John P. on 3/5/2006 at 15:39

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Thanks for the feedback! :)

Oh - and thanks, ZylonBane - that was pretty embarrassing... :erm:
-I've never made a mistake like that before (using backslash in HTML). I'm not exactly a web coder, so my web pages barely hang together by a thread, but I should have caught that.
I'll also look into making the comparison shots 'split screen'. I already thought of it, but I was afraid it would be hard to show all the different things in each image that way. But I'll try and do something somewhat clever.




Several of you mention that the new textures aren't gritty or worn enough, and I partially agree. But I'll explain why, and at the same time explain the moss on the rock wall in the Keeper Library:

As I was remaking textures, I pretty much went from one map to the other, and stayed in one map until I felt I had remade the "worst" textures there, then I moved on to the next map.

When I came to the museum, I wanted to remake the large brick texture, because it was used 'everywhere' in there (I have pretty much stuck to textures that would give the greatest impact). Now - this is inside, in a rather posh museum. I therefore didn't see why these large bricks/stones would become worn down or gritty in such an environment. So I found an image of a real brick wall (with large bricks), and made a tileable texture out of it, then a new normal map (more about the normal maps further down).

This actually took quite some time, before I thought I'd got it right (for my own tastes). It wasn't until a lot later, when I found myself in Auldale, that it became a "problem". It turned out, that the same large brick texture was used to cover a lot of the buildings there (on the outside), but not the entire walls. So my new 'museum' brick texture now clashed big time with another, very similar (same texture family) texture.

So I now had to remake that texture as well, to make one fit the other. Since I had already spent quite some time making the museum brick texture, I didn't want to begin from scratch again, so I used that texture when I made the other texture, which was used in Auldale (the textures in question are 'civwallb_d.dds' and 'civwallb_n.dds' only for the museum, then 'civwall512b_d.dds' and 'civwall512b_n.dds' for Auldale. All four are used in Auldale).


This is a "phenomena" that has coloured several of my textures; I make a texture, it looks OK in one location - I then come to a new location and the texture doesn't fit so well there. It's weird, because this happens even if I try to stay close to the originals when it comes to colour etc. But often when you introduce detailed textures, it's easier to see misaligned textures etc., because a blurry texture meeting a blurry texture isn't as visible as a sharp and detailed texture meeting a another sharp texture. If that makes sense...

So this is also the "explanation" for the rock wall texture in the Keeper library:

That is an "outdoor" texture for most of the beginning of the game, and then suddenly becomes an "indoor" texture nearer the end. I did notice last time that it looked a little weird perhaps to have moss in the cracks inside the Keeper library, but I was quite happy with the texture, and rationalised it by thinking "Well - they did use moss and such as insulation in the old days", although I admit it's perhaps a rather weak rationalisation.

But that's one of the problems of remaking textures for this game (and DX:IW); they are used all over the place - sometimes a little snippet of a texture is used together with another texture, to make a whole. So you never know where your new texture might wind up, so to speak.

About the museum normal map:

In addition to making a texture that was clean and looked real/detailed, I also knew I wanted to give the normal map more depth than the original has.

Making a new normal map - with some real height and details - from scratch, which is what I've done for this texture (and the normal map for the rock texture in the "Before Mansion" screen shot, and a whole lot of other normal maps), only using Photoshop with the Nvidia normal map plugin, and in addition make it tile so that it can be repeated in all directions without visible seams, isn't easy. I have developed my own method of doing so, but it obviously won't be as good as if I had modelled the wall and made a normal map from that mesh.

So that partially explains the normal maps and why some of the textures that perhaps should've been more rough and 'dirty', aren't, plus the moss on the Keeper library rock wall. As for the very square shape of some of the bricks - I have seen that kind of brick wall in real life. Perhaps I should take some photos and put on my web pages.

I will of course take note of all of your observations though, and I agree with them to some extent, so I'll try to do something about it if I decide to make more textures for the game in the future.

I think you shouldn't wait for an updated installer now, because it will probably be a while - right now I'm pretty exhausted. Perhaps later I'll make a 'patch' with fixed/new textures, so you won't need to download another 90MB.


-If you want to install my wall etc. textures, but don't want those mentioned Museum/Auldale ones, you can go to Start\All Programs\Eidos\Thief - Deadly Shadows\Collective Texture Pack\, and click the shortcut to ibt_patcher.exe.
It will look through all the textures at first, but once it's "settled down", you can scroll down the list of textures until you come to the texture names I mentioned above. You can then uncheck the checkboxes for those few textures, and when that's done, the original textures will show up in-game.




-Thanks for providing a different perspective on things. Maybe I can get away with it now... :erm:

Thirith on 3/5/2006 at 17:20

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I think I'd go along with that. Very good job, but at times it looks too manufactured for my tastes. Still, I'll have to try both versions (once I get through Morrowind, which is taking up my time at the moment).

New Horizon on 3/5/2006 at 18:24

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Great work John. :) I personally feel you've pulled a lot of the textures closer to the T2 style and helped to further tie the series style together.

ascottk on 4/5/2006 at 00:20

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I often use photographs as a base for textures. Here's a couple I did for the TDS community project:

(http://img48.imageshack.us/my.php?image=edinstonewall1d6mo.jpg) http://img48.imageshack.us/img48/9461/edinstonewall1d6mo.th.jpg(http://img455.imageshack.us/my.php?image=edinburgcastlewall1c4kg.jpg) http://img455.imageshack.us/img455/3050/edinburgcastlewall1c4kg.th.jpg(http://img93.imageshack.us/my.php?image=calpewall1roof2b3si.jpg) http://img93.imageshack.us/img93/3537/calpewall1roof2b3si.th.jpg

This tutorial for the GIMP came in handy:
(http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Tileable_Textures/)



I know how you feel :erg: The stonemarket and cemetary matlibs share the same textures.



Stonemarket textures are reused from the cemetary (the hammer section), the church, the docks, the keeper compound/library, the mansion, and a few others. So it's hard to keep things cohesive when textures are reused in several different maps. Easy to understand.



That's a bad design move on the original texture artist's part (seems to fit the general theme of TDS production), the outdoor textures should be separate from the indoor ones. We could separate the textures through the matlibs. That would mean, though, that the number of textures being used increases. TDS is hard enough on hardware as it is.



I often make normal maps from scratch as well with the GIMP. They may look good with only diffuse & normals, but when I added speculars, the normal maps' effects were lessened a great deal. So I revised the way I created normal maps. I used to manually create them using this method:

(http://66.70.170.53/Ryan/nrmphoto/nrmphoto.html)

That's even more tricky (creating four different bump maps per texture, each simulating a shot from above, below, left & right), & it's hard to get the colors right, which was why the speculars lessened the normal map effect. Now I just create a height map, use the normal map plugin (which is sometimes a pain, it interprets gradients as being angular, so I end up using a gaussian blur to smooth them out).



I've done a lot of research & photo hunting for my bricks. I haven't come across the square shaped bricks yet. I'm curious about those photos.

John P. on 4/5/2006 at 05:08

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You should uninstall them first. The textures would just become overwritten, but the overriding process of the original files is a little different, so my new uninstaller wouldn't be able to restore the original textures on uninstall if you do it that way. If that doesn't bother you, and you're not planning to play the game with the original textures again later (without a game reinstall), you can go ahead and install over the older packs. Another thing though is that there will be registry strings remaining from the old packs if you do this. Not really a problem, but over time, you don't want a cluttered registry full of unused strings.

To ascottk:

Thanks for that post, and the normal map link. I highly doubt I'll go through all that in order to create a normal map though. But perhaps I got an idea or two from it.

Come to think of it, I actually didn't use the same method of making a normal map when I made the museum bricks as I did when I made the cave wall one. So I'll look into that as well.

I too have used photos to a great extent when making this pack. The brick texture for instance in the Blue Heron is also from a photo, as is the cave wall. I have then made those photos into tileable textures, much like it looks like you did from the screen shots above.

I'm not sure I've seen the square, very 'sharp' bricks in photos, but I've seen very similar in real life. I'll take a look and see if I can find some example. But by all means; if you look at the texture, the sides of the bricks are obviously very clean and 'straight', but I thought the height of the normal map would mask that to some extent. I may look into making those bricks more 'irregular' on the edges.