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40oz

Optimal usage of texture patches?

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I've been thinking of some ways to really maximize the usage of patches in textures, as almost all the textures I've ever made used a single patch for the each texture in the TEXTURE1 lump. I've seen many other texture artists do the same in their wads.

Generally the patches that get the most mileage in doom are the vines, which can be applied on top of almost any doom texture and look cool, and the use of step textures on walls as borders. Other things like switch plates, poison signs, red eyed skulls, and gargoyle faces are used for doom textures too.

id like to think its possible to create a huge variety of textures in a texture pack using only a limited set of patches. Though unfortunately, you run the risk of making textures that look too garish and primitive when you can't carefully apply things like borders and shading around your patches to make it look less like cut and paste graphics. Though id like to believe its possible to do it and still create a unifying primitively old school theme without making it look outright bad.

I think some of Team TNTs textures had blood splat patches that were used in some of their deathmatch megawads that sometimes looked real bad, which has me hesitant to waste my time on it, but I still have faith that theres ways of creating similar things akin to blood splats, or maybe nukage/blood/lava splash trims in a way that wont look too dumb.

some other things I have in mind are warning stripe borders, metal borders/trims, cracks, light fixtures, computer panels, some sort of text, like a stenciled or engraved danger sign or something, bullet holes, scratch marks, pipes, fuseboxes, wires, chainlink fences, barbed wire, camo netting, etc.

any other ideas or suggestions on how to best go about making patches that look good when placed against a variety of textures?

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I think you've covered pretty much the whole thing.

I'm adding: "As always." :P (covering the entire problematique already in the OP) I can't think off anything more right now. Maybe you don't even have to try enumerating / generalizing all possibilities. Let's just wait for more ideas to come when you need them, while mapping / creating something particular.

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I've tried this approach. Such texture packs are rather awkward to manage. If you remove an unused patch from your resource wad, you'll have to reassemble all the textures. Maybe Slade is better in this regard, I dunno.

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An useful extension to source ports would be the possibility of defining semi-transparent patches, that blend in with any background. After all, I think all Boom derivatives define an additive transparency map, so it could be used when compositing a texture with semi-transparent patches. E.g. thing neutrally-colored (probably greyscale) engraved text, that could be added on top of any texture and fit-in seamlessly.

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Maes said:

additive transparency

[pedant]

Not additive by default, but it's possible to supply your own map with any effect you want.

[/pedant]

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Maes said:
An useful extension to source ports would be the possibility of defining semi-transparent patches, that blend in with any background.


Or you apply a semi-transparent 'decal' texture in front of a wall at 1 unit distance.

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Mordeth said:

Or you apply a semi-transparent 'decal' texture in front of a wall at 1 unit distance.


The point was to stop doing such time-consuming and work-intensive tricks. Also, not all ports have built-in support for decals, but texture compositing with transparent patched could be trivially retrofitted into any Boom-compatible source port with a TRANMAP lump (the texture compositing code is modified anyway, to fix things like tutti-frutti and and using masked textures without a background). Displaying such composited textures would require no change to the engine, as they would by just like any other ordinary textures after the compositing.

The big advantage is that texture design with such patches would be a job done where it belongs, aka in texture patch editing tools, not with mapping tricks or tedious image processing.

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