digital cameraz, image editorz, texture creation

[Thirdeye]

well i have gone through 3 different digital cameraz ( for various reasons and what not ) and i have to say i love the clairty and SIZE of the images...

HL 1 would really support more than 512x512 ??? because zhlt always complains about the texturez of gotten off the internet that are that size ( a few here and their ) any ways i know alot of people dont encourage a " photo rape " but i for one Marvel at the hand made " custom texturez " alot of these artists out their produce

so asking the BU forumz for your guyz input texture subject ?? to rape or not to rape ???
everything desires every bit of attention hand crafted or copied ??? quite the moral question indeed.... ( when i bother to check at least )

[Pierre-Marie Baty]

The maximum texture size is 2048x2048

http://www.hl2source.com/?content=faq#engine5

Personally I would not hesitate one single second to reuse the existing, even if you don't know who to credit. I really don't understand why people put restrictions on artwork. I mean, asking for a line of credit is one thing, forbidding the use for whatever case is another. Yet that seems to be very common.

[sPlOrYgOn]

pmb.. I think he's talking about HL1..

[Pierre-Marie Baty]

oops my bad

then it's 512x512 I think. A mapper could confirm that, ask Zacker or SoUlFaThEr...

[CoCoNUT]

I´m not an expert but I think it´s 256x256 for HL1, for Quake3-Engine 512x512. Correct me if I´m wrong.

[Thirdeye]

i was talking about HL 1 ony because i dont have hl 2 yet... so taking really huge digi photoz and editing them for my mapz game what have you isn't so terrible... couse i dont have time to make every one from scratch i hardly find time to map these dayz

[CoCoNUT]

I don´t have HL2, too and I´m not sure if I will ever buy it. Although it´s only 29€ in our stores. You only need to make the right size and convert the image into palette-colours (256), then copy it into the right wally-wad and adjust the brightness. Takes about a minute for one Texture (not if you use super-complicated filters and layers in Photoshop). I´m working on a viking-like fantasy-cs-map at the moment and made some texes for it. I don´t have much time and don´t know when I can continue this project, but it was great fun so far!

[Zacker]

1. The photo texture vs. hand made texture discussion is not that easy. Personally I prefer hand made textures, because they usually fit games better. Photo rapes often looks bad, because they aren't designed to be textures. A direct photo texture without editing is always bad.

Theese days most professional texture artists use photo sources for their textures. Thoose guys however don't just take in the photo and convert it to texture, they edit it - a lot. A photo usually contains a lot more details than the average texture and are therefore good to use as bases.

2. The official HL1 texture limit is 256*256. This however is not really an engine limit, but rather a gfx card issue. People who still run in software mode and have a 2mb gfx card will most likely not be able to run a map with bigger textures. Almost everybody run HL/CS in OpenGL or Dx and have 16 mb of gfx ram or more. Thoose people will not have any problem with 512^2 textures.

So unless you are Valve, then you should not care about if your textures go above 256^2. Even people with an old 16 mb Riva TNT 1 can handle thoose

[Thirdeye]

wow zacker your awsome

those textures look like their heading in the right direction

well i got tons of texture bases NOW !!! lol gimp or photoshop ???

[CoCoNUT]

Yeah, the simple question is what you want. Do you want to create a cs-type map with a "real" touch but "cs-feeling" in it. Do you want a comic-look, fantasy-look or whatever. Some people just take pictures of their hometown and build a map for their lan-friends "Hey, look, this is my house"! Do you want to impress Valve or the so-called "mapping-scene" with your map or is it just a fun-project for you? Does anybody pay you 5000$ for your map or do you play around with hammer just for fun... I wouldn´t take this all too serious...

There are lots of Photoshop-Tuts for the filters and effects you can use for your textures... I´m not a big fan of these things and I like it "photo-raped" sometimes
----edit
just forgot it: If you try to find out what "style" the mod has just look at the textures and the skins (+faces) of the models very closely: In cs 1.6 I would say, 80% of a certain comic-style, 20% real-world-style. Sometimes they tried to make games more "real-world"-like but look at HL2: Still 70% comic-like-look in my opinion. Another famous comic-game is Max-Payne. And look at World of Warcraft: Pure colour-comic-shiny-style. Doom1 had a cool Dark-Big-Pixel-Fantasy-Look *lol*