Maybe it's just me, but purple wood looks... not good. As has been pointed out, you can get away with that sort of surreal coloring when the texture is cartoonishly low-res, but when actual woodgrain becomes visible, it loses that artistic escape hatch.
@Renzatic: I used your base, straightened it up, adjusted the proportions to match the original, colorized it, added a little shadowing and distressed it.
This is just the base, straightened up, adjusted proportions, and colorized.
I think I may try starting with a clean panel rather than the one you posted.
One thing you have to pay attention to if you're intending on following the source as closely as possible is this, where I've marked.
It's what I was talking about earlier, how the paint/blue coloring meet up in thin strips along the seams, and make the texture look obviously tiled. It's like the paint is being withered away to the very edges. The more detail you throw into it, the more obvious it becomes. For example.
Yeah, this is my pretiled example on the last page. I had to post it because I accidentally saved over my old tiled up version because I'm an idiot. It's still good for example purposes though, as the patterns mirror the original pretty closely. Even untiled up, you'll notice how weird it looks. Specially that vertical seam. It...goofy looking.
If you want to try to keep the high res version as faithful as possible, you'll have to find some way to address that. Either use something besides peeling/blended paint, or change it into shadows and highlights. It's why I gave up on being exacting, and went and did what I thought would look best. Otherwise you'll end up a really, really ugly texture that's only usable for a couple good things.
And speaking of the redo, this is what it looks like tiled (though admittedly, it's not an exact upscaled replica, it's good for showing off a couple of things I want to illustrate).
It tiles nicely (well, I see one place I need to fix). Most importantly though, there's no obvious patterns in there. You could spread it out across a huge ceiling, and not immediately notice some little detail that repeats per square over and over again. You'd have to really look before you notice some little detail that shows up in every panel. You need to keep this in mind when making your textures. It's not just about faithfulness. That'll only get you so far. It also needs to look good.
...and that's hard to do. I know I haven't been able to do it both at once yet. All my attempts have been either/or.
Also, if you want to restart from scratch, I'll offer up where I got my original texture from that started me off. Here. Really, the entire panelled door set will net you gold someway, somehow.
Last edited by Renzatic; 15th Oct 2012 at 03:50.
Since you mentioned repeating patterns and tiling:
Another point: there's no reason we couldn't overcome that issue by making the texture 4 times the size, with 4 unique variants, to make the repetition less obvious.
Tiling issue fix'd. But I'm not gonna post a picture for such a little change and a texture that's slated for a likely complete do-over in the near future. You'll just have to imagine. Next up: BOOKSHELVES!
...cuz I'm tired of looking at wood paneling.
That last bit, not a bad idea at all. When I come back to the texture, I'll slap the base on a canvas 2x2, and see what I can do.
Last edited by Renzatic; 15th Oct 2012 at 16:26.
That's KWGRAINA. But you still need a drop in replacement for KWGRAIN2. I'm taking the approach that the garish colors are important to maintain the look of the texture for a drop-in replacement of KWGRAIN2 and am now trying out what a painted interpretation (instead of stained or oiled wood) will look like. One does so wish for the source images on some of these hard to figure out textures, just to know what it really should look like.Originally Posted by Nameless Voice
In some cases it doesn't strictly matter what it looked like originally, because the original form was so obliterated by the downsizing/palettizing process that evidently Looking Glass's own mappers weren't entirely sure what it was supposed to be.
But the look and mood of the texture should remain the same. The texture in question is very garish in its look, and the replacement should resemble that closely. Otherwise you change the feel of the missions where those textures are used. That's what needs to be preserved.
No, I meant for kwgrain2.
If you make a 1024x1024 4-up texture and set it as being "128x128" in the material file, then each of the 4 panels will appear as 64x64, fitting perfectly with the original scale, but there will be less obvious repeats because there are 4 (slightly) different versions.
I don't see how replacing a one panel texture with a four panel texture could ever work as a drop-in replacement, no matter how you scale it. To use it you would have to shift the texture around. I used that texture in a 1x1 panel space. Putting a 2x2 panel texture there would be wrong.
No, it wouldn't.
You would only see one panel in your 1x1 space.
Oy vey.
By enlarging a regularly tiled texture to include multiple copies of the base tile, but keeping the texture scale the same, you can minimize the obviousness of the tiling by introducing slight cosmetic differences (scuffs, etc) into the duplicates, instead of just having one obviously identical tile repeated over and over with the exact same imperfections in each tile.
Wouldn't you see the 4 corners center section? Center to center that's what you should see ... or are you saying that the 0,0 position would align with 0,0 and not center to center?
Right.
And even if you did see the centre (which you wouldn't), you could easily offset the texture to compensate for that.
So there no longer is a need for both KWGRAIN2 and KWGRAINA, just two different material files and the same texture saved under both names?
Well, you could make them slightly different if you wanted!
But basically, no, they can both be the same, they just need a different material file (with a different terrain scale.)
On an unrelated note, I was playing around with materials for a new water texture.
It's pretty rough, but certainly has potential.
<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/0GlVh3Uzp6U?version=3&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="420" height="315" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed>
Water looks pretty good, NV. The only thing I'd recommend changing would be the level of transparency. Make it a little more cloudy.
And while I'm here, does anyone know where I can find a bunch of alpha masked book spines? It'll save me about 10 hours.
How's this?
Last edited by LarryG; 16th Oct 2012 at 02:32.
Underlying Texture? Excellent? Colors? Kinda cloudy. Blend the overlay in more.
I agree that the overlay should be blended-in some more...Also, stain, rather than paint, is far more likely to be found on an indoor wood-paneled wall of this nature...So, odds are this would be the originally intended finish.
Opinion time. I haven't managed to get much done on this texture, since I've been having to troll Google looking for book spines, but here's what I've got so far. I want to get some feedback on it before I go any farther.
Shot on the left is the new texture overlaying the old. The right, what I've done by itself.
Not impressive yet, but it's getting there.
One of the things about that texture that has always bothered me is the lack of dimensionality. Somehow a sense of the 3-D nature of a bookcase needs to be imparted. I think that there needs to be some subtle shadowing, of the shelves on the back of the bookcase, and of books that are slightly pushed forward on books that are slightly pushed backwards. So for shadows to show up, the base color of the back of the bookcase needs to be a lighter shade of brown. Also, when you get to the cobwebs, they need to reinforce the 3-D nature as well.
What I'm not seeing yet in the side by side is any real improvement in visible detail as a result of improved resolution. Or is this the stepped down in resolution image to demonstrate how well it matches the original? For textures which are clear as to exactly what they are, the bookshelves are ones which will be very difficult to execute effectively, I fear. Better you than me!
This is why I once wanted to take photos of the books in the special resort of our university library. However, with custom-made paper boxes and written signatures on them this would have looked awful (left aside explaining to the head of department what textures for video games are). Now I wanted to point you to one of our digitalisation homepages which has high-res pictures of book spines, but these have signature stickers as well. So the only thing I can suggest is to try different languages for the Google image search like: German (c.f. a few nice examples from Switzerland). Unfortunately one cannot access dititalisation database images with rough keywords like "medieval" or "Renaissance".
I also think an "embossing" layer as a filter might help give a 3-D nature.
I was going to go with "blotchy". All those light spots and weird discolorations make the wood look like it's been splashed with industrial-strength solvents.
Looks like you applied a heavy noise layer to the books?
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