Need feedback on animated water. Working some textures for my first maps! :)

[piXelicidio]

Hi, I'm new to the forum, old to Doom, and I was not aware how things has changed for Doom wad creation.

Tried 25+ years ago making a level, was hard and painful, today is just great and addicting thanks to you!

You are breathtaking!

All the tools, map editors, source portssssssss..... 

Decided to try mapping following a tutorial and couldn't stop for the last 15 days.

(My background is 3D modeling, animation and coding)

To the topic: Textures: What do you think of my water replacement? 

I'm working for Doom Vanilla format. 
Since doom guy "walks over" water my idea is to show the "rocks" beneath like the water isn't deep at all. 
Also never liked it to be so dark, and wanted to make it match better with my outdoors and sky.

I'm just replacing or adding new textures when needed, I'm trying to keep the original style.
My rules (at this moment) are creating my own textures from scratch just when needed, while using the Doom2 assets most of the time. 
Never modify originals, but may use composition with TEXTURE1 definitions.

 

These are the two layers in Photoshop, background and water, will animate later.

 

I'm also working on my own switches to standardize them all based on their function. 
(I think original doom has too many switches and is confusing to me)

Example, for repeatable actions:
 

Then for definitive (only once) actions:

 

Notice they change in color but also shape, for accessibility. First time I played Doom I, was on a monochromatic laptop (1997~ I guess), with speakers sounds :)

Let me know if you want to see more of this work in progress, I'm trying to finish 3 levels first the share it to hopefully get some feedback. And then keep doing more if you like it or not because, this is too much satisfying ;) 

Cheers,
piX

Edited May 7 by piXelicidio

[piXelicidio]

Finally animated it looks like this in Chocolate doom:

 

 

 

Edited May 7 by piXelicidio

[Raith138]

To me it looks too gray and not blue enough but that is just my opinion.

[DoomGappy]

What are you usin to make these? What is your goal? Do you know how to work with the limited palette of Doom? These are important questions. I agree with Raith138, the sharp contrast doesn't give much the vibe of water, but of things moving over a still surface. Have you made any other textures before?

Edit: I like the buttons a lot, though! 

Edited May 7 by DoomGappy

[Rykzeon]

5 hours ago, piXelicidio said:

Finally animated it looks like this in Chocolate doom:

 

 

 

I think you should use desaturated blue colors instead, the way it looked is weird in my opinion. It feels like lighting blue water get mixed with Heretic's slime water. You may also wanted that somehow player will recognize that static blurred gray is actually rock, instead of part of flowing water. I only realized it when double-checked the image.

[piXelicidio]

@DoomGappy 
I'm using photoshop. My goal is a lighter water that (if possible) shows the "rocks" of the bottom, original water looks deep as the blue seems very dark.
There is long time since I played with doom palette, but yes, with that palette I learn to draw with and old Ms-Dos program called Autodesk Animator :)

This is another texture I'm working on to create from scratch a Doom door, that looks doom style, but is not the same... or at least I tried:

Process:


Back to the water the problem is there is no transition from blue to gray in Doom palette, that's why it looks too sharp, and can't desaturate blue.
Tried this make it even lighter blue and lighter gray to bring it a bit more close one to each other.
Also the animation is less chaotic now, like a calm water:

 

Thanks for taking your time to comment!

 

Edited May 7 by piXelicidio

[plums]

4 minutes ago, piXelicidio said:

Also the animation is less chaotic now, like a bit more calm water:

That's a much better animation and colour selection than your first one.

 

I don't know if it would be better to have the rocks underneath brown/tan instead of grey? Either way you're right that you're limited in what kinds of smooth colours you can get with the Doom palette.

Edited May 7 by plums

[piXelicidio]

Hi @plums, out of curiosity tried your suggestion: 

First this is the current image with gray bottom that produced the last GIF texture.


After making the bottom tan, then the blue becomes little purple, not a bad thing:

 

Then interestingly when converting to indexed the transition from blue two tan passes trough gray anyway:

 

Later tried with green, that has good ramps in doom pal:
Same issue:

 

This gray step could be avoided by drawing by hand directly with doom palette colors, but in this case is too much work, since I would have to create 4 frames and also make them seamless, doing everything with 32 RGB colors first is quicker and versatile. 

 

[piXelicidio]

Created also these two texture patterns to use as visual aid to guide the player in order to know what is connected to what or where to go. Complementing the already existing COMPBLUE in doom2.wad that I use for that purpose too.

Too see them in action I just make the maps available to here!
Textures are free to use!