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Hello fellow quakers
I am back from limbo after a long pause and this time with something (hopefully) substantial. It comes with a story so sit down and relax. For the impatient ones - download is at the end of the post.
Almost a year ago, in the middle of the corona situation that turned into complete clusterfuck, at least in Czech Republic, i realized I have an extra free time. With a lock-down in progress and not much else to do I told to myself I should use the time given and learn something new. I opened QC tutorials again, but it didn't take long to find out that coding is really not my thing. It's too abstract for me - pure frustration. I was looking for something else and stumbled across my old TR-lights related thread. With the complete RT-lights for Nehahra the only remaining thing is to compile a coherent Nehahra texture pack. A new one, complete and shiny that would impress all the mankind. The only problem was that I had almost zero experience with graphic editors back then. One thing is to make simple black-and-white cubemaps for RT-lights, something entirely different is to materialize the ideas I had in my head. I decided to start with a smaller project - a training one. I decided to finish Travail texture pack by CV. There are some missing textures in that pack that always frustrated me. Just a few.... easy stuff... My plan was to go through various HD texture packs, find the missing ones or edit existing textures to plug the holes in the CV pack and learn to use graphic editor in process. And then back to Nehahra. Piece of cake, just a few days... but as always, cake is a lie. I was naive.
At first, I stuck to the plan, but before long it was clear that texture-wise Travail is a behemoth. It uses several independent texture sets. Simple comparison - basic Quake uses some 570 textures and these textures usually come in groups. Once you finish one representant of that group it's relatively easy to make the rest of that group 'cause you can re-use material you already have. It applies for Travail as well, however only to some extent. There is a lot of unique textures that are used once and than they are gone. GOOD thing about it is that Travail has a great texture variability, BAD thing was that looking for the missing textures was a real pain. It was a much slower process than I have expected. And then, another problem emerged. The more I learnt GIMP, the less was I satisfied with already existing textures in CV pack. I wrote about texture variability, yes? So the UGLY thing is that existing Travail HD texture pack doesn't reflect that enough. A lot of textures are used repeatedly, some are only looooooosely similar to their low-res versions and some don't fit at all, in my perspective anyway. Some textures are objectively nice and OK, but they just don't play well with the other textures or with the mood of the level itself. For example - almost all o_metalXXX textures in Travail are rusty and decayed, but the existing HD versions are not. Textures that should be seamless with themselves (or with others) are not. It doesn't matter in low-res world because who cares, it's not visible. However, all these little inconsistencies become very noticeable when you switch from 128x128 to 1024x1024. A lot of existing HD textures had very flat and photoshopy look to them. You can easily spot that they were created by simple copy-paste-flipp over the vertical/horizontal axis. I also wanted the textures to have some depth so I changed shading for more 3D look. At some point I even flirted with an idea to make normal maps that would take care of 3D-ness of the textures, but I decided no to. Normal maps are supported only by some engines and to tell the truth I don't like/use them. They create unavoidable artifacts around the brush edges and make every surface look like covered with melted wax. And I also found creating normal maps boring as hell. To sum it up I changed my plan from simple "completing the pack" to "going through all the textures and changing/re-creating anything I don't like".
This pack is a result of almost year worth of learning. It took so much time because when I reached a certain level of skill and looked back on the already finished textures I told to myself "WTF is this shit. I can do better." I threw it away and started over. And it didn't happen only once... I'm still not 100% satisfied with some textures, but I had to draw a red line at some point otherwise I would never release anything. This pack covers all Travail levels - SP&MP.
A little statistics:
(updated for version 1.3)
total number of textures used for Travail and Grendels Keep bonus map: almost 1200
That's why I wrote it's a behemoth... compare it to the clasic Quake. Inside the pk3 file there is a zip file with the original low-res textures. You can do easily side-by-side comparison. I tried to stay as close to the original as possible.
number of textures in this pack (Travail+Grendels Keep): 892 (+luma textures)
I omitted only textures already present in ID1 pack by QRP and some other - noclip texture, pictures of Travail creators etc... Textures from QRP packs for both MP are included. There is only a few of them and some are altered by me. You need only this pack and ID1 texture pack and nothing more. I even advise not to have any other texture pack in Travail directory because there would be conflicts.
number of new textures: 721
Those 721 textures were done by my. 644 textures are completely new, the rest is based on somebody else's work (mostly QRP textures), but are changed so much that they are practicably new. The remaining +/- 180 textures are from Hipnotic/Rogue HD packs or done by other creators - mainly Talisa and CV I guess. Most of them were also altered as described above, but only slightly. Inside the pk3 pack there is an excel file with details. I hope I didn't forgot about somebody and didn't appropriate somebody else's work. However, it could happened due to the extent of the pack and I apologize in advance. if anyone recognize his/her work that is not properly credited contact me and I correct the enclosed excel file.
thanks:
- corona virus that made it all happen :-)
- texture artists - QRP team, Talisa, CV and all others I could not tracked down
- GIMP developers and creators of countless youtube tutorials
- people behind http://downloadtexture.com/ - great source of raw material textures
some examples of texture comparison:
HISTORY:
09-05-2021
version 1.0 - initial release
Update 09-15-2021
version 1.1
extra pk3 file for Travail add-on Grendels Keep textures
extra pk3 file with textures for explodebox
Update 09-25-2022
version 1.2
I reworked several of Travail HD textures while working on Tronyn texture pack project. I replaced old textures with the new ones and merged all the Travail related downloads into the one convenient file. One pk3 file now covers all Travail levels as well as the Grendelīs Keep addon.
Update 09-28-2023
version 1.3
Texture pack is updated with new versions of many textures - mostly kgrX series and wooden textures. These textures were already included, but were made by other creators, sometimes edited by me. I was not 100% OK with these textures, but I was too lazy to make my own versions back then. I have finally made these new textures while working on my "knave" texture pack. This should be the final release.
Credits entries for all textures have been re-checked and corrected to match all updates. Both Travail and Grendels Keep credits files are now merged into one excel file.
download v1.3
alternative download here (courtesy of webangel)
jakub
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