So I want to get into making my own textures.

What is the best program for doing this? Are there any good tutorials out there for making your own? Any pointers to know from people here who have been making their own for some time?

So would photoshop work for this kind of thing? Or do I have to use slade? 

New textures, patches, flats, etc are created with a graphics app.

Photoshop, if you have it, would be excellent. Paint.net and Gimp are excellent freeware apps.

Personally, I use PSP ver 8 most of the time.

One hint is that whatever you create must tile properly, else the edges will be very annoying.

Once you have a finished image it is inserted into your pwad with Slade3, into the appropriate namespace.

What kind of textures do you want to make? Are they generic surface textures like concrete or metal, or detailed stuff like machinery, wires etc?

To create generic surfaces there are easy steps you can follow for good results which will adapt to any shape you want -- e.g. bricks, horizontal runs, panels, adding lights etc.  The other stuff takes a lot of time and/or drawing skill.

8 hours ago, Cpl. Slaughter said:

So would photoshop work for this kind of thing? Or do I have to use slade? 

For creating the source images, Photoshop is much better. SLADE isn't, in itself, a real image editor. (There are some pixel editing tools in SLADE, but they're very rudimentary and not intended to substitute for an actual art program.)

However, you will need SLADE to convert the images into textures that the game can use.

Also, note that the Doom texture system works with "patches" that are composited together to form a texture. That means that you're supposed to create modular texture elements and then you can combine them in many different ways to create textures from them. For an example of what I mean, open this texture pack in SLADE and look at how it doesn't actually contain any new art -- everything is done by recombining the standard Doom II patches from doom2.wad in different ways. Of course, you can also just make your complete textures in Photoshop and then go with one texture = one patch. Most of the times, texture packs are done like this.

I have good amount of experience with Photoshop cs6. As for the types, Id like to learn to do perhaps a little of both. Generic and intricate ones. I've tried looking around on YouTube for tutorials on making doom textures from scratch but haven't found much. Id like to be able to do textures that look like this as far as walls, ceiling, floor, etc. But that's not to say I wont need something more intricate later on for something I'm working on.

If you want to create textures from scratch there are two ways:

- Photo mashing

You just look for source photographs of textures that you want to use (from sites like textures.com which has a ton of free stuff if you register) and then either use them directly (some on textures.com already tile) or mix them together. Put a metal bar on a brick wall for example. The rest is merely downsizing to Doom resolution and of course converting to Doom's palette.

- Painting from scratch

You can also paint your own textures from scratch. While there are not many Doom specific tutorials for this, there are a ton of 3D modelling software related ones, which work just as well for Doom. Do a quick search for "texture painting" and you will find a ton. Those tutorials will show you how to paint a "wood" texture for and how to make it tile for example. It's simpler than many think.

I'd recommend you choose only ONE of these styles, as they usually don't mix very well. Try to keep as consistent as possbile with your textures. If you use stock textures and map for Vanilla for example, it is very much adviseable that you stay as close to the original Doom textures' look as possible. If you are working on a TC, you can go totally nuts. If you map in UDMF you can even use highcolor PNGs.

I use paint.net for most of mine. That will get you through most of it though but if not I would recommend gimp.

40oz made a good texture editing tutorial here, just scroll down a bit 

Depending on what you have in mind for your project, you could go hi-res photo realistic or the standard Doom with the Doom color palette as mentioned above. Of course, even if you decided to go low-res, the palette colors don't have to be Doom, as the low-res palette can be slightly modified if wanted.

These choices also depend on which source port/engine (you'll have to use) to achieve the desired result.

Usually the problem with going hi-res instead is, everything will need to be pretty hi-res to "look right". Otherwise (in short), Doom guy will find him self teleported in to the real world with all his low-res collected sprites along with him. So hi-res usually isn't the way to go unless you plan on a full blown TC. But there's your options, again, depending on what you're wanting to do. 

On 4/15/2020 at 1:28 AM, Kappes Buur said:

Personally, I use PSP ver 8 most of the time.

Yes, I also use Paint Shop Pro 8, mainly to apply the palette and adjust the color, brightness and hue sometimes, if needed.

I've also used Gimp sometimes but not often. It does have some nice effects and worth checking out.

Mainly I use an older program that came with an IBM scanner I bought in the 90's called PhotoMax 1.0 by Arcsoft but it's not available anymore, unfortunately. The clone tool alone is awesome....

Wally! Nobody seems to use it. It was designed for editing Quake 2 textures. It is excellent for making dark or light highlight lines (good for making seams). When you have a texture that you made in another program which doesn't show what it looks like tiled.... Wally will show you the tiling. You can also shift your texture up, down, left or right with the arrow keys. For example: Know that grey brick texture in doom that is offset in such a way that the top and bottom bricks look cut in half. You can shift that texture up so the bricks look aligned at the top and bottom with just a key press. So simple it isn't funny. See example below of said texture that I offset in a couple seconds. Since my main program doesn't show how a texture is tiled, I use Wally to check it out. If there's a fugly seam, then I can shift it so the seam is visible, save it, and then fix the seam in this other program and then even shift it back in place later.

Personally I tend to use a suite of programs for working on textures. I've never used Photoshop, so maybe that's the way to go.

That sounds indeed like a very handy program Doom_Dude. I did not know about this. I will give it a try.

The same thing you can also achieve with Photoshop's "offset" settings, which shifts the texture in a given direction just like in your screenshot. Regarding making textures tileable, I can also recommend this online tool, which works best with high-res photographs as a base. This will make the bulk of the work and the rest can be pixel-edited in Photoshop, once the texture has been resized.

Yeah I find it very handy indeed. Here are a couple xamples where I used Wally's lighten and darken tools to make or enhance seams.

I'm sure a lot of people have used Gimp before, but I wanted to add that Gimp also has a make-seamless selection.

Though it kind of squeezes the corners together sometimes, so you'll have to touch them up sometimes afterwards, but it still works pretty well. 

16 hours ago, Cpl. Slaughter said:

I have good amount of experience with Photoshop cs6. As for the types, Id like to learn to do perhaps a little of both. Generic and intricate ones. I've tried looking around on YouTube for tutorials on making doom textures from scratch but haven't found much. Id like to be able to do textures that look like this as far as walls, ceiling, floor, etc. But that's not to say I wont need something more intricate later on for something I'm working on.

<<pic>>

Cool. Depending on what kind of feature set you're targeting, that kind of smoothness will be hard in something below a true-colour port. Like most 8-bit games, you can't blend between colours and the steps in each colour's darkness/intensity gradient are quite large. For this reason Doom works best with noisy, gritty and generally busy textures.  If you're working from scratch and targeting 8-bit, it's best to start in greyscale and colour later IMO, since grey has the smoothest representation of all colours in Doom.

I'm creating a texture set at the moment and found a process that gives fairly decent results for concrete, rough metal, smoother metal and a kind of reflective marble-ish look. Concrete and smoother metal (right panel of first image) pictured below.  If you're interested, I can put together a tutorial video or at least some rough steps or something.

Sorry for the late reply everyone. Been busy with work. Elend, Ill look up those texture editing videos and I plan to edit in UDMF, and that online site for seamless textures will come in handy.

Nue, Thanks for the link! Ill be studying his comments more closely. I have a lot to learn because I have zero experience with texture editing, but Im well experienced with Photoshop cs6 at least. 

Doom_Dude, Ill be checking out Wally in the future, especially if it helps with tiling.

Holaareola, That would be great if you could make a tutorial. While I am quite familiar with Cs6, I have little experience with editing textures and making them compatible for doom so the colors transfer over properly. So you may have to break things down quite a bit being that I dont have any experience with texture editing.

I plan to try other things too. Id like to learn how to make decorative sprites, like potted plants, desk chairs, along with making custom weapons etc.

 

Ive been trying to photoshop textures in 64x128 and I can see white lines in between the pixels. Will it look like that once it gets implemented into the game?

5 minutes ago, Cpl. Slaughter said:

Ive been trying to photoshop textures in 64x128 and I can see white lines in between the pixels. Will it look like that once it gets implemented into the game?

If you're zoomed in, it's probably just a grid effect Photoshop is doing. It's purely a visual aid for precision editing and can probably be turned off somewhere in the options.

But don't worry, there's no way for Doom's image format to record subpixel elements.

Gotcha, Thanks Gez!