Making Quake 1 Textures in photoshop

[Bloodshot]

Hey guys, I need help creating Quake 1 textures in photoshop. whenever i usually do it I save it as a 16 bit bmp and convert to the Quake 8-bit palette in Quark - but it seems to desaturate the texture a bit and make the colors a bit weird sometimes unless i do a lot of tweaking.

I just found out how to save in 8-bit format, and now the colors are completely screwed up. It's almost like converting from the Doom to Quake format without fixing the colors.

I need to know how to make a texture in photoshop so i can drop it in without having to convert it and mess up the colors, thanks in advance!

[golden_boy]

Try using Wally instead of Quark. Some modifications to original textures can also be made directly in Wally.

Save the image as a BMP and then open Wally and use the import function.

You can convert your image to "indexed", ie 8 bit / 256 colors, in Photoshop if you have a Quake palette (which can be extracted from any of Quake's PCX files, such as skins). This conversion will already indicate how well your texture holds up to the 8 bit conversion. It's hard to get it to look good in Quake because its palette is really pretty shitty. Reducing something from millions of colors to 256 colors is just pretty harsh. I get the best results when I modify original textures directly in Wally. You can create dozens of new texture versions by just cutting and pasting, spray recolor, airbrushing etc. in Wally.

Alternatively, have one 8 bit and one full color, high res version of your texture. Do that for all the textures in the map. Then tell people to use the high res textures (you will need the low res wad file for use in the level editor still).

Wally's Home - News

To remove fullbright pixels in Quake textures, TexMex is very handy.

QuakeOne - Quake 1 Resurrection - Quake 1 File Downloads - TexMex 3.4

Another method is to work completely in indexed mode in PS, using only colors from the Quake palette. This is pretty extreme though, and you better be a great pixel artist if you do this. Wally has the better tools for this approach though - it's specialized for 8 bit textures whereas PS is a general image editor.

[Bloodshot]

Thanks for the wally program. It really helps when I want to recolor Quake light textures and such.

I have a question though, is there any way to make Wally only let me see what i do in Quakes color palette? Every time I start off editing something it then converts it and ends up changing how it looks and the colors become a bit off - but I'm sure this would work fine if i could work directly in the same color palette.

EDIT: It does let you read external palette info so maybe I could get an external palette that's the same as Q1's?