Post your Heretic/Hexen textures and decorations!

[Not Jabba]

Some Tips on Using the Heretic Palette:

 

I've learned some useful things about the Heretic palette while doing texture work, especially from trying to get cleaner recolors or trying to blend separate color ranges in my tile mosaics. I thought it might be useful to share some of it for other people working with the palette.

 

I do my recolors manually in Photoshop Elements using the Paint Bucket tool (Opacity 100%, Tolerance 0, Mode: Normal, and the All Layers/Contiguous/Anti-aliasing boxes all unchecked). Most people probably have different methods, so my tips may have varying levels of usefulness and should mainly be seen as guidelines for understanding the colors in the palette, rather than exact rules for what shades to use and so on. However, I do find that I get the cleanest color schemes using my method; converting from truecolor to the Heretic palette can get wonky for a variety of reasons, as you can either lose useful shades or mix in colors that you didn't intend (e.g., due to the similarity of the ice-blue and gray ranges, the different yellows, and so on). Heretic's palette and colormap are designed for saturation rather than blending, so unlike Doom, a lot of the colors look better when they're pure rather than being dithered together.

 

For reference, here's the whole palette:

 

 

 

Fading the Short Color Ranges:

 

Heretic has four shorter color ramps: violet purple (169-176), lavender purple (177-184), amber yellow (137-144), and fiery yellow (241-247). These ramps have 7-8 shades, whereas most colors in the palette have 16 or more. As a result, it may feel like they're a lot less useful for texturing and only available for specialty uses like fullbright projectiles. However, I've found that I can usually recolor with them and only lose maybe a couple of shades in the process. This is because each of the short ramps actually fades down into another common color ramp. Here's a guide for doing that:

 

 

As you can see above, the lavender fades smoothly into blue, the fiery oranges fade smoothly into red, the yellow fades into bronze with a little bit of blending effort, and the purple, while it's definitely the most oddball of the colors in the palette, fades pretty comfortably into the lower ice-blues. This is how the Heretic colormap handles those colors as well, so it will work smoothly in any lighting. Even so (at least for lavender, purple, and amber), I would try to make sure my texture is primarily the brighter color, using the fade color only for the darkest spots. Otherwise, you won't really get the most out of those vivid color ranges.

 

You'll notice that after the color transition, I've switched over to using every other shade of the darker color, rather than every single shade (e.g., for the reds, I'm going from 157 to 155 to 153, etc.). This is because the short color ranges have wider differences between shades than the fuller color ranges do, so by skipping shades, we're maintaining roughly the same "gap" in brightness between colors.

 

Almost every other color range in Heretic fades down into the darkest grays after it hits its lowest shade. However, a couple are better off fading into brown first. Note this section of the image above:

 

 

After you hit the darkest bronze, you can fade down into the darkest brown shade (which is one of the darkest non-gray colors in the palette) before shifting into gray.

 

Similarly, the tans don't get very dark, and they should definitely move into brown before fading into the darkest grays. When I'm recoloring anything to tan, I almost never find a need to include dark grays in the texture. I just turn whatever the darkest color is into Brown 66 or another shade of dark brown and go up from there.

 

 

Brown and tan can probably transition into each other at other points in their ramps as well; they blend pretty well. A lot of sprites can especially benefit from starting in dark browns and then shifting up into tans and blending light browns amid the tans. You can see this in the excellent mummified corpses from Hexen, or in the Sabreclaw.

 

Additionally, sometimes the darkest shades of jade green can also fade/blend into the darkest emerald green shade (209) before moving down to gray.

 

Other Ways of Blending Colors:

 

Some colors in the palette may not blend well as a continuous color surface, but they still coordinate very well with each other. If you combine separate surfaces of similar colors together, the effect can be similar to a blend, or at least a strong synergy, which can be useful for doing complex color combinations. This is particularly useful in textures that represent abstract artforms such as tile mosaics, paintings, or tapestries. Below are some examples. The first one blends light bronze-yellows, fiery oranges, reds, browns, and even a couple of dark bronzes for transitioning. The second fades emerald into jade to create a distance effect. The third blends two different sections of the pure blue ramp with icy blues, grays, and lavenders to create a pretty cohesive sub-palette. The fourth uses light grays and light ice-blues for subtle interplay. The fifth blends upward from bronze through red, then purple, then ice-blue, then dark gray into black. The sixth shows a similar fade from tan to jade to blue. And lastly, the classic wave mosaic dithers lavender into blue, and it looks pretty slick. I've found that the Heretic palette has a lot of really interesting potential for doing stuff like this, so be on the lookout for opportunities when you're making multi-surface textures.

 

     

 

 

You can also do some similar fades with liquids, as seen here. It's not perfect, but it works pretty well.

 

 

Finally, there's the moss-gray color range (36-51), which I've actually never used, but I'd bet there's some potential there for blending between gray and jade.

 

Finally, there's basic dithering. This does work well for some color combinations; I find that it can be okay (and even beneficial) to convert truecolor images into the palette if it creates interesting dithering between any of these color combinations: gray/tan, gray/brown, brown/tan, gray/jade, gray/ice-blue, or sometimes even jade/emerald. Gray can be okay with most things, honestly -- as you'd expect.

 

Two colors you want to always avoid mixing are the yellows (either bronze or amber) with the fiery yellow-oranges, which can sometimes get intermixed when converting from truecolor. The former fades down to darker bronze, and the latter fades down into red, and you don't really want those colors mingling at random. If this happens in your textures, just touch them up manually, and replace the fiery colors with regular yellow shades (either bronze or amber).

 

A Tip About Texture Naming:

 

Finally, just as a quick protip, I would find a way to assign each individual color ramp a single letter for texture naming purposes (sometimes you can use strings of 2-3 letters per color, but sometimes the texture naming scheme doesn't leave you room for it). I name them as follows:
O = Black (Onyx)

B = Brown

S = Blue (Sapphire)

I = Ice-Blue

E = Emerald Green

J = Jade Green

R = Red

T = Tan

G = Gold (This is either Bronze Yellows or Amber Yellows -- I've never used both as separate recolors for the same texture)

P = Purple

L = Lavender

W = White

 

Technically G could also be Gray, but I tend to treat it as the default and don't assign a color name to it. Fiery orange could be F, but I've almost never used it as a primary texture color.

 

Developing a naming scheme like this makes it really easy to, say, create a hundred different color combinations of the same texture and sort them using texture configs in Ultimate Doom Builder. It'll save you a lot of work.

 

Edited October 15, 2023 by Not Jabba

[TheHambourgeois]

One thing I want to do is make a value/brightness comparison for each index so i can make good translation tables. The method I use currently involves putting color overlay layers in HSV blend mode and then merging from visible which reduces the image back down to indexed mode, but it has problems with some of the color ramps that have close colors (e.g. the Bronze/Gold range and the Amber, Gray and the ice grays/lavenders, etc.) and while I haven't noticed issues in any of the textures I've put out I have also mostly been using them in ZDoom where you don't use PLAYPAL or COLORMAP like crispy or chocolate would.

 

E: that is to say making these coherent color ramps is a good foundation for doing that so thank you

Edited October 15, 2023 by TheHambourgeois

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

@Not Jabba

This seems like some pretty useful research, thank you.  Did you derive this from studying the COLORMAP lump, or some other method of research?

 

When it comes to palettizing from truecolor, one trick I use sometimes if there are problematic colors/want to restrict things to certain ramps is to make an edited palette file with just the colors I want used (or removing colors I don't want used) and then convert to that first before transferring it to the real palette.  I believe this was a popular solution in Quake modding (where fullbright color entries could be a nuisance if you allowed them to factor into the conversion); a truncated version of the palette without the fullbright entries would be used for an initial import.

[Not Jabba]

40 minutes ago, ETTiNGRiNDER said:

@Not Jabba

This seems like some pretty useful research, thank you.  Did you derive this from studying the COLORMAP lump, or some other method of research?

 

Pretty much all of it is just from working with the palette to make textures and sprites over the course of several years, and finding out what works best in practice. I've done some work with the colormap, and it definitely does use all the fade colors that I described (including bronze and tan fading into brown), but I didn't use it to pick exact shades or anything quite that technical, so it's possible there could be further adjustments that would improve the fade ramps I made. The issue with using the colormap to build the ramps is that it's always going to be highly dependent on the exact light level, so maybe you can tailor the ramp that looks best at 176, but then does it still look the best at 144 or 208? Basically, I've designed the ramps that look best at fullbright, and I'm trusting the colormap to do an ok job of translating them into lower light levels -- I don't think I've run into any noticeable issues with it so far, though the colormap does have some weird quirks in general.

Edited October 15, 2023 by Not Jabba

[TheHambourgeois]

Just updated my texture pack  now that condemned has winded down. Nothing fancy just added some of the recolors and the mana-techbase textures I have made since the last round

 

e: missed a couple. Oops!!! Please replace the old one with this

Edited October 17, 2023 by TheHambourgeois

[Not Jabba]

This is probably the most boring but useful/necessary of all the sets I've done. Heretic needed some flat concrete-esque stone textures, especially wide ones.

 

TSSL* textures from Blasphemer:

 

    

 

My additions:

 

      

 

     

 

      

 

   

 

     

 

     

 

Tan recolors:

 

      

 

   

 

      

 

   

 

    

 

     

 

      

 

   

 

Again, this is just a sampling, and the full set will be in my texture pack. Everything I did with the light/dark tan, I also did with light/dark brown, jade, emerald, ice blue, red, and gold. There are also a decent handful of color mixes. Hopefully I will never have to do anything quite as tedious and layer-fiddly as this ever again :P

 

Edited October 22, 2023 by Not Jabba

[Not Jabba]

A lot of you are probably familiar with this set from Ettingrinder's pack -- or if you aren't, you should be! These are the kinds of textures that show you how much more powerful your mapmaking gets when you're working with great texture sets instead of just good ones. The originals by Ettingrider are jade and red, but here are some other color themes.

 

     

 

     

 

           

 

   

 

      

 

      

 

           

 

   

 

 

(More in spoiler)

Spoiler

 

     

 

     

 

           

 

   

 

      

 

     

 

           

 

   

 

     

 

     

 

           

 

   

 

    

 

   

 

   

 

   

 

   

 

   

 

 

 

 

    

 

    

 

    

 

    

 

 

(More in spoiler)

Spoiler

 

   

 

     

 

   

 

    

 

   

 

    

 

   

 

    

 

   

 

    

 

   

 

    

 

   

 

    

 

    

 

    

 

 

 

Edited October 26, 2023 by Not Jabba

[Xaser]

This thread could really use some more textures that aren't just recolors. A big part of what makes Heretic (and Hexen, to an extent) really lacking in the texture variety department is that a large chunk of the textures provided in community texture packs like bak_leg, etc. are just solid recolors of existing textures and a few light edits, with very little new materials (new types of stone, brick, metal, interesting magic bullshit, etc). Like, those bricks from Ettingrinder's pack are nice and fresh and exactly the sorta cool new content I'm talking about, but the posted recolors are to me just the same textures again. We've already seen those. :P

 

FWIW, there's still a good chunk of brand-new goodness (neoworm's stuff, nj's mosaics) or stuff converted-from-an-unusual-source (e.g. Desfar's Daggerfall edits) in this thread that totally fit my desire for new-new things, and I'm tempted to start up a sort of "curated community Heretic texture pack" that just skims the cream of the crop and ditches the sea of me-too's that tend to worm their way in. I have a bunch of my own edits from Sacrilege I'd toss in once I kick E3 out the door... though maybe I should do that first before trying to start more projects. ;)

[Desfar]

I'm still working at my wheel of time edits.

They are looking better and less 'crackly' but they still don't mesh cleanly into the existing hexen/heretic art style.

Most recent version were thrown into the other texture page.

 

[Not Jabba]

3 hours ago, Xaser said:

This thread could really use some more textures that aren't just recolors. A big part of what makes Heretic (and Hexen, to an extent) really lacking in the texture variety department is that a large chunk of the textures provided in community texture packs like bak_leg, etc. are just solid recolors of existing textures and a few light edits, with very little new materials (new types of stone, brick, metal, interesting magic bullshit, etc). Like, those bricks from Ettingrinder's pack are nice and fresh and exactly the sorta cool new content I'm talking about, but the posted recolors are to me just the same textures again. We've already seen those. :P

 

I get what you're saying, and I'd love to see more new stuff, but right now I'm doing all these recolors because the color themes don't exist. I can make any map I want...as long as it's gray with maybe some other color of trim. In practice, this is exactly the stuff that I've found that I need, so I'm creating it and making it available. I've been struggling because all the cool details in the world aren't enough to make a map if I can't get the basic architecture to work. Doom has centuries worth of work from people doing these kinds of variations of all the stock textures (which, remember, Heretic only has like 1/3 as many of), and that's where you get stuff like CC4-tex and AA-tex that people can make more cool themes with; people have poked at Heretic here and there, but it doesn't have that same groundwork yet. The work I'd like to do right now is to take stuff as useful as the Ettingrinder bricks and the Blasphemer TSSL strips and turn them into the expanded range of "stock textures" for people to use.

Edited October 28, 2023 by Not Jabba

[NeoWorm]

I kinda got stuck at creating nature textures and some textures for towns and villages. But I would like to create some themed packs eventually.

[RonLivingston]

5 hours ago, NeoWorm said:

I kinda got stuck at creating nature textures and some textures for towns and villages. But I would like to create some themed packs eventually.

that could be interesting

[TheHambourgeois]

Gonna second NotJabba in that, while I agree there could be more novel materials and themes to work with, I think Heretic is in its infancy as far as community content is concerned and there is still a lack of basic bread and butter textures. I would be keen to develop more content in the mana techbase theme, personally, but its kind of low on the list so far.

[Egregor]

I get what Xaser means, about the recolors just being similar-yet-different mostly useless stuff, but ultimately I'm going to agree w Not Jabba and Hamb on this. Texture art has come a long way since Baker's Legacy but solid Heretic Texture packs w complete recolors are still rare. My go to are:

 

-RottKing's Heretic texture pack (link not included)

-DoomMad's texture pack; Heretic palette (link not included)

-TheHambourgeois' Heretic texture pack (link not included)

-Looking forward to using Not Jabbas pack

-And of course I have to plug Quoth The Raven texture pack, though it's still in beta) (link not included)

Edited October 29, 2023 by Egregor

[Egregor]

Not Jabba and Hamb are able getter better, fuller results from the Heretic palette, often better than Baker, IMO. I'm looking forward to using the next generation of Heretic textures.

Edited October 29, 2023 by Egregor

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

3 hours ago, Egregor said:

Not Jabba and Hamb are able getter better, fuller results from the Heretic palette, often better than Baker, IMO. I'm looking forward to using the next generation of Heretic textures.

Yeah, some of the MEDIVLTX / Baker's Legacy recolors were rather... not good.  It looks like @Not Jabba has been putting the earlier-posted palette research to good use in getting better results.

[alexsa2015sa]

"I did promise to pool my few Hexen-palette textures in a single archive at some point. I don't really do much texturing anyways so it shouldn't take longer than half an hour," - said I, on the day I actually bothered to do this.

 

...over 24 hours and a good sleep later: that's a hell of a lot more textures than I remember drawing for "just Hexen". Yeah, this happens when the answer to the "Hexen maps released/total?" is a baffling *20/58*. Even cosidering that over half of 633 textures/flats listed by UDB are indeed just minor variations, patch combinations or endless recolours looking badly anyways, there is still about a hundred of different textures and flats.

 

Almost everything in the archive is PNG in Hexen-palette, unless I missed something. There is just too much different stuff in there so I'll just go over the list in a small wall of text: nothing ever goes wrong with a wall of text (and some png attachments)! Hopefully I didn't forget to mention anything important or something...
 

Spoiler

  

    - Over 40 total of 32-8-24-16-16-24-8 striped support textures: a small range of DOOR51 recolours with pattern and without, FIRE06, MONK04, PRTL01, and Sunrise Citadel stripes. Basically, if I could cut it to tiny pieces, I did. I haven't touched up CASTLE11 and PRTL01 textures from their extra-wide black seams,and some other patches have other quirks, but if someone needs edits of this right here and now feel free to ask. Don't expect me to answer promptly, though.
    - 32 STEEL textures and 10 flats, rusted and less so. Most of them are *also* support textures, with all flats and a few textures being rust recolors of a different shade than the original Hexen to match the rust recolors of support textures. I haven't made any original flats for this set, though.

    - 10 BRNZ textures and 2 flats based on either S_01 or FOREST10; don't recall which but it sure looks like that.
    (2 - pattern, 4-1-4)

    - COPPER set of 16 textures and 9 flats. Or, well, they are COPPER in unreleased texture2 file, patches are called W_HAC*** just to be maximally confusing. Copper, nails, and some 32x32 flats, I haven't actually finished with this set and it actually looks badly dull for a metal texture, and lacks proper copper sheen besides... look, no one ever told me how to do positive feedback, okay? Uses three basic surfaces which are included so you can make a "copper" sheet that is not rectangular.
    - 38 of PUZZLE 64x64 textures.Yeah, I needed more than PUZZLE5-12, and accidentally created something startlingly similar to a clean FIRE07 in the process besides. It's like the original textures of PUZZLExx and FIRExx were made by same people or something. (Disclaimer: WP_018 is similar to FIRE07, not identical. I haven't spend five minutes arranging the seams to match them yet.)
    - Set of 34 dual-coloured banners for RGBY, BW, Magenta colours. A lot of them, including a banner with a Chaos Device because why wouldn't I include a literal chaos device-producing button in a level? (2 - whitered, chaos device)
    - EARTH02, EARTH04 and MUD001-002: the former match F_00* ground textures, the latter is sorta, kinda looks like EARTH02 bricks
    - X_PURP*, a 8-frame 32x128 purple forcefield stars. Pretty sparkling and has sort-of-a-brightmap but that's about it.
    - F_DR51I2, a flat edit of a support texture layered over PLAT02 and tortured with a pencil tool until it doesn't look like neither. Used it to match with new KMDA 1.1 look of Fairy Castle. No, I have no idea why exactly did I single out this flat either.
    - 16 patches of blue or small grey brick on CASTLE07-like pattern. As in, really really blue, with a different material pattern. I don't actually recall which three textures I blended to make the material anymore, beyond the number involved.
    - 10 demossed SWAMP03 (or was it a Heretic wall patch?... can't actually recall which it actually was, they are near identical) arranged in a slightly different brick pattern. Not-edit: I forgot to make a showcase with these textures, wait a minute.

    - 4 key locks and keys. Hey, can't exactly hurt.
    - 16 gem socket 32x32 patches. Redkeep is far, far, far too repetitive with "find this 6x6 pixel item" sidequest.

    - 25 NOICE and NUICE textures. What it says on tin; mixes of ICE texture in various combinations with a little new texturing.
    I also discovered I did at least two FOREST07 - FOREST08 edits with cutoff roots. I will certainly do a third and a fourth when I'm too unhappy with the existing ones again, and again. What I really need to do is a "thin roots" variant that actually makes physical sense as passthrough; the originals are almost as thick as players with tiny holes in between.

 

...look, all this Heretic talk makes me want to upload my single finished Heretic level and forget about that misbegotten Doom clone for good. No, I have no idea how do I reconcile loving Hexen with lowkey hating Heretic either, it is just a thing.

alexsa2015sa_texture_29102023.zip

Basically, take this heap of barely-sorted textures off my hands and use it as suits your needs, since I clearly can't be trusted to actually release anything on a sensible timeframe. I *still* haven't used a number of textures in that for anything (and not just because two sets were created this week, not at all, being actually really totally honest here guys)

Edited October 29, 2023 by alexsa2015sa
added a missing png

[TheEvilGrin]

omg that is a gold mine ! i was precisely looking for that kind of stuff ! thanks a ton !

[DeathevokatioN]

A lot of these textures while decent, look like they were made for a limit removing gothic boom megawad, and not for a Heretic mapset.. also keep in mind that gargoyles and weapons exist in Heretic that clash violently with some of these stock color schemes.

[Not Jabba]

27 minutes ago, DeathevokatioN said:

A lot of these textures while decent, look like they were made for a limit removing gothic boom megawad, and not for a Heretic mapset.. also keep in mind that gargoyles and weapons exist in Heretic that clash violently with some of these stock color schemes.

 

Could you elaborate on which stone textures you feel are out of place in a game where everything is made out of stone, or in what way the stock-paletted weapons and monsters have color clashes with stock-paletted textures?

[DeathevokatioN]

11 hours ago, Not Jabba said:

 

Could you elaborate on which stone textures you feel are out of place in a game where everything is made out of stone, or in what way the stock-paletted weapons and monsters have color clashes with stock-paletted textures?

I'll start with the one I like the most, the very first theme under your first spoiler is beautiful imo and I can see them blending into the universe to create maybe a forgotten keep or something that Corvus would stumble onto after he gets cursed by D'sparil to wonder hostile unknown lands for a very long time! It keeps with Heretic's way of something that's middling between high fantasy and dark fantasy, I can imagine using all the weapons and seeing the death animations against such colors almost seemlessly... the onyx bricks on the other hand is something I'm not a fan of, maybe I played too many dark Heretic cathedrals that used a similar texture theme (15 years ago when there wasn't much quality heh), but it's a strong dark color that mutes some of the brighter colors and themes if it were to be tiled horizontally.. I can see it working if it were to be used as a border against a sky box in a tall outdoor area though for what it's worth, though.

Edited October 31, 2023 by DeathevokatioN

[zombie_ryushu]

Could I request some Captive/Tied up Crimson Disciple Sprites?

[129thVisplane]

9 minutes ago, zombie_ryushu said:

Could I request some Captive/Tied up Crimson Disciple Sprites? 

is that this guy from r667?

if so, I can try my hand at some sprites real quick. i'll keep ya updated

[zombie_ryushu]

4 minutes ago, 129thVisplane said:

is that this guy from r667?

if so, I can try my hand at some sprites real quick. i'll keep ya updated

Yes. I have a female Shrine maiden sprite that also needs a "tied up" Sprite too as in the project I am a part of these are rescuable units that join the player as Ally marines.

[129thVisplane]

@zombie_ryushu here's 3 for now, lemme know if you need more:

Edited November 4, 2023 by 129thVisplane
i cannot count

[zombie_ryushu]

4 hours ago, 129thVisplane said:

@zombie_ryushu here's 3 for now, lemme know if you need more:

Better than anticipated! I need to upload the Shrine maiden Sprites for one of them.

 

[zombie_ryushu]

So here are some other Sprites.
I need captive Shrine Maidens.

Elven Rangers of Parthoris (Corvus's faction) tend to take these girls Prisoners when they can capture them.

Edited November 5, 2023 by zombie_ryushu

[zombie_ryushu]

Burai Sprites (Faction Leader/Boss if you side with Corvus)
I need a few poses for this (male) character:
Sitting with legs crossed in a chair. Standing with arms crossed in a disapproving tone.
Floating with his arms crossed across his chest for a transformation Animation if he drops his Human disguise.
 

[Not Jabba]

These Hexen bricks are pretty much the best/most handy bricks because A) they're perfectly regular (64x32) and easy to use modularly, and B) they have so many variants already available that you can combine. To start with, I combined all the existing variants, or at least the ones I know of and like.

 

     

 

     

 

     

 

  

 

A lot of what's here is from Hexen, either unmodified (the base one and the one with the lich) or recolored from the similar gold brick textures (the one with the edge trim and the one with the warrior). The ones with the bat, vampire scene, and shield are from Realm of Parthoris, as are the ones with the hexagonal grate/window. The one with the books is by Zrrion. The ones with the dual dragons are by 129th_Visplane, from this post. The wider walls with the bat trim along the top are by Kristus, from Curse of the Lost Gods.

 

The following are my additions to the gray set. Some are obviously just color work. The ones with the metal are mine, but the first ones borrow elements from textures made for Realm of Parthoris, and the second ones are edits from Fuzzball's rusty metal bars (I'd like to do a more complete set of metal block components from these eventually, unless someone else gets to it first).

 

    

 

       

 

   

 

And here's the complete set in gold. The full pack also has them in tan, brown, jade, emerald, red, ice blue, black, white, and purple.

 

   

 

      

 

       

 

     

 

     

 

     

 

     

 

  

 

 

 

 

Edited November 5, 2023 by Not Jabba

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

I believe Zrrion the Insect did the arch-with-books initially.  I'd have to double check if the grey brick version of it was one of my variants or from his initial set.