Composite Texture Terrain Workflow

Here is a basic tutorial on creating a composite textured terrain scene using Adobe Photoshop and GZDoom Builder. This method can be expanded upon or downsized, of course.

Warphouse Released

After a three year build time, Warphouse is completed. A behemoth, single player map featuring only minimal graphical additions and some MIDI BGM I whipped together. It should pose a challenge to an experienced player and a lengthy romp with plenty of secrets and little tidbits to look at.


Download: Idgames
Doomworld Forum Thread

Warp House Update

Warp House is rounding down to the last of the major architectural work. I was hoping to see it released before the end of the year, but it's looking more like early next year for a release date. 

Warp-House Screen-shots

Some screenshots from a map I'm working on.  It's taken a long time to get where it's at and it's going to be a long time still before it's done. The map uses only stock doom.wad textures  It's essentially The Shores of Hell on acid being eaten by some monolithic parasite.

GZDoom Builder - Vertex Slope Tutorial / Workflow

Some quick and dirty vertex slope terrain.  Usually I'll use a more careful hand in sculpting terrain, but this video demonstrates the fundamentals of working terrain into a UDMF format map.

As the video progresses, you can see that the entire business end of vertex slopes is essentially flood-filling larger sector boundaries with triangles. There are a couple of things to keep in mind that aren't mentioned in the video.

- Assign all the lighting and texture properties of your terrain before butchering it into a mesh.  It takes a lot more work to flesh in the small details when you're swimming in triangles.

- Monster/player collisions on slopes aren't exactly refined.  Areas with very dramatic height variations should be avoided where a lot of foot traffic is to be expected.

- The least amount of triangles you need to achieve the desired effect, the better.

GZDoom: Mapping Assets Pack

Short video showing some mapping assets in action.

The Case for Megatextures

Megatexturing is more or less the nuclear option of Doom editing.  Using a 1 to 1 texture scale ratio puts a mapper at a tremendous advantage as opposed to working with higher resolution textures, and that's file-size.  Putrefier as a whole weighs in at a mere 20 megs, music included.  The texture data eats up a fraction of the total file size despite some very ham-fisted room texturing methods.

This represents a large portion of one of the rooms in Putrefier.  It looks quite robust in game and takes up a mere 212kb uncompressed.  Not a high price to pay for a lot of aesthetic stimuli.  It was constructed in Photoshop using existing textures in the resource wad, some splatter brushes and a bit of artistic ingenuity.   GZDoombuilder makes it simple to align your floor / ceiling textures by dragging them into place.   I should note that the larger the mega-texture,  the more you'll run a risk of encountering a more pronounced blurring effect and a strain on the images' color depth.  If need be, create your master texture and break it up into smaller pieces to avoid these undesired effects.

Another thing to keep in mind is if you have a general idea of what kind of lighting your room is going to have, adding additional bits of shadow and/or highlights is a nice touch. You're already using the real-estate, might as well make the most of it.

Demonic Pasta

This method also works well for creating more realistic outdoor environments as well.  

Outdoor areas,  depending on the desired level of detail, can be strung together in Photoshop using 3-4 base ground textures with various rocks and debris peppered in. Clone stamp is your best friend.

This level of detail, albeit a low definition rendition, is something that hasn't been seen outside of more modern games. As heavy handed as it may seem,  given the small file size and quick construction time, the end result could put an area of your map completely over the top for a relatively cheap price tag.