Nameless Voice on 6/4/2011 at 22:54

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Edit: Resurrected this thread. The currently active texture upgrade project thread is (http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=140187) here, in The Editor's Guild. Mainly bumping this to point non-Editor's Guild people to that thread.

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I'm going to post this request here as I'm sure a lot of people don't frequent The Editor's Guild.

Very little progress has been made on the Thief Enhancement Pack since its first release. I've added a few extra models, updated some of the textures, and also brought many of the existing textures up to 512x512 or 1024x1024, and also collected a few models and textures made by others for inclusion, but the number of changes is fairly small.

One of the main challenges which remains is the systematic creation of high-resolution replacements of many of the more complex textures, while staying as true as possible to the original design, appearance and style. A lot of these textures would either need to be drawn completely by hand, or require very heavy modification of whatever source texture was found to be similar to the original. That sort of heavy-duty graphics work is beyond my skill level, or possibly I just don't have enough patience to spend hours upon hours tweaking a texture to look just right - I'm a programmer, not a graphics artist.

In addition to the object textures, I'd really love to see an organised effort to replace all the terrain textures with high resolution updates that are completely true to the originals. This is especially true for some of the very low-resolution terrain textures used in Thief 1 / Gold.

Are there any graphics artists with the skill to pull something like this, and enough free time to contribute a few textures to this project?

(For anyone who doesn't know what the EP is: (http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=118999) The Thief Enhancement Pack)

The guidelines for textures are fairly simple:
* The new textures should be high resolution, at least 512x512 or larger.
* The new textures must very carefully match the design of the original textures. The rule here is "the same, but better", not to majorly re-image the game.
* Textures should ideally be in an uncompressed, true-colour format. I'll handle the final conversion / packaging.


I can provide a list of some of the textures that need reworking, though the blanket call of "pretty much every single terrain texture in Thief Gold" about covers it for a start. A lot of the textures in Thief 2 could also brook improvement.

Here are a few semi-randomly selected examples of original textures which could benefit from a high-res remake:

Some sample object textures:
http://img69.imageshack.us/img69/1912/wmpsyhic.gif
Psychic's sign

http://img215.imageshack.us/img215/4756/grav5.gif http://img215.imageshack.us/img215/9470/grav5a.gif
A gravestone

Some sample terrain textures:
http://img683.imageshack.us/img683/6598/b07.gifhttp://img683.imageshack.us/img683/9997/bdemo1.gifhttp://img683.imageshack.us/img683/2505/btila.gif
Some of Bafford's brick and tile textures

http://img683.imageshack.us/img683/1193/parkay64.gif
Rough wooden parquet

http://img683.imageshack.us/img683/1224/bigblock.gif
Large blocks


I can easily provide more original textures in need of work if anyone isn't able to easily access the files themselves.


EDIT:

Here's a link to some of the original texture families from T1:

(http://img42.imageshack.us/g/btila.gif/) "Bafford" texture family
(http://img694.imageshack.us/g/windowbl.gif/) "Ramirez" texture family

Note that some of the desk textures in the EP (made by Digital Nightfall) would be a good base for ramold.gif in the Ramirez family.

Nameless Voice on 10/4/2011 at 20:20

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Hello there,
any help will be appreciated!

To answer your questions:

File Type: anything lossless. I can convert the textures into the appropriate format myself. PNG format would be fine, though the final textures will probably be converted to DDS. I can take raw PSD files too, but those tend to be too large to send, and I don't really need them if I don't need to change anything.

File size: I don't care so long as you can get the files to me. I have a server you can upload to if the files are too big to attach to an email.

DPI isn't really relevant for textures, just the number of pixels is important. Considering the age of the engine, anything bigger than 1024x1024 is probably overkill, and 512x512 would probably be sufficient in most cases. Still, scaling an image down by an even factor usually isn't too harmful, so working at 2048x2048 or higher and downscaling for the final image might be another option.

Those sizes should also give an idea as to the amount of detail that can be fit into the textures.

I have no objection to making changes to make the textures more realistic so long as they don't change the style of the texture, e.g. changing the rather excessively orange tone of the gold to a more golden hue, as those original shades were probably caused by limitations of the colour palettes that LGS were working with. Ideally, the new textures should look "the same, but better" than the original textures, almost as if the original textures were made by scaling down the new ones and reducing their colour depth, though I've also made some few stylistic changes in the EP, especially when there wasn't enough detail in the original texture to be able to decide what it was meant to represent, and I had to use my own discretion.

Those decorative textures that you mentioned, such as banners, are the types of textures that would absolutely need to be redrawn by hand, as they were drawn by LGS rather than based off a photographic source, so they would be ideal textures to make as they're exactly the sort of textures that I don't have the skills to remake.

In case you don't know, if you have access to Thief, you can easily get at the original textures by looking in res/fam.crf (for terrain textures) and res/obj.crf (for object textures). The crf files are simply renamed .zip files, so use your favourite archiver. Object textures are in the txt and txt16 subfolders (with txt being fixed palette textures, mostly from Thief 1, while txt16 textures were allowed to use their own palette).

You can also check the EP.crf in the Enhancement Pack to see which textures I've already upgraded. I'm sure some could do with some work (and I've already recreated some of them since the release.)


Considering the tiny sizes of the original textures, you'll need to scale them up to a decent working size before you can start drawing on top of them - a tactic I often used when creating the EP textures.

Since you mentioned banners, here are three of the banners from Thief 1:

http://img864.imageshack.us/img864/7425/banner1j.gif
http://img864.imageshack.us/img864/7681/banner8dz.gif
http://img864.imageshack.us/img864/2024/banner2a.gif


(I'll also send you this post by email.)

finch on 10/4/2011 at 21:33

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(http://img855.imageshack.us/i/sorcesign.jpg/)

i did that in about 30 min just to rush it, i didnt really add any real detail just a simple texture and some shading. if i spent an hour or 2 on something like that i think itd be alot better

its 512x512 i could do alot more with it if i went 1024 x 1024

finch on 11/4/2011 at 00:10

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I have to disagree with your point - you say they are painted onto the wooden planks, to me it seems as if they are 3d, making them actually embedded into the wood itself as metal fixtures. this is how i have interpreted it so far, more to be done still.

(http://img24.imageshack.us/i/sorcerysigner2.jpg/) http://img24.imageshack.us/img24/4484/sorcerysigner2.jpg

Uploaded with (http://imageshack.us) ImageShack.us

its still in the VERY rough stage, but it gives you an idea of the direction i took it.
-there needs to be more orange in the gold (haha...almost ironic)
-blue needs to be more vibrant and have the swirls in it

finch on 11/4/2011 at 01:42

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yeah i overlooked that, im gonna head to bed, i'll change it up tomorrow, drop the gold see if i can make it look like its carved into the wood (how it should be)