Gleeful's Texture Blowout Ii: Walls

[gleeful]

Alright!

 

After a much greater than anticipated delay, I am happy to finally be able to present you with some more textures. As a matter of fact a lot of textures, pretty much all of the better wall-textures I ever did.

 

Here we go:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[gleeful]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[gleeful]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hope you like them!

 

I put all of them on the FTP-Server in a file called walls_gleeful.pk4 this morning. Feel free to use as many or as little as you like.

 

Kind Regards

gleeful

 

Be sure to check out my floor-texture update right here:

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showt...amp;#entry80316

[SneaksieDave]

Hallelujah, a bunch of new textures to enjoy. They look great, gleeful.

[sparhawk]

Great textures. But are the last ones not to modern? They look like concrete.

[Springheel]

Very nice!

[Gildoran]

Wow that's a lot not new textures... I'll try to get them up on CVS today.

[OrbWeaver]

They look excellent. If you want feedback, my only comment would be that the bumpmapped stones tend to look very rounded and smoothed. Perhaps they could be made more jagged and rough in some cases? Just running the diffusemap through the normalmap plugin and blending in with the "real" normalmap a bit might do the trick.

[gleeful]

Thanks for the feedback and kind words everybody! Much appreciated!

 

...my only comment would be that the bumpmapped stones tend to look very rounded and smoothed. Perhaps they could be made more jagged and rough in some cases? Just running the diffusemap through the normalmap plugin and blending in with the "real" normalmap a bit might do the trick.

 

I agree. In most cases that was a conscious decision though. I usually experiment a bit with various degrees of blurring and "strengths" of the nvidia-tool until I find what I like the most. Very blurred (thus rounded) stones tend to give a better impression of depth which I like.

 

As for running the diffusemap through the normalmap plugin and blending in with the "real" normalmap - I already do that. You should see them without this technique...

 

If any particular texture is really, really bothering you, I can look if I still have the Photoshop mask and if so fix up a quick alternative.

 

But are the last ones not to modern? They look like concrete.

Well, there was concrete in Victorian times. I agree though that these are better suited for industrial settings and big appartment houses than cathedrals or taverns.

 

Apart from that I just love broken walls.

[sparhawk]

Didn't know that. They certainly look great. Reminds me a bit of the Painkiller textures. They had just the right measure of dirt and scratchiness to make them believable like used and abandonded walls, and these concrete ones definitely look like old and worn for some time.

[OrbWeaver]

If any particular texture is really, really bothering you, I can look if I still have the Photoshop mask and if so fix up a quick alternative.

 

I wouldn't say I'm particularly bothered by any of them, they all look pretty good even with the rounding. The example that jumps out at me is this one:

 

 

Notice how jagged and craggy the diffusemap picture looks, and compare with the bumpmap where each stone looks really smoothed. Maybe this is the effect you were going for, but I think a version of this texture with the original rough stones would look good as well.

[gleeful]

You were right - it does look better with a stronger diffuse-blend.

 

 

I updated the local-map and put it on the FTP as "NEWGleefulLocalMap.zip".

[OrbWeaver]

What normalisation filter are you using? Looks like one of the larger ones, like 9x9 or so. I prefer to use the smaller filters to avoid things looking too much like layered plastic.

[ascottk]

I often use prewitt 3x3. That one gives me the most detail.

[gleeful]

What normalisation filter are you using? Looks like one of the larger ones, like 9x9 or so. I prefer to use the smaller filters to avoid things looking too much like layered plastic.

 

That's 4 sample actually. Anyway the look is very close to how these stones look in reality now.

[Gildoran]

Sorry it's taken me so long to add these... I'm starting to add them now.

 

The textures look great, but there's some problems I'm noticing. There's textures where some of the shadows are part of the diffuse rather than the normalmap, which causes problems if you need to light the texture from angles other than above. (for example if you need to rotate/flip the texture to fit it to something like an archway)

 

To illustrate the problem, I've flipped stonewall_8, and taken two screenshots of it, one lit from below, and one lit from above. In both images, the light is hitting the stonework at the same angle, just from a different direction.

 

In the first picture, the stonework is lit from below, and it looks beautiful, with consistent shadows and shading.

In the second picture, the stonework is lit from above, and it looks awkward, kind of like being lit by an ambient light. It's not entirely clear to the viewer which direction the stone is being lit from.

In general, it doesn't look half as good as the first image.

[Gildoran]

Some problem areas of the texture are circled in this picture:

 

In the top-most circle, the top of the block is in shadow for no apparent reason. It should be well lit. Most of the blocks have this problem.

 

In the other circles, the shadows are showing up on the wrong side of the ridges. The top should be lit more than the bottom, but the lighting is just the opposite.

 

Both these problems are caused by the lighting being part of the diffuse rather than the normal. I'm thinking of adding the textures that don't suffer from this problem, then providing a list of the ones that do, so they can be fixed before being added.

[Gildoran]

Since none of the "brokenwall" series of textures have shadow problems, I'll add all of those first. I'm thinking of naming them concrete_00X.

[gleeful]

Photosourced stonewalls are problematic, yes. No matter how diffuse the light, there'll always be some shadow somewhere.

 

EDIT: I just took a look at that and realized that I have no experience whatsoever with proper shadow-removal (which seems to a rather iffy task). Any good shadow-removal techniques would thus be much appreciated!

[Gildoran]

One method was suggested here. As far as I can tell, it seems like a way of reducing contrast in localized sections of the image. Renzatic also mentioned converting the image to lab color (I'm guessing that means hue/saturation/value), which would make it much easier to work with brightness without affecting color.

[gleeful]

Hm, a first try of the method mentioned above left me fairly unsatisfied. I need a lot more practice with that.

 

As I don't have that much time on my hands however and really want to get my doors as well as my third map on the way, I suggest you just put those textures on the Cvs that you deem good enough and scrap the rest.

[OrbWeaver]

Shadow-removal is not really a good solution, as it necessarily tends to reduce everything to a flat gray. The best way to avoid this problem is to control the lighting when you take the photo, such as taking the photo on an overcast day and illuminate it head-on with a flash.

[Gildoran]

Ok, I've added the broken/dirty/mossy walls as stone/wall/cement_*.

 

I've added wall_bumpy as rounded_001. (simply because I think of bumpy as refering more to the spattered pattern of plaster - if you prefer, I can rename it back to bumpy_001)

 

I'm still going to be adding more of the textures...

[Gildoran]

BTW, if I may make a recommendation for future reference: I usually have a hard time telling if a photo has lighting with an upward bias or no bias at all. What I find helps me to tell the difference is to look at the image upside down. If it doesn't look flipped when turned upside down, then it's probably safe to use as a diffusemap.

[SneaksieDave]

If we chuck a bunch of great textures because they might not be perfectly lit, I'd seriously question it. We can always include things, whether they're good, great, or simply okay, but excluding things for not being pefect is only shrinking the toolkit. If an author doesn't want to, or can't, make use of an asset, he/she isn't forced to.

 

I just saw some of Half Life 2 this weekend, and we really don't have a lot of time or position or working hands to be picky. Not to mention, their textures are simply fantastic, and ours are mostly ass. I couldn't believe how good it looked. One might say, "that's all the more reason to insist on 100% quality" but honestly, if we were shooting for HL2 quality textures, we'd probably have less than ten at this point. Maybe we should be shooting for quantity primarily, being a toolkit, because we don't have much in the way of texture quality even at this late a date. And these certainly looked very good to me.

 

Just my somewhat deflated (and dumbstruck) two cents.

 

 

Edit: You know what, ignore this. I was kinda taken aback by all the HL2, Prey, and D3 (on a high end machine) gaming I saw this weekend, and I just kept thinking over and over, "holy fuck, look at these textures. " Aiming lower is obviously not the answer, and I'm not trying to suggest it, but while having all less than perfect textures sucks, having none sucks much much worse. I'm honestly confused and not sure what to think about the whole texture situation at this point. But it ain't a good one.