Sourced: Community high-res texture set for HL: Source

[d'keesto]

Project Goal: Create a high definition texture pack for Half-Life: Source.

The Plan: Everyone is invited to contribute textures to this project. I will implement the textures into the game and we will release the texture pack to various mod hosting sites with all texture artists credited in the readme. Your amount of commitment is up to you. The only program you'll need is a paint program.

Contributing: See this website: http://sourced.leakfree.org/

 

[sdether]

As for the tracking of textures being created, have you considered setting up a CVS server, instead of the Zip you suggested. You could set it up for anonymous reads, and still require submissions to go through you to keep things organized.

Other than that, great project. I hope mapcore decides to work with you. They've got some great textures in that thread.

 

[d'keesto]

Hmm, not sure. The problem with these texture files is that you can't view them anywhere but in Hammer at the moment. This way, anyone can see all of the undone textures in one place.

If everyone submits TGAs to me, I can do mass conversions to save everyone the hassle of doing them individually.

 

[jheaddon]

MapCore are doing this also, check them out, some stunning work.

The way our modification is doing it is through modelling each texture and then rendering it, much higher detail and resolutions.

 

[d'keesto]

Link, please? I found that "Remake HL textures" thread, but that thread seems like it's just about showing of your skills by picking out a texture to redo.

 

[jheaddon]

Yeh that's the one, but they are actually (when they get around to it) going to write a program to convert their texture set into the HL game.

They have macman for a start, one of the great CS texturists, so off to great start.

 

[d'keesto]

Is theirs for Source or the original?

I'm starting this project because I want to see it done, and quickly, not "When we get around to it."

 

[sdether]

http://mapcore.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1274

This thread on Mapcore is called "Official Half Life 2 Textures", but if you look at it, it looks a lot more like Half Life 1 high definition textures and there is a lot of them. But the thread was last updated Nov 5th, so i don't know if anyone is working on importing them into HL:S or what

 

[d'keesto]

Yeah, it really doesn't look like that will turn into anything ultimately. Those textures look great, but they're what I would call medium definition, not high definition. Also there are multiples of the same ones, and some aren't in powers of two.


...so, does this forum not allow editing of older posts? That'll become a problem if I need to update the procedure.

 

[Tovart]

First of all, this is a great project and I'll be happy to give it a try (even though I'd probably be too late submitting anything).

But... here are a few things that kind-of bother me:

1) Most of all the remade textures are remade to look grimy and dirty, and this was pointed out in the thread (on mapcore), this won't fit in a clean, hi-tech laboratory (atleast before things go ape-s*#@!)

2) Most (all?) of those textures aren't bump mapped. in Doom 3 "color layer" of the textures was only the paint/blood/dirt etc. and the bumps were used for the depth. is that how things are done in HL2 too?

3) From what I've heard, Valve used photography for alot of the textures, which made them look really nice and realistic.

aaaaand... A question. will the HL:SC maps be recompiled with prettier lighting (if it can be done) as part of the project?

That's it from me. The terms and such probably aren't correct, and if I'm just horribly disinformed, feel free to slap some sense into my head. And keep up the good work. :imu:

 

[d'keesto]

Good points. I noticed the overuse of grit too. It should only be used on textures that were gritty in the original game.

I don't know much about D3, but in Source, you have a choice between bump maps and normal maps. Normal maps look much better, but also are not feasible for the way I expect people to be making these textures.

Anyway, at this point, the only goal is to release this as a texture pack. Therefore, with the lighting not being redone and the lack of dynamic light sources, bump maps will be pointless at this stage.

Half-life utilizes 3281 textures, some of which are pretty similar and some which are repeats. I think feasibility is important, so for now, just flat textures.

After this is released, I may look into relighting maps, though I think the download size of a mod like that might not be worthwhile.

And yes, I highly suggest using texture photos as bases for your textures.

Here's one of the ones I did today. Comments? I a little new to this too.

 

[jheaddon]

Like the text wear, quite good.

To be honest though the screws look pretty fake and flat, and the sign colour isn't anything like the original

 

[d'keesto]

Okay, I've gotta start on others if this ever going to get done!

 

[Dowie]

looks great

 

[d'keesto]

Thanks.

You know what, simple normal maps are actually fairly easy to do. I tried it out. And I forgot how much you use the flashlight in this game. I'm going to say, go ahead and make normal maps for any walls and ceilings that have relief. This will really improve the look of the game when you use the flashlight, at least.

 

[eediot]

D'keesto I will definitely give this a go. I think you should show us all the edited textures though - old and new, so we can appreciate them as well

 

[d'keesto]

I'll try to get some more up soon, but I don't have time to prepare all of them for the Internet. I've been working mostly on the smaller ones so far, so they aren't as exciting to look at.

Also, now I'm doing normal maps for walls and such. I'll type up a quick tutorial for doing that soon. I know the developers model the whole texture in 3d to do it, but there's a way to do it with your paint program where you get simple but decent results.

Also, in the original directions, I wrote that all dimensions should be multiplied by four, but actually, that number should really be two in most cases. Signs with words are sometimes an exception though.

When you submit, please separate textures into separate zips files for ones that are multiplied by two, and ones by four.

Now I wish I could go back and edit my original post!!!

 

[d'keesto]

Bad news with the normal maps. When implemented in game, the lightmap goes away, so the texture is completely black. But it looks awesome when you shine your flashlight on it.

I think the game may require that the material have a bump map before compiling for the light to work right. Not sure. When the SDK documentaion on materials is more complete, maybe I'll have a better answer.

Textures completed = 87. (Many repeats)

 

[brisck1]

yeah map do have to be re-rendered for normal maps to work as it needs to 'bake' the normal maps into the lightmap!

 

[eediot]

I have no idea what this is. Any ideas on how we can get it to work, though?

 

[d'keesto]

A normal map is another image file that goes with your texture and tells the Source engine what angle each pixel would be facing if you texture was truly 3D. Then the game adjusts all the lighting to account for the way shadows would be cast on that surface.

With a normal map, a flat brick texture suddenly seems very 3D when you shine a moving light on it (such as using your flashlight).

I think the game also uses the normal map to slightly deform the texture to give it more relief.

Effectively, a normal map allows a flat wall to be rendered in a way that would usually require thousands or millions of surfaces.

As brisck1 said, we would have to recompile the lighting for the maps to get it to work. I don't think this is possible without having the original map files.

However, it is very doable for model skins, because they don't use lightmaps. Unless I run into some vector lighting versus normalmap lighting conflicts. I'll look in to it.

A texture set I completed, before and after. There are about 25 or 30 iterations of this same kind of brick, so I did them all.

The colors look like they don't match only because I these areas of the room are lit differently, especially with my flashlight on in one picture.

 

[Iced_Eagle]

I emailed Gabe asking for any help he could give us (such as maybe map source, which I unfortunately doubt ) but hey you gotta start somewhere

If Gabe does give us tools to implement normal maps (maybe there is a special tool for the Source engine?)

Anyways it all looks great!!!! I will die even happier if it all gets completed!

 

[Dowie]

d'keesto , congrad, those last two pics of comparing your pack to HL Source one, were absolutely amazing

Excellant Work !

 

[d'keesto]

Thanks for the feedback. Both complements and criticism are helpful.

Clemens, thanks for the info in that email. Your email server doesn't like mine, so I couldn't reply. I hold off on doing model skins then. (Another group is doing models.)
http://hl-improvement.com/forums/index.php

I'll look into it some more. Initially looking at their forum, they seem to not want to port their work to the Source Engine.

 

[Dowie]

Could you post some more pics comparing the two please

thanks

 

[Iced_Eagle]

Well considering that they make good, high-poly models, then throw them into HL1 engine and then get like 12 FPS I don't know why they wouldn't want to come to Source... I mean you would get like no difference in FPS unless you put like 50 on-screen...

I bet their biggest pain in the ass is that the full tools aren't released just yet (few more days though!)

 

[Besli]

Clemens, thanks for the info in that email.

No problem! Yes, it's me: Clemens.
H.I.T stands for Half-Lif Improvment Team
Since begin of H.I.T the goal was to make better Models for Half-Life, Half-Life: Opposing Force and Half-Life: Blue Shift. We all know there was a HD (High Defination) pack on the Half-Life: Blue Shift CD, the HD pack was made by Gearbox and they used the models from their (cancelled) Dreamcast version of Half-Life. After this release some people of the Half-Life community asked why the models arn't as quality as on the PS2 version of Half-Life! Valve/Gearbox said this isn't possible with a PC, but the truth was that they just were to lazy! So H.I.T started to convert the models from PS2 to PC, and now some models are really better then the PS2 Models! After this H.I.T started to make a modification called: Half-Life: Enhanced, the goal is to Enhance Half-Life so people don't have to buy HL:2 to get a better Half-Life Singleplayer feeling. There is a bunch of new stuff like high detail textures, more NPC characters, etc...

Ambient.Impact (a member of H.I.T) wrote:
We might port some models over, but that's about it. There'd be not point in taking all the time and effort to port everything over to a whole new engine. I don't even think most of the code would be needed or even possible to convert.

 

[Besli]

Fury_161 (also a member of H.I.T) posted a topic on this forum: http://forum.leakfree.org/viewforum.php?f=33
Maybe they will work together, so the conversion of the models from HL1 to HL:S will be done faster.

 

[d'keesto]

 

[Besli]

Wow, looks really good d'keesto! :thumbs:

 

[d'keesto]

108 done

 

[eediot]

They look really good d'keesto. Have you figured out the lighting / bumpmap issue, though?

 

[d'keesto]

Yeah, we can't do bump maps on the levels without the original map files to recompile, which I highly doubt Valve would provide (that would also make the mod too big a download).

I haven't checked with the models yet, because another group may be releasing a high def model pack.

 

[sdether]

First attempt at textures for this project... Elevator buttons. Took some liberties with the lit up state, since with the higher res, you could get fancier

 

[Besli]

The elevator button is a great alternation, but this one looks more like the original one (made by Splitta on the Mapcore Forum):

P.S.: Pics on the first page are broken! Can you fix it, please?

 

[sdether]

Another version...

 

[d'keesto]

I can't fix the original pics cause I put them on some image serving website that took them down, and I can't edit my old posts.

Here's that texture I showed before.

 

[Besli]

Another version...

Yeah, that's great! Can you now make the complete set of elevator buttons? Would be great!

I can't fix the original pics cause I put them on some image serving website that took them down, and I can't edit my old posts.

Ah, okay.

 

[d'keesto]

This red symbol is the one I was talking about that means the material actually has more than one texture. Sometimes it means it's animated. But only one frame will show up in Hammer.

 

[Pi Mu Rho]

108 done

This is used so few times in-game, that I'd replace it with a prop.