Which Program Should I use to make textures of my own ?

[The Lone Wolf]

Hello people, I am new to modding and I am also working on a little project. So, I want to create my own textures. Why do I want that ?

It's because I don't actually feel comfortable when I am using textures from realm667 or some other free to use sources. I would be glad if you help me out.

[Doomkid]

Paint.Net is fantastic for editing textures, in my experience.

[ReX]

GIMP is a free and open-source raster graphics editor used for image manipulation and image editing, free-form drawing, transcoding between different image file formats, and more specialized tasks.

[Robo_Cola]

Gimp is awesome (and more complex, with more tools at your disposal) but there's a learning curve to it.  Paint.net may be a bit easier to get into basic texture editing fast.

Edited September 27, 2020 by STILES

[P41R47]

Those programs are good to make them, but anybody know this part of the question:

10 hours ago, THE IMP said:

I want to create my own textures.

How to make original textures?
I don't think a texture is created drawing pixel by pixel... or it is made that way?

[Kappes Buur]

The programs mentioned, or Windows Paint, should do the trick.

Texture images can be downloaded from the internet. However, you might want to browse through these links

 

https://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=31139
https://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=24346

https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/90900-post-your-doom-textures/

 

for inspiration.

 

Just remember that textures for walls and floor/ceiling must be tiled, preferably in both directions, vertical and horizontal.

[Sergeant_Mark_IV]

1 hour ago, P41R47 said:

How to make original textures?
I don't think a texture is created drawing pixel by pixel... or it is made that way?

It depends on your art style.
If you are doing pixel art style (See: Action Doom 2), then yes.
If you are emulating Doom's style, then no. You must draw by hand only the form of the texture (borders, depth, etc) then you place a base material texture (which can be found in many free texture sites) underneath it. Example:

[Smouths]

I've been using Paint Shop Pro 7 for all of mine- I'm sure there's probably something newer/better (PSP7 is 20ish years old at this point,) but it's been pretty easy to learn with as a newbie, at least for me.

[P41R47]

Thanks, @Sergeant_Mark_IV!
That was pretty useful to made myself an idea of how to do new ones ;)

[M_W]

+1 for GIMP.

 

I use Photoshop because I need the creative suite for reasons, but GIMP is free and open source, what's better than that?

[kwc]

https://github.com/Kimbatt/cc0-textures
Have at it :)

Edit: I guess I can chime in. 
I used Aseprite for a while and I liked it a lot, pixelpushy by nature but capable of some decent advanced features. I enjoyed using it a lot until I realized that it's RGB-to-Index quantization crushes a lot of greys and a few low-contrast reds, reducing the palette to something like 235 :/
So I bit the bullet and got photoshop, with a few tweaks, you can get a pretty good and accurate workflow going.
I still use Aseprite from time to time when I'm making minor adjustments or am outright drawing textures (lights, computers, etc), I just remember not to index using it and just stick within the palette.

Edited September 27, 2020 by kwc

[Martin Howe]

8 hours ago, Doomkid said:

Paint.Net is fantastic for editing textures, in my experience.

Good news on that front for Linux users like me, BTW, 'Pinta' (a clone of PDN) is now being actively maintained again :)

[Gez]

Get a digital camera and take pictures of the surfaces around you. Then turn them into textures!

[smeghammer]

9 hours ago, Smouths said:

I've been using Paint Shop Pro 7

Stick with PSP7. I bought a copy ages ago and it's excellent (and way cheaper than Photoshop...)

[Raleigh]

13 hours ago, ReX said:

GIMP is a free and open-source raster graphics editor used for image manipulation and image editing, free-form drawing, transcoding between different image file formats, and more specialized tasks.

Gimp is really hard to use, I know it 100%

[Sergeant_Mark_IV]

I would also recommend Fireworks 8 (when it was still Macromedia, before Adobe purchased it). This is what I have been using for years, to make both textures and sprites.
It's a very newbie friendly, layouts are very easy to use. You can just download the free 30 day trial version, and then google a serial number and boom. There you go.

[P41R47]

3 hours ago, Gez said:

Get a digital camera and take pictures of the surfaces around you. Then turn them into textures!

How i reduce it size properly?
It become a garbled mess!
I work with Photoshop CS3, and when i resize them manually, they become blurry.
And using just a tiny part of the bigger picture doesn't have the details i saw on it.

I tried opening it on the image visor, then zoom out, take a screenshot, and then work on that screenshot, its not the best way, but most of the details are still there.
But not works every time.
Also, its kinda difficult to make them loop on every side.
How is that made?

[DooMAD]

7 hours ago, smeghammer said:

Stick with PSP7. I bought a copy ages ago and it's excellent (and way cheaper than Photoshop...)

 

7 and 8 are both good.  I've been using 8 since forever.  Careful if you go with an older version, though.  I can't remember if it was PSP 5 or 6 that I really didn't like as much.

[Gez]

6 hours ago, P41R47 said:

How i reduce it size properly?
It become a garbled mess!
I work with Photoshop CS3, and when i resize them manually, they become blurry.
And using just a tiny part of the bigger picture doesn't have the details i saw on it.

I tried opening it on the image visor, then zoom out, take a screenshot, and then work on that screenshot, its not the best way, but most of the details are still there.
But not works every time.
Also, its kinda difficult to make them loop on every side.
How is that made?

 

 

Well, I don't know about Photoshop since I don't use it. I use GIMP which is admittedly weaker than Photoshop.

 

So here's an example. A picture of a dry stone wall I took. The actual photo is 6000x4000, I resized it to 600x400 (using GIMP's default cubic resizing method) to make it easier to share:

 

The next step is you crop a part of the picture that you want to make tile-capable. Here I'll get rid of the top and part of the bottom.

 

 

Then there's the magic step: offset the image by half width, half height. In GIMP there's a shortcut for that which is shift-ctrl-O. It brings all the ugly seams front and center.

 

 

So now you've gotta work on fixing those seams. It can be more or less difficult and it requires a little bit of skill, but if like me you have none you can substitute a heavy use of the clone stamping tool. It's magic.

 

The seams have been fixed. But maybe we broke the new edges of the pictures. So we offset the picture again!

 

 

That actually looks kinda fine? Let's call it a day.

 

Cubic resize to 256x128:

 

 

GIMP is bad at applying a palette, so I use SLADE to convert to Doom format with Doom palette and then convert back to PNG for sharing:

 

 

Here you go, a beautiful wall that will make every brick-aligner tear their hair out in frustration!

[P41R47]

Thanks @Gez that was realy easy to understand and it will help a lot of members like me that would like to try on texture making ;)

[TheMagicMushroomMan]

GIMP is great for pretty much everything. Bring out the GIMP!

[ReX]

3 hours ago, Gez said:

.... you can substitute a heavy use of the clone stamping tool ....

@Gez Is this a feature of GIMP?

 

[EDIT: Never mind. In GIMP it's just known as Clone Tool. "Clone Stamp Tool" appears to be what Photoshop calls it.]

[NiGHTMARE]

Pretty much any raster graphics editor more powerful than mspaint will have this kind of tool. In Paintshop Pro (v7 at least), it's called the Clone Brush.

[Marisa the Magician]

10 hours ago, Gez said:

GIMP is bad at applying a palette, so I use SLADE to convert to Doom format with Doom palette and then convert back to PNG for sharing

 

I personally use mtPaint to do palette conversions, since it has some pretty in-depth tweaking in that aspect, and even some extra dithering modes.

[DooMAD]

13 hours ago, Gez said:

Cubic resize to 256x128:

 

 

GIMP is bad at applying a palette, so I use SLADE to convert to Doom format with Doom palette and then convert back to PNG for sharing:

 

 

Here you go, a beautiful wall that will make every brick-aligner tear their hair out in frustration!

 

The tricky part with photo-realistic textures is that the colours are often too subtle for the Doom palette to pick up on.  Everything leans towards greyscale unless there's a strong saturation.  You can try to add some colour back in, but results can be mixed:

 

 

It might also look a little out of place when used with the stock Doom textures as those have a certain visual style to them that doesn't really exist in the real world.

 

Sometimes it helps to darken the image and bump up the contrast a little.  Just seems to look a bit more Doom-ish for some reason:

 

Edited September 28, 2020 by DooMAD

[Gez]

Darkened and contrasted:

 

 

The monochrome look is IMO not a bad thing because then you can colorize it with a Doom palette tone.

 

Or, with the high-contrast variant:

 

[P41R47]

21 minutes ago, Gez said:

Darkened and contrasted:

 

 

The monochrome look is IMO not a bad thing because then you can colorize it with a Doom palette tone.

 

Or, with the high-contrast variant:

 

Those looks doomy enough ;)

[THT]

^^very sexy. 

Does anyone still have access to the Windows XP editor called "Wally"? That thing was truly phenomenal: designed for editing Quake textures, it could be loaded with the Doom palette and supported features like tiling, noise generation, "decorations" (i.e. bullet-holes/rivets/caution-stripes/etc) that could be superimposed, and they could even used in a generative fashion to make craggy holes out of whatever you initially drew. A great tool for pixel-artists that seems to have dropped by the wayside which is a damn shame.

I haven't found any tool since that even approaches it but maybe that's changed now... UPDATE! I was able to find a copy here. Dunno why I had so much trouble with that before but I will say I've been running a Mac for ages...

 

Edited September 29, 2020 by THT : UPDATE!

[Gez]

Wally can be found with its manual there: https://valvedev.info/tools/wally/ and there's also a wally_155b.exe over there: https://www.quaddicted.com/files/tools/.

[ReX]

@THT I was a regular user of Wally, and I do agree that it was (is) a versatile graphics editing tool, particularly for pixel manipulation.