Hi everyone,
Came here from another forum looking for the gap in missing textures in half life 1 source....great that the community is strong!
About making textures:
Go grab a original from the wad file in page 1...duh!
Then look at the texture and see if it tiles, if so; in what way?
We will deal with the tiling later so dont worry TO much about that.
Then go find some reference material from http://www.mayang.com of similar photo databases...or plain old simple internet!
The bigger the better is my advise work big and making is smaller is done afterwards.
In some rare cases a simple enlargement of the original and some brush-ups will be allright but never great. Besides, its more fun creating a totally new texture (check out the HEV remake for instance, amazing work!).
Gentlemen, start your photoshop!
First, place the original in layer one JUST AS REFERENCE.
Now bring in you basic picture of a texture similar to the original.
Adding details is easy and experimenting is the keyword. Add layers, add other pictures and smooth things up using the eraser and perhaps the transparancy layer functions like multiply or soft light, hard light etc.
Important is to keep the colouring scheme near the original one.
This can be done at the end with your new texture in one layer.
(flatten everything - beware that every layer style is flattened allright since strange thing could happen there) Now go play with your color-levels: image - adjustments - color balance (or levels) and tweak as much as you like!
All done with the details and colouring? Ok, now lets make this damn thing tiling shall we?
Do not use the patern maker standard in photoshop in CS since its...well...shit. Maybe for a simple sand texture this thing works but almost every time it doesnt work (for me).
Lets pretend the texture needs horizontal tiling: Select the entire right side of the picture with a small band of 100 pixels (sorry, this is HARD explaining in english since im dutch). Now copy it and flip it horizontally and put it on the left side (snap is a handy function for this). Now - in theory - the texture is tiling horizontally perfectly except for the right side of the inserted piece wich came from the right side (no im not drunk, I suck at explaining thing...). Simply erase the non-fitting edge with a big size brush the edges or play with the stamp or healing brush till the pasted piece is no longer standing out. Thats it.
You can repeat this for the bottom and top bit. Check the tiling in a big new file and just copy the texture 4 times and see if it works...or not.
Thats it for now...excellent work you all!
