Creating Your Own Textures
Basic Texture Editing

There are several utilities available that will allow you to create your own Quake textures, or modify an existing texture. In this section, I would like to present a basic step-by-step procedure for creating a new texture that you can use in your maps, using MipDip and PaintShop Pro.

MipDip is a utility that lets you import and export textures from the .wad files that are used by QBSP to create the final BSP map file textures. I use it because it is easy and straightforward to use (once you get the hang of it!). Note that MipDip does not actually do any image editing functions, it is only a tool for creating or modifying the contents of wad files. I mainly use PaintShop Pro for the actual image editing, but you can use Photoshop or other programs if you want, just make sure you can load and save the palette files (more on that later).

In this example, I will go through all the steps involved in creating a new wad file, then adding a graphic texture to the wad file so that I can use it in a map editor. Let's say I am creating a pirate ship theme map, and I want to use this picture I found of a Jolly Roger flag as a quake texture (arrrgh, matey!): (See the picture in the lower frame....)

Note: To speed up loading of this page, I made the graphics separate from the text.  In several spots, you will see this icon =>   Click on that icon when you want to see the corresponding image in the lower frame!


Starting MipDip

When you first start MipDip, you get a plain, blank screen.  At this point, you can either open an existing .wad file to modify, or create a new one from scratch.  In this example, we will create a new wad file.

Since we want to create a brand new texture, for a specific map project, the best route is to create a brand new wad file to contain all the special textures for this map. So, the first step is to create the new wad file, by selecting File, then New Wad.

MipDip creates a wad file called "unnamed.wad", and displays the contents (which are empty) in a window. At this point, before you go any further, it is probably a good idea to rename this wad file to something more meaningful, so select File and Save As to get the save file dialog box.

I recommend putting your wad files together in the same directory, in this case in the Program Files\Worldcraft directory along with the other wad files. I am calling the wad file test.wad for this demo. Click the Save button to create your new, blank wad file.

At this point, all we have is a blank wad file. We need to create a "place" in the wad file to hold our new texture, and for that you click on the New Item button on the menu bar.

MipDip now prompts you for information concerning what kind of item you want to add. For brush textures, you select MipMap texture, and enter a width and height that you desire (in this case I dialed in 64x64), and enter the item id, which is the name the texture will have when you call it up in your map editor (I called my new texture jroger). When naming your item, note that certain characters are "reserved" for special effects: If the first character begins with a +, then it is assumed to be an animated texture, and the next character must be a number (for example, +0switch). If your item id begins with *, then it is a swirly warped texture (like lava or water). See my link at the bottom of this section for more information on these advanced textures. Just keep these special characters in mind before naming your texture! Click Ok to create your new item.

Here is how our wad file looks right now. Not much to look at yet, just an item called jroger that says New. But, we are now ready to jump over to our graphics editor program and get our graphic ready!

This is the image after several changes to the original image displayed at the top of this page. It has been gamma-corrected to make it a lot darker (Quake tends to make textures look much lighter), glowing red eyeballs were added, and the image resized to 64x64 to match what was set up in MipDip. At this point, the image looks ready to be used in Quake, but there is one more very important step needed: The image needs to be remapped to the Quake palette. If we didn't do this, then all the colors would come out all screwy.

This link will display the 'normal' Quake palette. It's hard to believe, but that's all the colors that are used by the standard Quake! If you want, you can download the palette file (link is at the bottom of this page), or you can create your own palette file very easily: just take a Quake screenshot, open the screenshot PCX file in PaintShop Pro and select Colors and Save Palette. Note that the bottom 2 rows of colors are special colors! All of the colors in the bottom 2 rows (other than the very last value) will always be 'bright' even when not lit (for example, the red glowing switches). The very last color is a 'transparent' color used for console graphics and such. So, this can cause a bit of a problem... if you remap your image to this palette, and some of the colors remap to those special fullbright colors, you texture can come out having bright dots or areas on it. Of course, if you are creating an image from scratch, you can simply not use those colors, but the normal editing method would be to create your texture image in more-than-256-color mode, then remap it to this palette, so it's something you should be aware of.

How to get around this? Well, you have a couple of options. The first would be to use some sort of image editor with a "color replacer" option to remap any offending colors. Another method is modify your Quake palette so that your textures won't remap to those values. This is a trick I stole from ELM-Somberfire (thanks dude!), so I want to make sure he gets full credit for it!

The Trick: Edit the Quake palette file so that the last 2 rows of colors are all completely black. With your Quake screenshot still displayed, select Colors, then Edit palette, then select each of the colors in the bottom 2 rows and change them to all black (R:0 G:0 B:0). When you are done, your modified Quake palette should look like the one on this link.

Make sure you save your edited palette when you are done! Now, with your image displayed, select Colors and Load palette, and load in this palette, and the textures should remap without creating any fullbright textures. The only downside of this method that I have noticed is that sometimes you will end up with a greenish tint to some texture combinations, but it sure beats going in and manually changing a lot of textures!

Ok, so now the image is scaled properly, and mapped to the correct palette. Select the image and copy it to the clipboard (Control-C works in PaintShop Pro). Now it's back to MipDip!

Back at the MipDip window, select the texture item you want to work with, so it has the dotted outline around it, then select Edit, then View Detailed.

The next window should look like this. MipDip is now displaying for you the base texture image plus the 3 sub-mip images which are displayed from increasing distances. If you don't see this display, then you have done something wrong! Back up and re-read my instructions on setting up the wad file, and try it again. From this screen you can paste in your graphics.

Just select Edit, and Paste...

On the next dialog box, make sure and select "Paste into submip1". Shortly, we will be letting MipDip create the other submips for us, which is easiest, but you will get better results if you create your own submips, by resizing your original image with antialiasing in Paintshop, but that is advanced information for another day ;-) Click the OK button to save your submip, and you should end up with....

This! If all goes well, your image should be pasted into the submip 1 position, and we are now ready to create the other submip images. The submips are the scaled-down versions of the texture that are used at increasing distances from your viewpoint. If you did not create the other submips, the result would be that in the game, you could see the texture when you were close to it, but not when you moved away from it (it would gray out).

To create the submips, simply select Edit, then Resample, then confirm on the next dialog box. What this does is create the 32x32, 16x16, and 8x8 images for you using a simple algorithm. When you are done, you should end up with the display shown.

Tada! That's it! You have now created your wad texture. Close the details box (with the title test.wad), confirm the changes, then select File and Save to save your wad file, and you are all ready to use your wad file with your favorite editor! (I figured you might be getting tired of clicking on those Quake symbols by now!)
 


Some final thoughts...

I only intend to present bare basic information here on how to add custom textures to your Quake maps. MipDip has a lot more features than what I have presented here - for example, you can open an existing wad file and select a texture, then export that texture to a BMP file, so you can edit it (then re-import it using the procedure I have here). MipDip also allows you to pull textures directly from a .bsp file.

There used to be several major sites with excellent information on texture editing, but several of those have seemed to go by the wayside. If you want a more thorough explanation of Quake textures and texture editing, I highly recommend another PlanetQuake site: The Chop Shop. I don't claim to be an expert on this subject, so any corrections or additions for this page will be cheerfully accepted! :-)
 

Links and Files...


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