Texture quickie - why so bright!?

(eRRoLfLyNN) #1

I’m having serious annoyance with textures. Everything I make looks fine, in terms of colour / brightness etc, until I compile my map. When I load it up, my textures are VERY bright. Yet, in Photoshop, side by side with official textures, they look no brighter.

I am fairly new to image stuff, so any help you can give me would be great.

Do I need to write a shader or something? Is there a certain ‘way’ I need to save them (ie channels / paths etc)? Re format, I have been saving as both jpg and tga, and the results are the same.

My compiles are the most basic for these tests, BSP -meta, with no light etc.

Please help me, this is really doin my nut in!

(carnage) #2

i have this problem too, realy i dont think there is much u can do other than change the gama settings in GTK to match the image in photoshop

when compiling with light it helps as when blended with the lightmap it wont stand out as bad

and if new to textures learn shaders they are very powerfull when you can use them

(Detoeni) #3

Can we see a sample of a problem texture?

Even when you dont use a shader for a texture, the compiler gives it one, so a new shader wont help.

(]UBC[ McNite) #4

What i noticed about textures when I started to make my own is that ET usually brightens them up a lot. So i need to do real dark textures to make them look decent in the game. But its np you ll get accustomed to it fast.
Maybe its because of the 1.3 gamma that ET sets as standard?

Here s a pic of a texture:

This is the same tex in the game, not really much light around:
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(eRRoLfLyNN) #5

That’s very strange, when I take the screenshot and compare it to the texture there is no real difference. But when in the game it just seems very bright. It must be the gamma, as I’ve often noticed that screens taken in ET look very dark when out of the game. But this is a fresh install of ET, no graphic tweaks or anything.

I was making grass though, and had to make it almost black to get the dark colour green I wanted. I suppose just have to get used to it.

(]UBC[ McNite) #6

The screenshots seem to be taken without the gamma. My screenies look like ingame when i brighten them up with app. gamma 1.3 in the PhotoEditor of MS Office.
Have a look at my moss-texture in The River II (link here) and you ll see how dark that tex is, and how light it looks in the game when you host the pk3.

(Detoeni) #7

Screenshots are taken with gamma 1.0. In game your texture is only one side of a sum, in game it will be filtered with a lightmap, if you have no lightmap it gets filtered with white.

(eRRoLfLyNN) #8

So do I need to make a lightmap with a different colour & write a shader for my texture so it is filtered with the lightmap? How is a lightmap made? Sorry, I’m searching but not turning anything up.

(Detoeni) #9

When you compile you map the lightmaps are made by q3map2. The game adds them to your texture automaticly.

When you make your texture (or write shaders) you need to give a little thought to this.

If you make a white poster and add it to the game it will look too bright, because the white gets added to the lightmap it gets brighter. so to get white in game, your texture needs to be gray to start with which then gets lightened to the right color.

In photoshop, I get a texture to how I what it to look, it then gets desatuated and darkened by 20 to 30% (Ctrl+u in photoshop) so it looks ok when seen in game. This does not work on all texture but it will work in most cases.

(]UBC[ McNite) #10

desatuated

Doesnt desaturating only move the colors towards b/w and drains the color from the pic?

What works for me is: make a new layer on top of the texture, put a dark color (grey) all over it, make it “hard light” and then mess with the opacicity (not sure this is the right word, its the % right next to the hard light).
With the hard light you ll make the structure shine through, and with the % u set the degree of darkening.
This also allows you to give the whole tex a hint of a certain color, eg. when you make this darkening layer a dark grey with a bit of blue the whole tex gets a bit of a blue touch.

(eRRoLfLyNN) #11

Cheers will have a mess around with this. I have been desaturating, darkening, and putting darker layers on top and messing with opacity but still not getting the effect I want. I’m looking for a real washed out feel. Any idea how to get this? Any time I use effects it seems to add some light to the texture and I can never seem to get rid of it. I’m trying for dead, washed out tones, a bit like some of the Call of Duty textures. No luck yet though!

(]UBC[ McNite) #12

I think for washed out I d use 2-3 layers of the same tex with diff degrees of desaturation, and probably 1-2 layers with a medium-light grey color with low opaqicity.
And maybe looking at the 2-3 layers of the same tex I d make a completely desaturated one on top and use a light eraser on it so in some areas the color of the lower one shines through a bit… (just my 2ct). Let us have a look when u r done with it though, looking forward to the result :cool:

(eRRoLfLyNN) #13

Alright but it may take a while lol, 2 days now :slight_smile:

In game I’m now going between r_gamma 1.0 and 1.3 to try and keep me right, but they still look very white. Will post up if I get anything decent. Cheers for the replies.

(squadjot) #14

r_ignoreHWgamma 1 , then ur screens will look exactly the same in imageeditor as in game