One of the biggest obstacles that
urban mappers face is a lack of appropriate textures. There are
plenty of good textures that can be 'ripped' from other games, but
many mods won't accept maps made with them. They can be hand-drawn
in an editor like WALLY, but frankly I haven't seen very many of
these that didn't look flat and 'cartoonish'. The method I'll
describe in this tutorial has, so far, worked the best for me, and
should help you to build a basic urban texture library in no
time. |
First we need our source images. There
are three sources I can highly recommend: 1) The Golgotha
textures - these jpegs are from the now defunct crack.com... they were
intended for an upcoming game, but the money ran out, and the
company decided to make all their work public domain before closing
their doors for good. 2) Web page backgrounds - there are plenty
of public domain web page backgrounds out there, in a variety of
styles and textures... wood, metal, grass, etc. Even better, most of
them are already tiled. 3) Digital photos - if you have a digital
camera, go wild with it... figure every 10-20 pictures you take will
provide one good texture, so give your camera a good
workout. |
Let's start with a texture from
GOLGOTHA (figure 1). It's really not good
practice to make one giant texture like this, so let's cut it down
some (figure 2). For window areas like
this, the optimal height is 128 units, but you may want to
experiment depending on the image. |
 Fig. 1
 Fig. 2 |
What I've done here is to select an
area around one of the windows, crop it, then resize it to a height
of 128 units... using the original aspect ratio, the width would
have been 158, but since this isn't cleanly divisible by 16, I
changed it to 160 - final size 160 x 128. In this case, I had to
change the aspect ratio, but only 2 pixels, so there will be no
notiecable difference. |
Import this into WALLY, REMIP it, and
click on the tile option to see what the texture will end up looking
like in your map (figure 3). This is
where you'll want to do any touch up work. |
 Figure 3 |
This looks okay, but
a better technique would be to layer your textures to get rid of any
repeats (artifacts). What I've done in figure
4 is to create two textures from different windows into the
original image and layer them randomly, using multiple brushes
(figure 5). |
 Figure 4
 Figure 4 |
Now we just add a little mood lighting
(figure 5), and viola, your urban map is
on its way to becoming a classic! |
![]() Figure
5 |
Some final notes: Make sure the
dimensions of your finalized source image are cleanly divisible by
16, or you won't be able to load it into WALLY. Also, be careful how
you break up your brushes to layer the textures... r_speeds can get
jacked up if it's not done right. | |