quake 2 textures too bright
hello, i hope i registered on the right forum xD i know most quake related stuff was made by the folks of the polycount forum.
polycount was one of those iconic names back than like planet quake and gamespy and i hope this is the same polycount that i think it is xD
anyway a short introduction:
when i was a kid, i loved the sh-t out of quake2 and i also loved making maps and mods and what not, but there was this one thing i couldn't make cuz i didnt have the necessary knowledge, skill and programs but it was also a thing i wanted to make alot. it was my own player characters. the only thing as close to my own characters i did was making skins for existing player models.
but not so long ago i realized that i already have everything i lacked back than to make my character so i immediately got to work
now the modeling part went smoothly, but making the textures gave me a headache. i created a few textures using the quake2 pallet and it looked all good in the editor but when i loaded them in the game, the textures where burning bright!
i tried lots of things, extracting the pallet from an original quake2 pcx file, downloading a few pallets from the internet, tried darkening the pcx textures i already saved. nothing worked, i kept getting the same bright texture.
now i remember back in my old skin making days i had the same problem, but i dont remember how did i solve that problem exactly.
finally out of desperation i darkened the texture image to make it too dark and re saved it to pcx with the q2 pallet and when the game brightened the texture, it started to look about right like it was intended to look like, only the quality suffered alot because of this up and down in brightness and applying the pallet on an improper brightness image
heres an example
polycount was one of those iconic names back than like planet quake and gamespy and i hope this is the same polycount that i think it is xD
anyway a short introduction:
when i was a kid, i loved the sh-t out of quake2 and i also loved making maps and mods and what not, but there was this one thing i couldn't make cuz i didnt have the necessary knowledge, skill and programs but it was also a thing i wanted to make alot. it was my own player characters. the only thing as close to my own characters i did was making skins for existing player models.
but not so long ago i realized that i already have everything i lacked back than to make my character so i immediately got to work
now the modeling part went smoothly, but making the textures gave me a headache. i created a few textures using the quake2 pallet and it looked all good in the editor but when i loaded them in the game, the textures where burning bright!
i tried lots of things, extracting the pallet from an original quake2 pcx file, downloading a few pallets from the internet, tried darkening the pcx textures i already saved. nothing worked, i kept getting the same bright texture.
now i remember back in my old skin making days i had the same problem, but i dont remember how did i solve that problem exactly.
finally out of desperation i darkened the texture image to make it too dark and re saved it to pcx with the q2 pallet and when the game brightened the texture, it started to look about right like it was intended to look like, only the quality suffered alot because of this up and down in brightness and applying the pallet on an improper brightness image
heres an example
Replies
it's completely normal that the textures in game look a bit different, there's a lot of things that may influence how the texture looks, like bugo mentioned, it's probably ambient light or vertex colors.
That's why you always should test your model in the engine when your painting your textures.
Welcome to the forum btw.
im gonna make a tutorial on how to make quake chars in the future when i have a site for that but for now a quick sumary of what you need to do:
start modeling your character with the modeling software of your choice, doesnt really mater how you do it just make sure you dont go over 2k tris cuz theres a limit, i dont know exactly what it is tho but considering that normally quake 2 models are like 500 tris so 2k would be like 4 times the normal amount. an md2 file supports up to 4k tris but the game itself has a limit somewhere between 2k and 3k, its allways a good idea to test export your model and try to load it in the game before proceeding to any uv mapping or rigging.
btw it has to be all tris so convert it to tris before exporting. also the model doesnt have to be one piece, as in, parts of it dont have to be connected to each other, it only needs to be a single object layer. the gun however needs to be a separate layer or file.
once you finished and tested your model in game, begin making the UV, again here it doesn't really mater how you do it either, it only has to have a single material and a single texture so try to put everything on the UV map as tidy as you can to use up the space efficiently. the normal quake2 texture resolution is 256x256 but you can go higher than that, the limit is somewhere between 350x350 and 400x400, my model has a 350x350 resolution. also dunno why but all the player chars i have for my q2 never exceeds 256x256, i hope there is no real reason for it and i will not run into some problems in the future because of my texture resolution being too big xD
now, quake 2 uses 256 color mode pcx file format with a custom pallet, when making a texture, use the colors in the quake 2 pallet for the best results afterwords when converting your texture into the q2 256 color mode pcx file using the q2 pallet. to get the pallet, go into your pak0.pak file and extract the pallet from the colormap.pcx, if you dont have a way to get inside the file, alternatively go into your players folder and get the pallet from any of the character textures you find there, the only problem is that some of the tones will be missing and replaced by a white color.
also do the same for the gun.
now once you have everything ready, there are 2 paths you can take.
path one would be to use blender, this one is easy if you are an experienced blender user. you just rig and animate your model in blender and just save it as an md2 file and ur done.
but if you are like me and the complete nonsense that is blender's interface is driving you nuts, you can just continue your work in your favorite 3D application that you just used to create your model, the only problem is that you wil still need to use blender at one key point of the process (unless you find a plugin for your program that lets you export md2 files)
in my case, here's what i did: i upend the model in blender and exported it as md2, then i opened the same model (not the md2 file that i just exported) in lightwave 3D to rig and do all the animations.
now to know what animations you need to do exactly, you need to get any model viewer or editor that can display quake 2 models and their animation frames. every animation needs to have a specific amount of frames, not any more, not any less and have to go in a specific order, use the male or female or cyborg player models as your guide on how much frames you need.
also note that quake 2 frames are actually key frames, quake2 generates the frames between the key frames in game by morphing the key frames, so for example a run cycle has only has 6 key frames.
i had to set the playback to 10 frames per second in in lightwave to be able to sorta turn my every first frame into a key frame play them in game speed while skipping stuff that is supposed to be in between the key frames
note that the very last frame of every death animation will be looped continuously after the player dies (dead body laying on the ground) and the very first frame of the shooting animation will be looped too if the player is shooting an automatic weapon, again use the original quake player model animations as reference material.
also the gun needs to be loaded in the scene as a separate layer or file and put in the model's hand since frame 1
now when you are done with all the animations, you export them all frame by frame as a separate 3D model with transformation, in lightwave it would be the save transformed object option(i didnt have any plugins to do that automatically so i had to export every frame by hand, i was so happy that quake 2 uses only key frames
do the same for the gun only skip the death animations since the gun model disappears when player dies
another good thing is that only the base frame (the MD2 file you exported) uses UV maps
this is good because for the next step im going to use a program called quake model editor or QME to load all the frames into my md2 file. now the program is really crappy cuz it cannot import UV maps, thats why i had to use blender to export the base frame. you can load 3D models into the program and save them as MD2 but they wont have UV maps so i only load models as frames. also since the program is really old, i had to use lightwave 5 lwo file format to save my frames.
okay so like this is the final step, you load the md2 file you exported in blender, you delete all the frames generated by blender (they will all be the same first base frame) only leave 1 frame or frame group, import all the frames you made, QME will automatically use the frame file names and numbers to make frame groups and arrange them. arange the frame groups in right order and hit save.
do the same for the gun and ur all done
enjoy your quake character
also
in QME go to model properties and set the skin resolution that you are using there before saving because if the resolution is different there from your actual texture resolution, you will have problems in software graphics rendering mode later on.
dont forget to name your frames when saving them from lightwave to like run01 run 02 run 03 and so on so that you would understand what is what in QME
additionally, you can make different weapon models to represent the weapon that the player is actualy holding in his hands, like the rail gun or the rocket launcher and give them the flowing names.
w_bfg.md2
w_blaster.md2
w_chaingun.md2
w_grapple.md2
w_hyperblaster.md2
w_machinegun.md2
w_railgun.md2
w_shotgun.md2
w_sshotgun.md2
now every time you switch weapons, everyone will see what weapon you are holding in your hands.
well i hope that helps, just ask if you have any questions
it has nothing to do with anything, i tested it on both the steam version of quake and my CD i had a long time ago and i got same results, also the pallet is correct i believe since every pcx file in q2 directories and pak files use the same one, but they all look correctly, so im guessing it has something to do with the program im saving to pcx with.
[HP]
that game has no such things, it uses improved technologies from 95 xD, besides everything else work like it should only my texture doesnt, if i put on a texture from another model on mine, it also looks the way it should look
and thanks btw
But as I said before, the overbrightbits and gamma/brightness will all have an effect on this. The games naturally gonna wash textures out by default, it just wasn't made for 24/32bit textures, so use a modern day source port.
Keep in mind I know a tad about Q2 as I was lead on Quake 2 Evolved
After I am happy with a final texture, I go to Image -> Mode -> Indexed Color. I load the custom quake 2 palette, and it "looks" done. I save it out as a .PCX, but in game it looks inverted and overexposed. Is there something I'm missing? Should I use a converter? Do I need to adjust some settings before I even start painting? Thanks to EVERYONE here for the help with this. I was able to successfully and finally see a playable character of mine in-game after, what, 13 years? Lol.
i dont know what's quake 2 evolved but if you knew tad about q2,
you would know that it is impossible to not use the q2 pallet, as the textures simply would have wrong colors, pretty much what's hapening to King Kinetix now. if my textures didnt have the quake2 pallet, it would look like bright nuclear green, yellow, red puke in the game xD, like i said before, i saved the pallet into file from a quake2 pcx file and applied it to my texture before sving, otherwise it wouldnt even work.
Kinetix
it sounds alot like you decreased the color depth to 256 but you did it using the default 256 pallet and not the q2 one.
i dont know mutch about saving 256.pcx files in photoshop tho. if you oploaded the file somewhere i could see what's wrong with it.
and yeah i checked out some of my models in my q2 dir and ur right, half of them have darkend textures, looks like more people had to do this to make their textures look right, also some that didnt darken their textures have them looking too bright. i also noticed that it has mostly something to do with the GL rendering driver cuz all the textures of all the models i have look the way they where intended to look like in using the software rendering driver, including my model (its too dark xD)
Also nice one for ignoring the entire part of my post talking about WHY ingame assets turn a different colour.
as for the thing i "ignored" well i felt that you might be right about that one so i didnt see any need to point anything out there lol b ut not that you didnt ignore half of the things said by me and kinetix
anyway, scroll up and take a look at the pictures i posted, top one is from the viewport, and the two pictures below are from the game and watch the video. im guessing we had some kind of big misunderstanding here.
no im not and yes i am using the correct pallet, how do i know? well lets just say i have more experience working with quake than your overconfidence say you do (no offense) so im going to share my experience with you
this is how it looks when i use a 32bit texture (im assuming you mean true color mode?)
this is how it looks when i use an incorrect pallet
as you can see, the colors dont wash our or become over bright like you said(you have never really seen what hapens when you use a 32bit texture did you?), they just turn into a colorful diarrhea, and as you can see from the screenshots and videos this isnt the problem im actually facing.
also regarding the that isnt solving the problem, that is runing away from it and that is not an option in my book, i cannot tell people to use some special quake client just so that they could see my textures properly, if couldnt make it work with the stock quake like it was intended, that means i failed, there is no excuse, and if it was a bad port, well everything else would look messed up too, not just my textures.
you are right about the flat shading and loss of smoothness but have you ever heard of such a thing as error diffusion or color dithering?
here's an example, both of these textures use the correct quake 2 pallet
this is a texture that uses the near color method to apply the pallet, it produces the result you described
but here's how it looks if you use something smarter as error difusion, as you can see i only had a minimum loss of quality, otherwise it looks exactly as the original 32 bit texture, awesome huh?
so i hope you understand now that my problem is not even related to this
furthermore
again, lets look at my problem, the texture isnt ruined with incorrect colors, it's just too bright, but other than that it is working fine and yes its a 256 color q2 pallet texture, not a 32bit one
and now lets see how the same texture looks using the software rendering driver
as you can see it looks the way it is supposed to look, that means that the cause of my problem is related to the GL driver that comes with the game