Textures and Such

I got bored last night and decided to spend 12 hours playing around with textures.

You will need a password, which is doomstuff because I am totally unoriginal.

The textures were taken from Doom RPG and slightly modified to appear more like the PC Doom games. They have not had the Doom palette applied to them because I have no clue how to do such things.

Very nice! I like em a lot. If I were you I would have touched up the tekwall-ish pieces and computer monitors. Apply some sort of a bevel around the border to make them look more sunken into the texture instead of like a piece of paper pasted on top. aside from that they are very nice.

Also some step textures, and border textures (ala SUPPORT3) done in that same style would be very handy.

I do have to say I agree. I like the ones with the data screens rather than the ones with the universe. They seem like a more natural fit and just look better in my opinion.

Nice work. Had a quick play with the Hue/Saturation/Lightness settings in PSP8, but I'm having a bit of trouble finding the right shade for the big green wall textures to look good when converted to the Doom palette. Also, looking closely, there's a slightly strange checker-pattern along the top section.

The smaller 32px x 64px green panel textures convert quite well though.

The original textures had that checker pattern, I thought it gave it character. lol

As for the conversion, how do I go about applying the doom palette to the images? I use Paint Shop Pro 8.

If Paint Shop Pro 8 supports ACT palettes, you could export the PLAYPAL lump from the IWAD and change its extension to ACT.

Just export a random sprite or graphic using XWE/WinTex/SLumpEd/etc from one of your Doom IWADs and open it in PSP8. It should already be in the Doom palette. Then go to:

Image -> Palette -> Save Palette...

Call it "Doom" or something like that. Then any time you want to apply the Doom palette to an image, just use:

Image -> Palette -> Load Palette...

and pick your "Doom" palette. "Nearest color matching" usually tends to look better than "Error diffusion dithering". If it looks ugly, click Undo, then mess around with the colours and contrast until you find a shade that converts well.

You can also find the palettes for GIMP here.

Xtroose said:

If Paint Shop Pro 8 supports ACT palettes, you could export the PLAYPAL lump from the IWAD and change its extension to ACT.

If your using Paintshop Pro you can just save the palette of any stock Doom texture I don't see why you would need the PLAYPAL lump for this maybe there is a reason I am missing? Also in the PLAYPAL lump index 247 is mapped as color 0, 0, 0 but when you save the palette of a Doom texture that index is mapped 0, 255, 255 this could cause some problems I would think.

DooMAD said:

and pick your "Doom" palette. "Nearest color matching" usually tends to look better than "Error diffusion dithering". If it looks ugly, click Undo, then mess around with the colours and contrast until you find a shade that converts well.

Sometimes that works ok but I have found it good to grayscale then either colorize or load a palette that has say for example all the red colors in the Doom palette.

Pottus said:

If your using Paintshop Pro you can just save the palette of any stock Doom texture I don't see why you would need the PLAYPAL lump for this maybe there is a reason I am missing?

If you import an ACT palette in a wad and name it PLAYPAL it will be used as a palette in the game.

Pottus said:

Also in the PLAYPAL lump index 247 is mapped as color 0, 0, 0 but when you save the palette of a Doom texture that index is mapped 0, 255, 255 this could cause some problems I would think.

This is not a big issue in Doom, but is a lot bigger in other Doom engine games.

If you are using this approach of creating palettes, it is better to take a screenshot in a source port with software rendering and use its palette. There really is no need for the existence of "transparent" indices, because any decent image manipulating program supports alpha channels.

Why am I getting a password prompt to view the folder?

KingKill33 said:

You will need a password, which is doomstuff because I am totally unoriginal.

Okay, well I applied the palette to the textures to get a feel for how they look, and I must say that they convert rather well IMO. However. the blue/green tech walls turn this shade of gray that I don't quite like. Perhaps taking one of the colors from the palette itself, placing it over the texture and making it slightly transparent then applying the palette may work?

Edit: That idea is a total fail.

In Photoshop I make extensive use of Gradient Map adjustment layers to color-adjust images that I'm going to palettize. It allows me to remap the image as grayscale into a gradient made up of whatever colors I want, so I can set up a gradient from Doom palette colors to, for example, map the image into Doom's blue range, or create a map that starts at orange, transitions to Doom's red range at the most optimal point in the palette, then continues with the reds down as dark as it'll go and then switch to the nearest brown.

This isn't some sort of magical palettization function, though, it can just help ease the process significantly if you use it properly. For textures consisting of multiple color ranges, some masking would be required to have different Gradient Map adjustment layers affect different portions of the image, to map them into different color ranges.

To see how it looks paletted, convert to Indexed Color, using the Doom palette as the loaded color table. When working on paletted graphics, I do this a ton of times, just bringing up the Indexed Color conversion dialog to see how it'll look, noting any problems, then clicking Cancel to go back and adjust further to try fixing whatever's not palettizing smoothly.

If you run into issues with visible color banding, create a new layer, fill it with 50% gray (this is probably quickest to do just by filling it with either white or black, hitting Ctrl-I to Invert, then hitting Ctrl-Shift-F to Fade Invert to 50%), do an Add Noise on it (amount probably no more than 20), set its blending mode to Soft Light, and set its opacity to something around 10% or so, finding a compromise between what helps smooth the color transitions and what just looks grainy and yuck. The noise layer should probably go below your gradient map layer(s), and again, make liberal use of the Indexed Color dialog to see how your changes are looking.

I realize you said you're using PSP8, not Photoshop, but hopefully this info will be helpful to someone at least. :P

Thanks for the advice, I may have to procure a copy of Photoshop and give that a try. :D

More textures:





















They're all pretty much variations of the same thing. I also never swapped the blue for the pink for transparency and such. Also, step textures as requested. I wasn't too sure how to go about a support texture, but I'm currently working on it.