MAPTEXTURE HELP

Conversion from 16bit - limited palettes.

Oh great stuff. (btw if you notice the sarcastic comments becoming more regular now its due to having sat writing this shite listening to my thoughts for too long!) The Quake2 Engine sucks graphically compared to Q3.Likewise engine usuing limited palettes fares badly compared to the power of 16bit colour upwards.
In the case of Quake2 it Fullbrites the colours a lot meaning that you have to darken your texture with the LEVELS before converting.

NEVER use the left or right sliders.
Only use the LEVELS middle slider and a general rule of thumb is to take the levels down to 95,85,75 .
Anymore than that and you will darken so much you actually blend the colours together and it becomes too matte oor has sharply dark edges that suck ingame.
Often you will never be able to get the same tone of colour in your WAL that you had in your TGA. So don't waste time trying to.
Make sure the TGA is perfectly hued/saturated etc then if it doesn't convert to WAL correctly redo the process but before you do,
make a new layer over the top of your TGA,
fill it with the nearest colour in the Q2 pallete to the colour of the TGA.

Set the layer to softlight,Hue or Colour and then adjust the transparency so its not taking ALL your colour / definition details away but is still visibly altering the work.
I orginially thought sometimes converting to WAL with the Difussion method looks better in adobe when small, but when you enlarge it you see all the pixels more clearly and that shows ingame so best not to use diffusion and instead ...bite the bullet. Dont use Diffusion.
WALS will always suck compared to your TGA's. Its also best to do the Conversion from TGA to WAL on a large texture.

For instance, I work in 3 folders. PSD folder, TGA folder , WAL folder.
PSD folder contains double sized textures, I flatten, half the size and then save as TGA
( in general though I don't always work as much as double size , but mostly )
Then convert that tga to wal. Sometimes it won't look right, so I flatten a PSD again and then convert that to Indexed colour mode and THEN half its size and save. Works better.

 

'Patience is a Virtue, and Artists are lazy people

 

'Patience is a Virtue, and Artists are lazy people