How do you make textures

[Kira]

I think I will make my first textures soon, so I'm very curious about your methods and tips at making textures for Doom.

- What are the steps you follow at making a texture?
- Which software(s) do you use?
- If you use more than one software, what are the steps for which you use each of them?
- How do you deal with the doom palette?
- How much time it take you to make a decent/good texture?
- Do you know good tutorials on the web?

I think I'll have more questions depending on your answers.

Thanks.

[Kappes Buur]

Well, the internet abounds with images suitable for any map. For example, go to a website for floor tiles/wood flooring and download some of their images.

To work on images I use Paint Shop Pro. Versions 7 through X3 have good effects filters, including one for seamless tiling. For rudimentary effects, like simple recolouring or resizing or format conversion, Irfanview or XnView are good.

Since I am mapping for G/ZDoom, I work only with the PNG format, so the doom palette is kind of redundant. Simply place the new textures between TX_START and TX_END markers.

Time spend on a texture depends largely on its complexity, up to several hours sometimes, to tweak it just right.

[Kira]

Thanks for your answers Kappes Buur! I'm also interested in making textures from scratch BTW.

[Kappes Buur]

Before one builds a map, certain concepts like size, locality, theme etc have been thought of. And closely related to theme is colour. There are tons of texture resources already available. REALM 667 is a good starting point.

Paint Shop Pro is an excellent program, but you might not want to shell out up to 100.00 right away. Corel offers a trial version. Or download Paint.Net or Gimp, which are freeware programs. However, in either case, you will have to spend time to get to know the program you settle on. Each is slightly different.

While textures from scratch are limited only by your imagination, they will take a bit of familiarity with the program of your choice. I would have a look at existing textures first, and transform them, one way or another. Then, when you know the capabilities of the program, tackle original textures.

It's a lot of fun.

[Kira]

Thanks again, I intend to learn to use gimp because I'll be in vacation with a laptop running Ubuntu next week.
It should be a lot of fun indeed :). Do you know good tutorials for Gimp?

[ReX]

K!r4 said:

Do you know good tutorials for Gimp?

Here is a link to tutorials for all skill levels.

[Kira]

Heh, I should have checked this myself... how noob I am sometimes. Thanks ReX!