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Deadwing

Some tips on decorating maps?

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So, my maps aren't know for being detailed, if any at all, so I want to stop being lazy and improve my decoration skills to make them at least nice to look at lol.

 

It doesn't need to be super-detailed, I'm aiming to try something more clean which would be a middle term between simplory and polluted. Some of the early Valiant levels, Evilternity and BTSX levels hit that spot for me.

 

Some things I've been trying to accomplish + questions:

 

- Match the texture with the shape I'm trying to create: This means, no brick texture cut in half and etc. It's very trendy nowadays and for a good reason: visually is a lot more clean and consistent.

 

- Divide big portions of straight walls or ceilings into subdivisions, so the whole thing is more pleasant to look at. I guess I read that on some skillsaw's post here long time ago. Looking at the first Valiant map, I got surprised how much work went for the ceilings and how effective they made the whole level be. So it's something I got to work more than just adding some lighting texture here and there. Dealing with walls and especially floors is a lot more hard to me, because they will change player's movement and might hurt the intended gameplay (for example, bumping with different floors heights or being stuck with a corner and then dead). Any tips on how dealing especially with these two?

 

- Also, with walls, if I´m not dealing with the layout of the map (windows, heights), the only thing I know to do is to add a lame decoration panel or decoration thing (such as columns, evil eyes, gore thing, etc). Any tips to improve "overall architecture"?

 

- Colors usage: A long time ago when I was watching a stream of my maps, someone complained how the colors of that level didn't match at all lol Honestly, it's hard to not agree. Any tip regarding that to make to map visually interesting with different colors but not looking like carnival or something very monochromatic? Should I focus on 2 or 3 main colors and stick with it? Also, should I take advantage of using the same texture the most possible or keep variating with a larger set?

 

- At last, outdoors: Natural landscape is all about not being lazy, I guess. Add different layers of rocks with different heights will do the job right? As for buildings in outdoors, this is a bit harder. Adding an extra layer of wall on top makes the building more interesting, I guess, but what are other ways to make outdoor building more interesting?

 

Thanks for the Help!

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I've released one map in my entire life, so take the following with as much salt as you like.

 

Agree with you on the floors. You can use self-referencing sectors (probably cleaner ways of doing it in Boom format and up) to smooth out floor height variations.  I hate it when someone has put detail above gameplay and caused my view to judder around as I'm constantly on and off some fussy filigree on the floor.

 

The most common thing I see is pretty much what you said in point 2, which also applies to 3. Just have repeating trim sectors with different floor/ceiling heights.  It's the easiest way.  Then break up the horizontal walls by adding supports and then once again doing the nested sector thing and having lights or panels or something inset into them.  Example from Eviternity (although without insets): evi-post-09.jpg

 

The other thing is find structural units that you can create once and repeat.  A great example of this is Hurt by Elend, which imo is a study in how to do tasteful detailing. This is especially common in high detail GZDoom maps IMO. Here you've got the supports, the crenellations on the gstone lava banks, the overhangs on the giant outer ring.Doom-Hurt.jpg

 

 

For point 4, if consistency bothers you could always pick a handful of base colours, an accent colour and run with them. A few cool mappers like Tourniquet and Ribbiks do this a lot with great effect.  It automatically looks consistent and gives the wad an identity and sense of place. I prefer more variety myself if possible, maybe just stick with no more than 2 accent colours and 2 or 3 base colours per area and limit how many accent + base combos there are in any one map?

 

For outdoors, always tough in Doom IMO, fuck knows. i find making outdoor buildings look good a headache due to the lack of 3d floors and trying to fake different heights with different sky flat heights. One trick for landscape which I saw and loved is to use midtex to break up the flat sector lines on the horizon.  Poor example here but it was the first one I could get on google and I'm supposed to be working. It's of Demonastery, by Nootrac:, you can see the lines on the bottom left where the main gstone wall finished

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Hah, thanks for mentioning my map, although I am not too fond of this screenshot anymore. It is actually a bit too "busy" and some of the textures just clash imho. I would clean this up a bit these days.

 

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Dealing with walls and especially floors is a lot more hard to me, because they will change player's movement and might hurt the intended gameplay (for example, bumping with different floors heights or being stuck with a corner and then dead). Any tips on how dealing especially with these two?

 

Well, you could still detail without lowering or raising floor sectors. Sometimes it's already enough to add some kind of "trim" at the sides near the walls and just change the textures instead of raising the sectors as well. To not get hung up on wall detail, you can always set blocking lines around pillars that might have too much detail.

 

Generally I noticed it helps me most when a place is kind of rooted in reality. This way I can think about real world structural integrity (need a pillar here, or the ceiling might crash), maybe machinery that fullfills functions (airconditioning towers / blocks in a corner) or simple things as aesthetic choices that an architect would make. The more abstract a map is, the harder a time I have to actually find stuff to put there. Usually I end up with a pillar here, an indentation in the wall there and lowering floors here. That gets kind of boring very quickly and I am trying to work on this. In these cases I sometimes think more about a gameplay feature that this room could still support and try to implement that, regardless of how "well thought out" my map layout already is. Once it's there I can see more easily "Oh yeah, that could be a metal texture". Let's say you have a rather empty room you want to detail and the first that comes to mind is "a platform in this corner" or something.
 

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Any tip regarding that to make to map visually interesting with different colors but not looking like carnival or something very monochromatic?

 

 

Sometimes it helps to find a small palette of colors on sites like Lospec.com or even Adobe Color and then try to recreate this in Doom. This can be difficult with certain texture sets, though, so it would help of course if you can edit textures yourself. Generally look for a) contrast and b) colors that go well together. There are a number of possible approaches:

 

- Use 1 very bright color and the rest brown / grey

- A complete set of fitting colors (Ancient Aliens as an example)

- An overall color theme like "Red" and maybe "Yellow / Gold / Black" as a contrasting color. This is similar to the first approach actually.

- Go totally bonkers and choose "RGB" and think about how one could implement all of these colors in a coherent way. The key colors come to mind of course, but it

could also be "this part of the map is more red and the other part mostly yellow".

 

You can change these color themes during a MegaWAD of course, as long as they are coherent within the single maps.

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8 hours ago, elend said:

although I am not too fond of this screenshot anymore. It is actually a bit too "busy" and some of the textures just clash imho

You kidding me? That shot is incredible, I wish I could make maps that look like that.

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Thanks for the awesome posts guys!

Does these changes that I tried to do for map 1 make any sense?

 

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That level of detail is right up my alley. Not too bland, not too detailed. The improved version of the 2nd set of screenshots looks super atmospheric. I like the idea of the double-inset wall light fixtures, although I'm not so sure about the cobblestone texture, as it looks out of place in the brick wall.

 

You could also check out this thread, which has a similar topic:

 

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Awesome, @boris! what texture you would think it would fit with the lite5 instead of the cobblestone? >.<

 

I'll try to replace it for something less "busy"

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For the double-insets' outer texture, I'd suggest something relatively flat, that could look like roughcast perhaps, or like a metal panel, or like a wooden box, etc. Like: what would make sense around a lamp? They cut a hole in a wall to place that lamp, and then plugged the hole with something. Yeah, cobblestone or other bricks will not really work.

 

The sandy floor on the bottom of the first scene could get broken up a bit, put some little rocks here or there. And also you could use more decorative things -- if you allow yourself custom sprites, natural rocks and plants could replace or supplement Doom's vanilla things. They're the kind of things such a map needs. If you keep to vanilla Doom sprites, then the good old burned tree, twisted tree, spiky thing, candles, and assorted corpses will have to do. Some of the areas could also use more techy elements like the bollard lamps.

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Yeah, gotta add some more detailing for the sand indeed haha. I'll try to find some good sprites replacements for the vegetation too.

Anyway, I finished working with map 6 and this was more difficulty than I thought due to the level of abstracity lol I probably took some notvery good decisions, but I'm kinda trying to multiply the level of detailing by 2, if this makes any sense >.< If I try to do "microdetailing", it'll look so out of place, IDK

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I feel like borders, pillars and steps make up a lot of detail. It allows you to have complex architecture and clean texturing when you split up any natural seams with something contrasting or at least different. Your last shot with the bricks and metal pillars is a good example.

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I've been studying Afterglow's body of work a ton lately, and I think that for me, he really hits the sweetspot when it comes to detail. I think that he's a master at optimizing his visuals, as he creates really beautiful scenes without a ton of lines and sectors. here are some of my favorite shots from Lamentations DM, which I refer to most often out of his work because I think it really well showcases everything I love about his style:

 

L3lhpc0.png

I really love this scene because most of the textures here are the same relatively plain 64px-tall concrete bar texture, but there's some really cool layering in the geometry that makes it still look great. the lighting contrast here really helps too! the nice gradient to a darker level in the underpass is a really nice contrast against the bright light in the hallway near the center of the image and the other bright lights on the left and right sides of the scene from the skylights.

 

IZprARP.png

what I love about this area is the layering of different textures/materials on the same Z plane. on the walls of both edges of this scene, he's using two different textures stacked on one another to create what's effectively a composite texture, but then he extends the geometry from the top texture out from the unified composite plane to make those cool ceiling beams. I think that Mechadon and StormCatcher also both really excel at this sort of stuff. of course you have to be careful what textures you're combining, just as if you were using separate border sectors, but this is imo a great technique for making a scene more interesting without adding much geometrical complexity. you can just as well do this sort of thing with a single texture that has seams or otherwise visually distinct pieces, and again I think the very same mappers I just mentioned do that just as superbly.

 

uCwwVjy.png

some great fake composite texture stuff and bordering/layering going on here, but the reason I took this shot was because of the transition between the darker and lighter tan bars in the middle of the shot, right above the steps. he (and Mech and StormCatcher) often uses these sorts of gutters to transition between two different materials, rather than just butting the two different textures up against each other at a 90 degree angle or with a flat support transition texture in between. here's an example from Eviternity where that latter technique is used as a transition instead, and I think that comparing these two shots makes it clear how much more these gutters from Lamentations make textures feel like pieces of geometry, rather than just wallpaper (and yes I see the irony in using a counter-example from the one Eviternity map that Afterglow had a hand in). here's one more Lamentations example of this, on the right wall. gutters like this are really really simple and often involve no extra sectors, but it makes a world of difference to me.

 

ReJTgXj.png

and finally, I love this shot for two reasons. one is that he's using a combination of these stripey vertical textures with subtle geometry changes to turn some otherwise flat walls into something more interesting. I think that essel and many of the other mappers in BTSX do a great job of this sort of stuff, which makes sense because it's a pretty sector-cheap way of detailing in vanilla (though you definitely need the right resource pack to make this work well). and the second reason I love this shot is that he also uses some smooth lighting gradients to make this hallway look really appealing, even in the absence of any geometry work on the ceiling or floor.

 

 

as I mentioned, StormCatcher and Mechadon also excel at all of these things, so you could just as easily study their work to see these ideas in action. I love each of their styles, though I talked about Afterglow specifically because I think he matches most closely with the sort of thing you're aiming for Deadwing, in that his design is often more "simple" (streamlined is probably a better term though), but simultaneously quite clever and beautiful. if you're curious to dig any more into this stuff, here are some examples by those authors that I reference with some frequency these days:

  • Afterglow: Lamentations DM (dmdlamdm.wad)
  • Afterglow: Sacrifice DM (dmdsacdm.wad)
  • Mechadon: THT Threnody map10 (thtthren.wad)
  • Mechadon: 32in24-12 map08 (32in24-12.wad)
  • Mechadon: 32in24-15 map01 (32in24-15.wad)
  • StormCatcher: Eviternity map19 (eviternity.wad)

 

also, I do really like the changes you've made in the shots that you posted Deadwing :D

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Woah, thanks a lot for the post, @Tango!
That's an awesome guide!

I'll look more carefully at his maps and see how to incorporate that style in my maps!

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On 4/22/2020 at 12:58 AM, Tango said:

...without a ton of lines and sectors... I think it really well showcases everything I love about his style...  often uses these sorts of gutters to transition between two different materials, rather than just butting the two different textures up against each other at a 90 degree angle or with a flat support transition texture in between.

 

Those design decisions were likely a product of:

  • My initial experience with those textures was making darken2.wad that targeted doom2.exe, so VPO-friendly minimalism was expected.
  • For those darken2 tan textures (remade as OBASEA/OBASEB in OTEX), there really wasn't a vertical compliment in the same colour/shade
  • After dmdjm*, SlaughterDM, early Crucified Dreams, SacrificeDM, etc., I was tired of Romero E1-style cliché to use SUPPORT2/ADEL_S01 separators.

Around the time those maps were made, my main inspiration was community-made maps from the first three Quake games. Many were attrium-style designs with vertical layered materials and strong framing. Making detailed Doom maps with that in mind is a lot of easier when you have many patterns of the same base surface which is why OTEX is the strongest choice.

 

38fOpuYl.png

 

Having that concrete with vertical edges, I can frame the doorway on X and Y along with a darker frame. Then I layered new materials behind that, along with completely (un)necessary 3D cutouts.

 

Tonight I noticed this jarring corner where the concrete and dark metal meet awkwardly:

 

hCtxtRcl.png

 

So I broke it up with a concrete column. Again the vertical concrete edges is used, but only 4-wide pixels of that texture are in place to transition the column into the brown/black middle material. So the concrete is like a photo frame of the metal panel.

 

AkP3aPsl.png

 

Finalizing geometry, it might help to think in the context of the material, what real world thing it represents, how heavy it is, what support system would be needed.

 

Then iterate dozens of times and take 22 years to finish said map.

 

On 4/22/2020 at 12:58 AM, Tango said:

here's an example from Eviternity and yes I see the irony in using a counter-example from the one Eviternity map that Afterglow had a hand in

 

 

Dragonfly did that transition. I never noticed.

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