Converting Digitized Photos to Textures by MexicanRadio
One of the biggest obstacles that urban mappers face is a lack of appropriate textures. There are plenty of good textures that can be 'ripped' from other games, but many mods won't accept maps made with them. They can be hand-drawn in an editor like WALLY, but frankly I haven't seen very many of these that didn't look flat and 'cartoonish'. The method I'll describe in this tutorial has, so far, worked the best for me, and should help you to build a basic urban texture library in no time.
First we need our source images. There are three sources I can highly recommend: 1) The Golgotha textures - these jpegs are from the now defunct crack.com... they were intended for an upcoming game, but the money ran out, and the company decided to make all their work public domain before closing their doors for good. 2) Web page backgrounds - there are plenty of public domain web page backgrounds out there, in a variety of styles and textures... wood, metal, grass, etc. Even better, most of them are already tiled. 3) Digital photos - if you have a digital camera, go wild with it... figure every 10-20 pictures you take will provide one good texture, so give your camera a good workout.
Let's start with a texture from GOLGOTHA (figure 1). It's really not good practice to make one giant texture like this, so let's cut it down some (figure 2). For window areas like this, the optimal height is 128 units, but you may want to experiment depending on the image.
Fig. 1 Fig. 2
What I've done here is to select an area around one of the windows, crop it, then resize it to a height of 128 units... using the original aspect ratio, the width would have been 158, but since this isn't cleanly divisible by 16, I changed it to 160 - final size 160 x 128. In this case, I had to change the aspect ratio, but only 2 pixels, so there will be no notiecable difference.
Import this into WALLY, REMIP it, and click on the tile option to see what the texture will end up looking like in your map (figure 3). This is where you'll want to do any touch up work.
Figure 3
This looks okay, but a better technique would be to layer your textures to get rid of any repeats (artifacts). What I've done in figure 4 is to create two textures from different windows into the original image and layer them randomly, using multiple brushes (figure 5).
Figure 4 Figure 4
Now we just add a little mood lighting (figure 5), and viola, your urban map is on its way to becoming a classic!
Figure 5
Some final notes: Make sure the dimensions of your finalized source image are cleanly divisible by 16, or you won't be able to load it into WALLY. Also, be careful how you break up your brushes to layer the textures... r_speeds can get jacked up if it's not done right.