texture palette problem

[cactus]

hi,
I tried to make my own textures for doom2 but problem is when I try to convert my texture to doom palette ,the texture looks very bad,
I wanted to know what do you all use to convert an image to doom palette?
I tried photoshop (whith a *.pal file) and wintex both make my texture look messy...

It seems a cool blue is particulary hard to obtain...

[Fredrik]

A trick is to experiment with shifting the image's saturation and hue values to align them to the color ranges that exist in the palette.

It seems a cool blue is particulary hard to obtain...

That's because there isn't one in the palette.

The colors you can use are these:

I use PSP myself, works most of the time but the Doom palette is unfortunately very limited.

If there's a particular image you're having trouble with, you could show it here and I might give it a try.

[Ultraviolet]

Wintex will just bring any given pixel to the closest possible color on the Doom palette. Try using Doom palette colors as a base, do your art from there, smear, blur, fade, whatever, then convert then touch it up with colors right from the palette. Might have to do some manual dithering.

[cactus]

unfortunatly, my provider seems to have problem whith FTP,I can t upload a thing ...
>:(
maybe i can email it to you...

[cactus]

fredrik I sent you textures I am in trouble whith...
Maybe the best is to create all from doom palette as UV said..

[cactus]

mmmm mail to extropus_nospam@hotmail.com failed

[Fredrik]

Remove _nospam

[Grimm]

Hey, kinda off topic, but I didn't feel like starting a new thread. Which source ports allow colors outside da pallate, and which ones support 16 million?

[Fredrik]

Most of the GL ports. At least JDoom and ZDoomGL do.

[The Ultimate DooMer]

cactus said:

I wanted to know what do you all use to convert an image to doom palette?

It seems a cool blue is particulary hard to obtain...

If you use Paint Shop Pro, you can obtain the palette by loading up any DooM bitmap and choosing 'save palette'. Then load up your image and choose 'load palette' (from the Colors menu). This will convert your pic to the DooM palette. To view the palette and see what colours are available, choose 'edit palette.

Cyan is the transparent colour in the palette, so that's why cool blue is hard to obtain. You can get a decent cool blue effect by using the lightest shades of the blue colour range.

For making your own textures, remember that:

red - good (32 shades)
blue - good (31 shades)
green - good (28 shades)
yellow - average (9 golden shades, plus 8 really bright ones)
orange - decent (21 shades)
purple - bad (5 shades)
brown - great (49 shades)
grey - decent (17 shades)
black - bad if you want multiple shades of it. (5 shades)
white - decent (17 shades)
pink - decent (16 shades)
peach - decent (16 shades)
cyan - nonexistent (1 shade, which is transparent)

[Fredrik]

Cyan is the transparent colour in the palette

No it isn't. There is no cyan color in the Doom palette at all. There's not even a transparent color in the palette.

red - good (32 shades)

Red is not good unless you're making very bright things. The entire 0-64 range is missing. This is very obvious with textures such as SP_HOT.

The only colors you should use for the bodies of textures are brown and gray, and the colors close to them (e.g. the low-saturated greens).

Other colors (i.e. the fully saturated ones) should only ever be used for details and in special cases (red for lava, blue for water...).

For aeshetical reasons as well as for functionality with the palette.

[NiGHTMARE]

Fredrik said:

There's not even a transparent color in the palette.

Err, so what's Palette index 247 for then?

[Fredrik]

NiGHTMARE said:

Err, so what's Palette index 247 for then?

A duplicate black.

[Grimm]

Heh, I was gonna say somethin' about the transparency, Frederick, but I decided not to. I have to disagree with what ya said; brown and gray make for very boring textures.

The fact of the matter is that with the shit we have today there's no reason really to even stick to the pallate, unless you're looking for Doom.exe compatiblity. In reality, there's no reason to stick to the original resolution either, in my opinion, unless you want *low* detail.

[NiGHTMARE]

Fredrik said:

A duplicate black.

Oh, so you mean it's a not a transparent colour, but a transparent shade (because that is the index you use if you want transparency in-game) :)

[Fredrik]

Grimm said:

I have to disagree with what ya said; brown and gray make for very boring textures.

You can use lots of color but it only results in cartoonishness. If you look at Darkening 2 (which arguably uses the best texture set ever created for a Doom WAD), almost every texture is brown or low-saturated.

[Fredrik]

NiGHTMARE said:

Oh, so you mean it's a not a transparent colour, but a transparent shade (because that is the index you use if you want transparency in-game) :)

Doom doesn't use a transparency index. Transparency is represented as an absence of pixel data.

Since such a representation is unsupported by most regular graphics formats, editors have to represent transparency with a color. They choose index 247 because it's a duplicate of black (hence unused) and cyan because it's far from any other color in the palette and therefore easily distinguishable and unlikely to cause any trouble in color conversions.

But when you convert the graphics to Doom's format, the pixels with the transparency index are simply removed.

[NiGHTMARE]

So basically the in-game Doom palette is actually only 255 colours (well, less than that if you count the fact that white is duplicated three times)?

[Fredrik]

No, the palette is 256 colors internally (of which 249 are unique). In editors, it's 255 colors (-1 one for the transparent one).

There's one special entry btw, index 255. You can use it in flats but not in any other graphics as the value 255 is used to indicate end-of-post in the format used for everything except flats.

[Grimm]

You can use lots of color but it only results in cartoonishness. If you look at Darkening 2 (which arguably uses the best texture set ever created for a Doom WAD), almost every texture is brown or low-saturated.

I disagree. I have a few textures that are not under those colors which look very nice, and not cartoony at all. I have not played the Darkening 2, but I did play the first one, and the textures put me to sleep.

Oh, and don't double post, btw. (Heh.)

[Fredrik]

Well, take Doom episode 1 for example. The only frequently used high-saturated color is dark green.

[Grimm]

True, but pulling something from the Shareware ain't exactly fair. :) Look at the computer consoles and wall monitor thingies. They all use fairly bright colors and they look great. Look at that blue texture made of little lines (heh, no idea what the name is), that looks awesome! Deimos Labs wouldn't be the same without that texture. As long as you don't just fill up areas with one bright color, there's no point to limiting yourself to certain hues. If you can pull it off and make it look good, go for it!

[Fredrik]

Grimm said:

As long as you don't just fill up areas with one bright color

That's of course my point. You can use high-saturated colors occasionally, but they don't work in abundance.

[Grimm]

Oh, alright then. :P

[FireBastard]

Fredrik said:

No, the palette is 256 colors internally (of which 249 are unique). In editors, it's 255 colors (-1 one for the transparent one).

There's one special entry btw, index 255. You can use it in flats but not in any other graphics as the value 255 is used to indicate end-of-post in the format used for everything except flats.

You could use 255, it all depends on the decoder used (look very carefully at the texture control format. DOOM probably can't (dumb decoder), but perhaps ZDOOM can - haven't looked. I'm going to have to try that. Only problem will be forcing it in there somehow. Have to think about that. Maybe change the palette so 255 gets used. Yeah that's it.

Fredrik said:

They choose index 247 because it's a duplicate of black (hence unused) and cyan...

How long you been saying this? Look again.

Ultraviolet said:

Wintex will just bring any given pixel to the closest possible color on the Doom palette.

Wintex is supposed to do that, but it fails big time because it uses a simplistic difference calculation and can actually pick the wrong color even if a correct match exists. That means it can swap colors on you. So that's why using Wintex is a bad idea. I think either XWE or DeePsea bypass that kind of problem and give more consistent results. I found that out real quick when I got into graphics editing.

Using PSP is a bit smoother and faster because you can change contrast, hue, etc and keep trying if starting with an image that was not created using the DOOM palette.

[Ichor]

I combined your three posts into one.

[Fredrik]

FireBastard said:

You could use 255, it all depends on the decoder used (look very carefully at the texture control format. DOOM probably can't (dumb decoder), but perhaps ZDOOM can - haven't looked. I'm going to have to try that. Only problem will be forcing it in there somehow. Have to think about that. Maybe change the palette so 255 gets used. Yeah that's it.

Yes, you could use every index in the palette if you used a different decoder. But then it'd be a different format. We're talking about the format used by Doom - and it uses 255-termination for columns.

How long you been saying this? Look again.

Huh? What should I look at. I haven't used every editor in existance, some may be different. Like I said, the question of the index is irrelevant because a transparent index is only used by editors.

[cactus]

Hey fredrik can i ask you a favor?
It seems I m not able to convert textures as you have done before for me.I mean I can t obtain same light/brightness using PSP, maybe because i ama not familiarized whith it.
Can you convert this tex for me as you done before?:
http://tetsujin.free.fr/collec.bmp
i mean the skeleton,and the little inca man?
those have rock color like you have converted.

[Ultraviolet]

FireBastard said:

That means it can swap colors on you.

Load a 24-bit image and it will reverse red and blue...

Also, I am well aware of WinTex's shortcomings, but thanks anyway.

[Julian]

cactus said:
http://tetsujin.free.fr/collec.bmp

Love those :)