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Texture browser alternative

Started by Cyber8, May 21, 2018, 03:56:42 PM

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Cyber8

Hey there,
As much as I don't have any trouble making geometry for the map, i sure find texturing to be very annoying. Mainly due to the fact that textures in Doom 3 are not very categorised.
For textures you mainly have few folders named walls/floor/ceiling/(specific stage), and that's it. Another thing that doesn't help is the fact that the texture browser shows the list of all textures, if I want to see the texture I have to click on it first, then it shows in the "recently used" tab, where I can actually see what texture I'm picking.

Is there any way/setting, to make texturing a lot easier? I thought of making my own folders and segregate textures myself, but what can be done with texture browser, so it displays textures like in recent tab?

LDAsh

There's no software alternative that would be directly compatible with any Radiants, but I've been trying the same thing and here's my method, although it's for a completely different project.  This will only work for simple MTRs that contain a header and an editor image.

I take all the editor JPGs and rename every file to prefix their folders into the filename, and put them all together into 1 folder, then I start to categorise them into what they actually are, based on (real-world) materials and features, such as 'crates_wood' and 'crates_metal', etc.  Importantly, I need to keep the original subfolders in these new categories, but luckily Radiant can handle fairly long headers with a deep folder structure, at least as much as I need it to.

Once that's all done, I remove the prefixes in the filenames with a script so to return their original filenames.  The only reason for doing it that way is to keep track of which subfolders they belong to when they are all lumped together into 1 folder and I'm categorising them out.

Now I can make an index of all these files to turn the results into a text file, which can then be MTR files, just a list of headers.  This is where Grep will come in handy, to take a simple list of headers and place the correct structure underneath to give it an editor image, or in my case just the "diffusemap" line, with the curly brackets on the lines above and below, so a list of headers becomes one big MTR file.  I need to manually split this file into separate MTRs, but that's not so difficult since it's all alphabetised.

Once that's done, I simply do a search/replace operation to remove the "categories" from the prefix of every "diffusemap" line (so as to not affect the header) and I'm left with MTR scripts that have headers based on categories, but still uses the original file and location of the editor image, so I don't end up with another copy of the image for every category version.

So now in Radiant, I have all the originals but I also have extra "zzz_category" folders underneath, where mappers will be able to find what they're looking for based on substance and feature, instead of the original location and filename, which isn't often very intuitive.  All that's required is to run a script on the .MAP file to remove the category prefix from the headers and return it to the original header before compiling/exporting.  I don't find that Radiant takes so much longer to load or anything, and more importantly the size didn't increase by more than half a MB.




The Happy Friar

Quote from: Cyber8 on May 21, 2018, 03:56:42 PM
Another thing that doesn't help is the fact that the texture browser shows the list of all textures, if I want to see the texture I have to click on it first, then it shows in the "recently used" tab, where I can actually see what texture I'm picking.
What are you using to edit D3 maps?  In D3Edit, in the Textures/Media tab, you can list the texture folders.  If you double click on a FOLDER (not an image) then click the "Textures" tab it will list all the textures that were in that folder.
That's how Radiant has handled it for quite a few versions.

silverjoel

A new version of DarkRadiant was just released that allows for a favorite texture group.  That may be something that would help you out.