Is this a dumb method? (Detail textures) Created 8 years ago2016-07-03 13:01:47 UTC by fuzun

I made a texture black and white and adjusted its levels to use that as a detail texture for the texture itself. Is this a bad thing to do?

I tested this with
*Xash3d
*3000px texture & 3000px detail texture

Here is results:

With detail texture applied:

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Without detailed texture applied:

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*3000px texture & 3000px detail texture

Huge waste of VRAM and probably blury texture resulting to quality loss due to resize of power of 2, that's all I have to say.

The texture itself look good and it's detail version too, but this isn't adapted to an engine like Gold Source (and even Xash3D). It looks like the rocks are being "smashed in the face like potatoes" or getting "crushed by a hydraulic pressure thingy".

It was upscaled to 4096px but it is a waste anyway. However, this is not the point.

What do you want to say by saying isnt adapted? Usage of 3000px or using black and white version of same image as detail?

As for the crushed by a press :D,
Yes there is something wrong but I could not realise what is the cause.

The 3000px texture size is wrong.

Seeing what you did with the detail texture, I concluded that it's a nice way to emulate HDR in GoldSRC.

So, if you converted the original texture to BnW (black'n'white), to use it as a detail texture, that's a very cool way to add more colour to these 8-bit textures.

The texture size, though... You could have at least made it 3200px, or 3072px, to be exact, even though that's between 2048 and 4096.

Anyways, if you ever publish a map filled with those big textures along with big detail textures, include the system requirements, please. My card has only 64MB of VRAM, and so do other 20 000 men who play games.

Seeing what you did with the detail texture, I concluded that it's a nice way to emulate HDR in GoldSRC.

HDR is not about the textures, it's about lighting, and generally involve techniques such as bloom, lens flares and tone mapping. This is what HDR looks like. Unless there are many flashlights pointing to the texture and reacting to the player's position and angles, nothing from HDR is "emulated".

You could have at least made it 3200px, or 3072px

Too much for GoldSource (even for Xash3D), I've seen some projects that "enhance" HL's campaign with Xash3D/Trinity or whatever and the maximum I've seen so far is 2048x2048 pixels and I think that this texture size should be the "extreme maximum" for GoldSource and I think this is also the max we use in ARRANGEMENT for HD textures.

That looks smashing! Sadly I'm not sure I understand what this is for.

That looks smashing! Sadly I'm not sure I understand what this is for.

I just dont have much time and knowledge to manually create detail textures for a lot of textures. So I made original texture black and white and used it as detail texture.

I am not sure if this a optimal method if you consider time but with given results, I think this method makes things better.

What do you think? Should I make details of noticable textures with this method?

Also, dont stuck with resolution. This is just a demonstration and like I said I upscaled them to 4096 to see what will happen.

So, if you converted the original texture to BnW (black'n'white), to use it as a detail texture, that's a very cool way to add more colour to these 8-bit textures.

Yes I did that and I adjusted the levels to distribute rgbs around 128.

As this is Xash3d, I used 32bit textures. I think this method gives some heavy contrast rather than colors. (At least for 32/24 bit textures)