Basic texture creation:

What you need
Getting started
Texture sizes
Choosing an image
Tiling
Animated walls
Transparent walls
Final steps

This page is intended to be a "getting started" guide to making your own textures for Doom games. Many people seem to think this skill requires expensive programs and extensive knowledge. It doesn't.

You can make some very nice looking textures using only a couple of free programs and a very little bit of artistic talent.

What you need:

1. First, you will need a wad manager / lump editor program such as XWE or Wintex.

2. Second, you will need a basic Paint program that can work with 256 color bitmaps. (.bmp files)

   Probably, you already have this that came as part of the original operating system for your computer. Every version of Windows (that I am aware of,) comes with Microsoft Paint and this works just fine. Macintosh and Linux machines probably have similar paint programs that work just as well, if not better.

3. Third, you need another free program called Image Analyzer.

   This is not really a requirement, (except for this tutorial,) but it makes things much easier and allows you to work with images in many other ways than the simple paint programs can.

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Getting started:

1. Open the Doom or Doom2 iwad with your wad manager.

   Find the section of the iwad that lists the wall patches, then save any one of them as a bitmap file.

   (A floor texture will work also as they all use the same palette.)

   *The easy way to start is just to make a copy of the Doom palette bitmap as I have done.
   Just R click and save this image as a .bmp and you have a perfect template for making textures:

   

   Now, you should have a 256 color bitmap image saved somewhere that uses the Doom palette.

   This is very important. Whether you choose to use Image Analyzer or not, any wall, floor, ceiling, sky, or other graphic image in Doom uses this same set of 256 colors.

2. Open the Image Analyzer program and load the Doom texture you just saved.

   Select "Image" from the toolbar menu, then "Edit palette".

   A new box will open showing you the Doom palette stored in the bitmap.

   Don't adjust or change anything!

   Click the "Save" button in the lower right corner, then enter the name Doom. That's all. You have now saved the Doom palette into Image Analyzer.

   With any 256 color bitmap that is now opened in Image Analyzer, simply click on the "Image" tab at the top, then select "Import palette from the drop-down menu. Select the palette named Doom and it will by applied to the image.

Texture sizes:

There are a few standards and limitations that need to be followed when making new textures for Doom.

Choosing an image:

You can use just about any type of image for your new texture. Image Analyzer can convert all of the common formats into a 256 color bitmap, then resize it and apply the Doom palette. This sounds better than it actually is however.

Size:

Doom textures are very small and low resolution images to work with, so this needs to be taken into consideration. No matter what you do, a photo of your friend's Rottweiler is just not going to have much detail and may not even be recognisable when reduced to the size of a game texture.

Try to choose images that are small and without a lot of detail to begin with. The original Doom and Doom2 textures are an excellent resource, as are the many custom textures that others have made.

Colors:

Even though there are only 249 colors available in the Doom palette, it is very surprising how well an image with "millions and millions" of colors can be converted.

Getting good results with color conversion is mostly a matter of experimentation.

In the example below, (a) is the original image converted to 256 colors and reduced to the the proper size.

(b) is this image after the Doom palette has been applied.

It doesn't look too bad, but all of the green shades of color have changed. There is too much red.

This image, (c), I have increased the saturation, (the intensity of color,) then reduced the red and blue values (adjust levels,) before converting to the Doom palette.

It has more green than I wanted, but I could try reducing the blue value more and the red value less.

Sometimes it is not just colors, but contrast and brightness levels that need to be adjusted also.

Many times, the limitations of the Doom palette are going to prevent you from making it perfect, but you can get it very close with some practice.

Tiling:

Tiling is the property of the texture to match with itself horizontally and vertically, on areas that are larger than the image itself.

If you want to find new wall textures like brick, stone, marble, wood, metal, just search the web. There are thousands of free images that have already been made to tile properly for use as backgrounds on webpages. The only things you will need to do is make sure it is the proper size and colors.

This is RWDM11B from the Doom2 wad. It was never intended to be tiled. I want to make a new lava fall texture however, and this looks like a good image to start with.

First, it needs to be resized. It's already 64 wide, so I'll just stretch it to 128 high. [1]

To make this image tile, we first need to see how much it needs to be modified, and where. Copy the image, then enlarge the bitmap to double the size. By seeing four images the way Doom is going to see them, we will know where to start. [2]

Obviously, this image doesn't tile well at all. The only areas we need to work on are the lines where the image meets itself. Reduce the image to 128x128 and we will concentrate on the vertical edges first.

Examine the way the image lines up, (and the way it doesn't) then decided how you want it to be. Using the fine brush and the darkest color, draw new lines where you want the new edges to be. Using a larger brush and the most dominant colors, paint in where you want more. [3]

The delicate work now begins. First I try the airbrush on larger areas using different surrounding colors. You can also try switching to "draw transparent" and then copying and pasting areas and edges of other parts of the image where the detail needs to be restored. Most likely, you will end up needing to use the single pixel brush and painting with one color at a time to make it look good. [4]

This middle vertical edge has now been corrected. To make the first edge the same, Copy from the middle of the image (starting at pixel 64,0) to as far as changes were made. Paste this section against the far left hand edge. [5] Reduce the whole image to 64 wide, and it should tile perfectly horizontally now. [6]

The same process is used to make the horizontal edges match up with each other, so I don't need to write it all again. Just repeat all the same steps, only working on a vertical axis:

[7]

[8]

The final result:

The lava texture now tiles almost perfectly horizontally and vertically. It's always a good idea to check. Compare [10] to example [2] above. There may be little things that changed or got messed up after switching from horizontal to vertical adjustment and some fine tuning may be needed.

Animated walls:

The only difference between static textures and animated ones, is that they have multiple frames. I have only used standard 64 and 128x128 textures as animated walls, but it is possible to use other sizes also.

First, determine which of the animated walls you want to replace. This only makes a difference in how many frames you want to use. The only possibility for normal Doom2 is 3 or 4 frames.

For the lava flow texture, I will name it WFALL, so I need to make it have 4 frames. This will be easy to create as the entire wall will be moving.

Frame 1 will be the finished lava texture [9]. The next frame will be this same image, but adjusted down 25% as shown in [11] below. Simply copy the image and move it down about 32 pixels, then past the copy to fill the space: A + B = C, which will be frame 2.

Repeat this process 2 more times to create the remaining frames.

When these four images are named properly and installed in the wadfile in the correct order, Doom will display them as a repeating sequence that will simulate a flowing lava fall.

Transparent walls:

Textures with spaces in them that the player can see through are referred to as transparent. Only walls can be transparent, (as the game was not designed to have floors over floors.)

In Doom games, these textures are used mostly to give the appearance of windows and bars, but there are many other ways to use them. You could use a transparent texture to simulate vegetation, spiderwebs, hanging flags or chains, etc. You can also use transparent images in animated textures to make moving flames or dripping water.

Making a transparent texture is basically the same as making any other wall. Instead of painting with the normal "solid" colors, you use a color that the game recognises as transparent. The original Doom does not display the cyan color, (R=0 G=255 B=255) so this is what you paint the areas of your wall that you want to see through.

As an example, I want to make a new "metal bars" wall. Start with a blank image the size that you want. Here, The black is where the bars will be, the white is going to be transparent. (This is painted using the Doom palette, but it doesn't need to be at this point.)

The next step I use is to copy the original design and make a mask. Here, the bars are filled with cyan since that is what I want to use as a background color. The area that will be transparent is filled in with a solid color. (it doesn't need to be blue, but it should be a color you aren't using.)

Going back to the original now, Just plain black bars wouldn't look very realistic. Here, I used a grey color to highlight one edge of the bars. Then, the airbrush effect is used to put random dots of different colors all around. Hopefully, this will look like spots of rust and moss when it's finished.

To blend this mess of colors together, open Image Analyzer and load the image. To use the "smooth" filter, the image must be 24-bit color, so I have to convert mine first. While it is 24-bit is also the time to make it lighter, darker, adjust the color, or use any of the other Image Analyzer tools.

[d] is the 24-bit image after using the smooth filter. [e] is the same image after converting back into the Doom palette. Some green got lost (again,) but I'm happy with it.

The last step is to paste the mask over the processed image. This covers all the garbage I added and gives the bars their shape again. Just fill in the blocked areas with cyan and the new bar texture is finished.

[g] is a .bmp you can copy if you want to enlarge it or use it in a map.

*Another way to avoid a lot of this work is to cheat. Once you have a design and a mask made, just skip to the last step and paste it over one of the original Doom textures like METAL or SILVER.

Final Steps:

Once you have the image at the proper size, with Doom colors that are acceptable, and have it tile well, all that needs to be done is usually just a final clean-up

All those little dots of odd color in the wrong places make the image look strange and should be removed. The only way to do this is opening your new texture with Paint in the highest magnification and working pixel by pixel again.

Working with the Doom palette with any paint program can be difficult. Many of the colors are very dark and do not show up well. What appears to be black is often another color at a lower luminance level.

Depending upon your monitor, sometimes you can get these darker colors to display better. Try adjusting the brightness and contrast levels. Usually, however, this will make the screen look too bright and washed-out.

The only certain way to know what your new texture is going to look like in Doom is to see it in the game. Personally, I use Legacy for this most of the time. I have a "Test.wad" which I open in XWE to exchange textures, then I can see it in Legacy within a matter of seconds.