Texture Guidelines

This should be a rough guideline for choosing the correct dimensions and format for your custom TDM texture.

Dimensions

• Diffusemap: max. 1024 pixels (when used for smaller areas: 512)
• Normalmap: max. 1024 pixels
• Specular: max. 512 pixels
• Editor image: max. 256 pixels

Compression Standards

• Diffusemaps: DDS (DXT1/DXT3)
• Normalmap: TGA (uncompressed, no RLE)
• Specularmap: DDS
• Editor Image: JPG (medium quality (e.g. 85 in Photoshop), not over-compressed)

• If the texture is to be included in TDM : A high res copy of the diffusemap (can be RLE)

Naming Conventions

Assuming your texture is named rough_grey_dirty, the names are

• Diffusemap: rough_grey_dirty.dds
• Normalmap: rough_grey_dirty_local.tga
• Specularmap: rough_grey_dirty_s.dds
• Editor Image: rough_grey_dirty_ed.jpg

• Nontiling textures have the _nontiling_ part in their name: rough_grey_dirty_nontiling_local.tga
• Textures tiling into one dimension only get the _tiling1d_ part added: rough_grey_dirty_tiling1d_local.tga

• Heightmaps: rough_grey_dirty_h.tga
• Alphamaps: rough_grey_dirty_a.tga
• Occlusion maps: rough_grey_dirty_occ.tga

Exceptions

• Skyboxes: Doom can't handle DDS for Skyboxes, so uncompressed TGA should be used here. If the dimensions of your skybox textures exceed 1024 Pixels, JPEG compression on maximum quality should be applied. (Uncompressed TGA on six 2048 x 2048 textures would result in 72 MB altogether, which is definitely too much and the high resolution will compensate the anyway negligible JPEG artifacts.)

Material File Conventions

See here: Material File Naming Convention

Remember: Do keep a backup of the ultra hi-res versions of your work as well as your working files (photoshop, gimp files). These should be added to the texture_src repository, which keeps all the "working" or "source files".

See also

• DDS creation
• How to add Textures to The Dark Mod