textures and Flats

Mod message: Move this to the Doom Editing Tutorials forum; the placement of this post in this forum is a accident. I had a lot of work doing this tutorial. Don't let this effort disappear.

This tutorial is designed for maximum simplicity and ease to introduce Doom modders into the world of making custom textures for maps. As such, it is presented in a step-by-step format using an example flat (in this case, a industrial grid) for use in maps.
PLEASE REMEMBER MAKING WALL TEXTURES IS DIFFERENT, YOU MUST ADD THE TEXTURES TO TEXTUREx! AND NO MAKING TEXTURE PACKS WITH THAT, OK?!

Step 1: Download the image from Star Textures. Star Textures is a free-license site where you can download images for personal and commercial use. Remember to credit the image's creators!


Step 2: Open that image using GIMP. If you don't have GIMP, then install it. The rest is easy-peasy.


Step 3: Cut the image into an perfect square. Make sure you check the "1:1 proportion" when cutting the image in the Tool Options. This is only necessary when making a flat.


Step 4: In case of flat, rescale the image down to 64x64. This is pretty simple. The image may appear a bit distorted because of the low resolution. (In ZDoom, you can have an larger image resolution as long as it is a perfect square.) This step applies to texture in the form of "Rescale down to power-of-two dimensions if doing a vanilla-compatible texture."


Step 5: Save the image. This (hopefully) says it by itself. Simple too.


Step 6: Load the image into SLADE3. Easy too. Make sure you clicked on "Make a new WAD" or "Make a new archive" beforehand.


Step 7: Convert the image into Doom's flat format. Click in the image's lump/file in SLADE. In the right side a preview appears. In it, the image shows in a blue circle the button that must be pressed. In the red circle is the format that must be chosen. After that, hit "Convert".


Step 8: In case of WAD, put the flat inside F_START and F_END markers. More info about markers (aka namespaces) is detailed here. This makes sure the flat appears in map editors as... a flat, when loaded.


This is pretty much all, and despite the number of steps, making textures and flats is actually easy and quick, depending on how is the starting base image, how you want it to become, how different you want it to appear in-game, how much you will test for it to have the desired look ingame and how much work you are willing to put in this. Good luck making texture packs!

Thanks for Dzmitry Sukhavarau for providing the test image. It is clear that I deleted the WAD and won't provide it to anyone. Ever.

That texture seems useful for a moire effect-themed map.

rdwpa said:

That texture seems useful for a moire effect-themed map.

Maybe...

Easiest Way of Stealing Textures and Flats

Vorpal said:

Easiest Way of Stealing Textures and Flats

What? I didn't understand.

Your tutorial has zero information on "making" anything, just stealing stuff made by others and not crediting them.

I totally forgot the crediting part! I am so idiot!
I will update the OP immediately if it isn't already.
EDIT: Updated the OP:

Step 1: Find the desired texture base in the Internet. With Google Images it is superbly easy to find something suitable to work on. Make sure to credit the creator of the texture, or else...!

The site you ripped the image from does attribute ownership to an actual human. There's no need to ask if he minds his 4807x3218 photograph being reduced to a 64x64 palette shifted texture, though, because who gives a fuck what he thinks.

I'm not really talking about copyright law here, just a sort of basic human respect where if you use something made by someone else, it is good to give them a nod personally or an acknowledgement at least.

I thanked him for letting me use the imagery in the tutorial and deleted the example WAD from my HD.
It is from here.
I will put the thanks in the OP as soon as possible. Also I know nothing about copyright, only about crediting, "thanks" and "you're welcome".

EDIT: I also changed from "Google Images" to Star Textures in the STEP 1 description so no one will accidentally take a licensed image.

Just saying it is illegal to just take random images off of Google images to use in your own work regardless of your intention to make money or not. Find sites that actually let you download or buy images off them like this one which you can download textures from for free if you sign up or you can buy the better ones.

Star textures is an alternative. Just reload the page and see the OP. I also reduced step number for practicity.

I also don't think people who make textures for Doom just grab textures from texture websites, but that's just my two pennies.

Normally people who want maps with custom textures hire very talentous artists to make the textures from them. But hey, it's bad to your money and very hard, also this is faster. You might also want to experiment with other GIMP tools to modify the image before rescaling it so that it is beautiful ingame.

Instead of trying to constantly adjust your tutorial to satisfy whiners like me, why not ask yourself if there is any reason at all to have steps describing how to download a jpeg off the internet? Especially if the idea of ownership is confusing to you?

Gustavo6046 said:

Normally people who want maps with custom textures hire very talentous artists to make the textures from them. But hey, it's bad to your money and very hard

It may be harder, but it's more fun (and well worth the effort) to make textures from scratch... don't be tempted into taking shortcuts!

Vorpal said:

Instead of trying to constantly adjust your tutorial to satisfy whiners like me, why not ask yourself if there is any reason at all to have steps describing how to download a jpeg off the internet? Especially if the idea of ownership is confusing to you?

Good idea, but I think I will keep Star Textures as a recommendation. I also don't think you're "whining", as you have the reason. I actually should thank you, because you prevented me from making other infringe copyright. I don't slap dogs that whine. And you aren't a dog that whine.

HavoX said:

It may be harder, but it's more fun (and well worth the effort) to make textures from scratch... don't be tempted into taking shortcuts!

My scratch textures are very fucking horrible! Take a look at my Laser Gun or Paratrooper Rifle wad for a example.

Since this tutorial is aimed at creating texture packs, it is worth noting the license from startextures,

Do not sell or distribute any of these textures (modified or not) by itself or in a texture, material or scrapbooking pack!

It is aimed at making textures for maps! Included in maps, not in packs!

http://www.textures.com , http://www.plaintextures.com and http://www.gametextures.com are good sources for royalty free textures you can use for map making.

When making Doom fidelity textures though you're gonna be spending a lot of time manually touching up and repainting them after resizing though, almost to the point of making the the usage of the original texture moot besides being used as a reference. Doom/Quake textures are essentially pixel art and are meant to be very scaleable, where even a single pixel can infer a lot of detail. You don't really get that kind of quality needed when just scaling down high res sources since they just turn into a muddy mess with no definition.

I though this thread was already moved.
Anyway, painting pixel-by-pixel seems quite time-consuming, especially when making 128x128 textures, it's like clicking 128² times in Paint.
This is a try of making a texture of some sort I done:

I simply don't have any fucking talent!

This thread is not getting moved to the tutorials subforum.

That is ok...
This is another try:

I decided to follow this tutorial... and that is the result!

create 64x128 canvas
scribble anything into it... literally anything at all
ctrl-a to select it, filter through a high parameter fragmentary blur
use lasso tool to scribble a selection over it, turn the selection black and white
repeat the process but choose sepia instead of b&w

finishing touches:
(optional: polar inversion?)
extract an actual doom patch from doom2.wad and paste it into another layer at around 85/255 transparency
find the green vines texture too and paste that on top so you don't have to think about making the texture wrap properly
consider using the pixel noise feature to make it look like you put effort into this texture
finally draw a lot of horizontal grooves using brightness/contrast filters with the selection tool

your texture is now ready for Requiem/Eternal Doom

Does this look like hellstone?

I put good effort into it.
After selective Gaussian distortion:

yakfak said:

create 64x128 canvas
scribble anything into it... literally anything at all
ctrl-a to select it, filter through a high parameter fragmentary blur
use lasso tool to scribble a selection over it, turn the selection black and white
repeat the process but choose sepia instead of b&w

finishing touches:
(optional: polar inversion?)
extract an actual doom patch from doom2.wad and paste it into another layer at around 85/255 transparency
find the green vines texture too and paste that on top so you don't have to think about making the texture wrap properly
consider using the pixel noise feature to make it look like you put effort into this texture
finally draw a lot of horizontal grooves using brightness/contrast filters with the selection tool

your texture is now ready for Requiem/Eternal Doom

Hahaha omg

You just forgot one thing:
use paint sprayer to spray on blood for alternate textures
Smooth out blood spray with the highlighter to make it look like you did a good job

Fonze said:

Hahaha omg

You just forgot one thing:
use paint sprayer to spray on blood for alternate textures
Smooth out blood spray with the highlighter to make it look like you did a good job

yep