After a while, (and not to long a while one would hope) you should become bored by, (and so will the people who play your maps) of the standard half-life.WAD texture set. If you think making textures is something only for the pros, then think again! In this tutorial I will guide you through making a simple set of textures that can be used to make a map. Before we begin to look at how to make textures, you will first need two things. The first is a program called Wally, which can be freely downloaded from the downloads section of this website. The second is a program like Photoshop or Paintshop in which to create your textures. Once you have either of these (You can use paint for very basic effects, but you can download a program called Picture it! which is good for creating textures if you do not have either of the above, and its a free download from the Microsoft website)

Now open your preferred graphics application. I will be using Photoshop throughout this tutorial although all the techniques I will use are common to all the leading graphics programs (crop, rotate, re-colour etc)



First of all I found a picture I liked of a door. I used the crop tool in Photoshop to create a box around it. I also used the distort tool in order to visably "flattern" the texture so that it looks totally flat and not in any kind of perspective when looked at straight on. To do this in PhotoShop, go to Edit >> Transform >> Distort. Then play with the image until it looks as if you are looking at it straight on.



I then saved the file as a jpeg and place in a folder on its own. Do the same with any other pictures and place then all in the same folder. Next up, open Wally. Create a new WAD (make sure its set to Half-life package WAD3) and click new. Now go to the Packages >> Add images menu. A box will appear. First of, navigate to the folder where you?ve placed your images. Next place ?*.JPG? (without the quotes) on the Image wildcards. This means that Wally will import all the jpeg files in that directory into the WAD you are creating. Now on the output boxes below, click on the Open package option and select the name of your WAD (untitled 1 or similar if you havn?t got any textures in it yet) Then click on go. You?ll se the progress bar fill and all the JPGs from that folder will be transferred into textures into that WAD you are working on. Now all that?s left is to do is to save the WAD in your C:SierraHalf-lifevalve folder, where textures are kept.



Things to note:
?Once you?ve transferred your JPGs into your WAD, double click on them and re-mip them by clicking this button shown below. (Re-mip allows half-life to draw objects at long range so the textures don?t just disappear)



?Your JPGs need to have dimensions in multiples of 16. This is probably one of the main reasons people find texturing difficult. (i.e. X by Y pixels) if this is not done ? then Wally will not load the JPGs.
?You will loose resolution when you import your pictures, so if you?ve got some 500KB image then don?t expect it to look the same in Wally as it did in Windows.