Mollymutt's DK64 retexture wip

Nice start. Obviously, since the characters would already be done without textures, it'd be hard to add much more detail to them. Logo's good though, good job. And yes, lining up is a pain is the ass.
I won't comment much until the environment's touched up a bit, since you won't be seeing the other stuff much.

Nice start, mollymut. Only thing I can point out about this early work is to watch the decals. The flower looks really grainy around the edges. The wood texture looks real nice, as well, but bring out the red. Things can look completely different simply due to improved fidelity, but I personally think it is best to try and stay as close to the originals as possible, unless of course you are aiming for an entirely new look and feel. You did a MUCH better job at getting rid of the texture tiling that was in the original (first+second image). Still there, but may not even be an issue. Way to go!

Can't wait for some near completion comparisons. It's always amazing to see how an area of the game looked before and after retexturing. Keep it up!

Are you just google image searching for the things you need and trying to edit them to fit the game? If so you aren't going to get far and you're going to kill the original art direction of the game.

I like the idea, but I think in some of your pictures, I see the same pattern over and over again. Basically it doesnt look tiled up correctly, making it look like it was poorly put together. I suggest you try finding images that blend better, or make your own. I like the idea though. Good Luck-minkster

I really like the idea. It reminds me of the original donkey kong games. I think however it will be very hard to do this and still maintain that Donkey Kong classic feel. I wish you luck with it!!!

the rock face and most of your other textures need to be darker in my opinion they are way too bright at the moment

Jokke_r said:

the rock face and most of your other textures need to be darker in my opinion they are way too bright at the moment

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Yes

Mollymutt, I'm sorry but as much as I'd really love to see this game with new textures, I don't think your attempt is going in a right direction. The only thing I see right is the logo at the start (and the first picture as well) and the grass in DK jungle. As for the walls and the plants.....they just look out of place and don't match the DK theme. Try darkening the walls more (tint them in brown). And by the way, I never got DK64 to work correctly on my emu. It just plays way too slow. Is there any reason for that? (Maybe this is not the right place to post it, but as you're talking about DK...)

Codexing said:

Mollymutt, I'm sorry but as much as I'd really love to see this game with new textures, I don't think your attempt is going in a right direction. The only thing I see right is the logo at the start (and the first picture as well) and the grass in DK jungle. As for the walls and the plants.....they just look out of place and don't match the DK theme. Try darkening the walls more (tint them in brown). And by the way, I never got DK64 to work correctly on my emu. It just plays way too slow. Is there any reason for that? (Maybe this is not the right place to post it, but as you're talking about DK...)

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I totally agree with this, from looking at the shots it looks effortless and very bad looking.

Mollymutt said:

Dave, I said I was going for a realistic look. Noone has gone for that type of look before. What does everybody else think?

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I never said you aren't going for a realistic approach, but the way you are doing this is self-destructive. You may be using real images for your textures, but it's not of the nature of the game. Just because you replace a rock texture with a real image of a rock, doesn't mean it's going to be a smooth transaction.

The things in the game are done for reasons, the people who do art direction and texture work in games aren't just anyone from the street, they know how to use colors correctly, how to tile their images, how to compress them, and how to get the most mileage out of their work.

The reason I called your method self-destructive before is because as far as I can tell you are just doing image searchs for things in the game, coloring them, and then just throwing them into the game. Not only can this bring visual problems (desert looking, smooth rock surface when it should be a darker rocky type of rock surface), but it's going to hurt your own texture making abilities.

Eventually you are going to come to a point where you can't just find an image of what you have to make, you're going to need to recreate something that is original to the game and this isn't something that will come up just once or twice, it's going to come up hundreds of times in the game, and will result in you being unable to finish the retexturing project.

I'm sorry to say I think it looks terrible. I'm sorry, but it really does.

I think you should concentrate on enhancing the art style of the game, not replacing it with seemingly random textures.

Nah. It's not horrible. Mollymutt is just looking for feed back on a particular texture. There isn't much else going on.

That considered, it fits. I think it could do with lets grit, but it deffinitely fits the pallet MUCH better. I believe Harvet Sun's issue lies with this texture being a fairly generic earth texture, where DK had more organic 'rock' textures. You can use this as sort of a material, but paint in the rock surface. The effect should be to generate the illusion of more geometry than there really is, not simply illustrate there is a textile feel to the surface. What you have currently depicts very small geometry, which is good, but it destroies the idea there may be more substantial geometry than what was actually modelled in game. Compare HL2 to Doom3. Though both games utilized similar texture sizes, most everything that had substantial geometry was actually modeled and rendered in three dimensions. HL2 took a more old school aproach, where whatever they could get away with describing as a 2D texture on a 3D surface, they would. Windows, doorways. All of this was as flat the wall they were painted on. From a distance, they look great. Get up close, and the illusion is destroied. Since N64 games don't afford us the luxury of simply modeling all of the real world details we would like to include, we have to fake them in the textures.

Let me try and find you an example...

Here is largely what you're doing
http://www.azontherocks.com/photos/AZR Construction_86.jpg
We see the geometry of this climing wall clearly. The ply wood being used to construct the face has all sorts of TEXTURE, but there is very very little geomtry on our scale. If there was enough geometry, a flat 'texture' would be appropriate, and furthermore, the term would be acurate, because you are finally using a texture to... add texture.

In contrast
http://www.emutalk.net/attachment.php?attachmentid=25576&stc=1
An original from DK, and while the surface loses a lot of actual TEXTURE, it does have a degree of depth within each 3D face of the geometry. This masks the simple geometry these textures on painted onto. Nah, not by much, but it helps, while making the sense seem more complex three dimensionally.

So try and illustrate, or create the illusion of more geometry and shapes on the flat faces than there actually are. If you want grit, rough, or any of these other micro tactile illusions, you could just as soon use a more traditional texture map in a blending layer, or apply filters galor, though both are probably going to destroy a lot of the faked geometry you worked so hard to make.

Suggestion for execution. Work general to specific. Try making a tilable texture that isn't much more than 4 or 5 colors. Map out geometric shapes. Rectangle here, triangle there. Go all out and make a nice polygon of however many sides are necessary, but keep these shapes of color as simple as possible. Think like you're painting a cartoon rock. Try your best not to get caught up with making a crack look really neat. Just try and get a form that looks three dimensional in TWO dimensions before you worry about any of that. Once you get a neat super simple texture that works, dive in and add all the flavor you want. Cracks, knicks, scratches, moss, mold, or just some basic texture to make what probably seemed like sliced up chocolate look more like rock.

Good luck. I'm sure you'll get the hang of things before long.

Hmm.

One thing you could try is having the original texture as a lower layer and placing the newer one above it, with a half opacity. Then render it into a single image. *shrugs* I don't know what'll happen. It's just a suggestion.

And personally I don't like the original textures. They are too plastic-y for my taste.