Step By Step Guide To Creating Custom Textures. - by Ravenhook
Ravenhook on 5/12/2015 at 16:41
Well I am probably going to get told off but I have been trawling through all the possible searches that I can think of and have come up with a big zero.
I am looking for an idiots (me) guide to creating custom textures to use in my FM that I have dug out, dusted off and decided to continue...I was looking in particular to making wall, roof,floor and water textures...eg I have jpgs of some really nice stonework and would like to use them.
Please bear in mind that I'm over sixty, have one buggered eye, half deaf and completely stupid so any help would have to be in an ABC type guide please.
Anyone able to reeducate this old fossil???
Thank you.:D:D:D
Nameless Voice on 5/12/2015 at 17:03
I'm not going to go into huge detail here, but a quick overview of the basics:
You will need:
* A graphics program, preferably Photoshop. Photoshop CS2 is (
https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-suite/kb/cs2-product-downloads.html) available for free from Adobe. That version is slightly old, but works perfectly well, and is from before Adobe ruined the UI by trying to make it a tabbed program. 32-bit only, however.
* A source of photographs suitable for use as textures ((
www.textures.com) - formerly CGTextures - is my favourite source.)
* Some time and patience to learn how to use Photoshop.
In most cases, you need your textures for Thief to be seamless - that is, the left edge needs to flow straight into the right edge without being able to see a gap, and the same for the top and bottom edges.
Sometimes you will find textures which are already seamless - great. Otherwise, you will need to make them seamless yourself.
A very simple way to make a texture seamless is to open it in Photoshop, use the Offset filter to shift it both horizontally and vertically by around half of the size of the image, and then try to repair the now-visible seam. For many types of textures (e.g. ones with repetitive surfaces, such as rock) you can do this quite easily using the Clone Stamp tool.
For more complicated textures, you will often need to rotate, skew and/or re-perspective the image and carefully cut out a portion where both sides roughly map. The Clone Stamp tool is still great for fixing discrepancies.
Once you are done, you can use the Offset filter with the inverse of the previous numbers to put the texture edges "back" where they were (if you want.)
Another thing to note is that all textures must be sized in powers of two, for example 256x512 is legal, but 250x500 is not. That means that each dimension of your texture must be one of: 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096 pixels. The latter are rather extreme. You should stick between 256 and 1024.
In the old days, there was a lot of complicated stuff about putting textures into texture families and making sure that they all share the same 256-colour palette, in gif or pcx format, and also textures were limited to a maximum dimensions of 256x256. Now that we have NewDark, those limitations don't exist any more.
You can just drop your high-resolution (but power-of-two), true-colour, PNG-formatted textures straight into the family folders - provided that you are okay with your mission requiring NewDark.
You can also convert your textures to DDS format (you will need to download the DDS plugin for Photoshop), which is a compressed format that makes your texture use up less memory. Using too insane a number of large uncompressed textures can cause Dark to crash due to running out of memory.
nicked on 6/12/2015 at 08:40
As for using them ingame, you need to:
* Put the textures in YOURMISSION/fam/YOURTEXTUREFAMILY
* Add the family in the normal way (add_family YOURTEXTUREFAMILY)
* The textures won't be assigned a material by default. Go to Editors > Object Hierarchy and change Archetypes at the top to Textures. Now find your texture names at the bottom and drag them into the relevant material folders. You can select and hold down the mouse and use PgUp and PgDn to speed this up when the folders are expanded.
* Then make sure you save and set your gamesys and you should be able to hear the correct material sounds next time you go ingame (assuming you have already room-brushed!)
If you find your textures aren't in the texture list, especially after adding, removing and compressing different families a few times, they may have been put in the Missing category. Just type purge_missing_objs, save everything, reload and try again and if they're used, they should be in the Textures list in the Object Hierarchy.
Ravenhook on 6/12/2015 at 11:39
Thank you for your help chaps, downloaded an early cs2 paintshop and seem to have only 30 days trial with it...dropped a texture I was playing around with from gimp that was crashing dromed and it worked but the palette was all screwed up...I seem to remember something about full .gif but heaven only knows how you go about that..so I reckon I'll just have to stick to borrowing and crediting.
I'll check out texture helper thanks.
I am using the updated newdark which makes the drag and drop into an existing texture family easy.
Yandros on 6/12/2015 at 14:54
You needn't worry about full, palette, GIF format or 256 colours any more, import as full colour and save as PNG format and you're good to go!
Ravenhook on 6/12/2015 at 15:07
Ok...downloaded a texture from textures.com 1024x1024 jpg seamless version 1.59mb...opened it in photostudio 5 and saved it as a jpg which reduced it to 520kb, opened it in paintshop 7 and saved it again as a png, dragged and dropped into my dromed brick fam...loaded the fam in dromed and....drum roll......crash.:laff::laff:
Oh dear.
So next what I did was to use the same downloaded pic and opened it into photo studio 5, resaved it as a png, dropped it into the fam folder, loaded the family...this time no crash, the texture was there and when I applied it to the surface the texture was a huge scale....??
Did it again and reduced the texture scale in dromed from 16 to 13 and bingo...re-optimized and it works...photo studio 5...I got it with my first computer free and use it to resize my eos photographs...newdark rocks...thanks guys.
Is it the same with water ... I have found some really nasty looking stuff ideal for sewers.
nicked on 6/12/2015 at 16:23
I wouldn't advise saving any custom texture as a jpeg at any point, because you'll get horrible artifacts. DDS, TGA, PNG, GIF, PCX are all good (and should be used more or less in that order of preference).
Water is a tiny bit trickier - assuming you want a simple, non-animated water texture, you want to save your water image as xxin.xxx and xxout.xxx where xx is the name of your water, and .xxx is the file format (same deal as other textures in terms of the formats used).
Then you just put the xx as the texture name in the flow brush surrounding the water. What I can't remember is if it has to be just a two-character name, or if that was just an LGS convention.
The Watcher on 6/12/2015 at 17:19
Quote Posted by nicked
DDS, TGA, PNG
TGA is pretty much pointless once you have PNG: PNG supports a the same image depths as TGA (plus some extra), while having much better compression support: PNG does two stage lossless compression where the image data is pre-filtered to optimise compression, and then passed through the DEFLATE compression algorithm, while the best TGA supports is the far more simplistic Run-Length Encoding algorithm. There's really no need to use TGA anymore, except for legacy textures.
Yandros on 6/12/2015 at 21:11
I agree with Watcher, there's really no reason to use TGA for all the reasons he gave, plus you can have a full 8-bit alpha channel with PNG also.
