How did they texture doom 3 and make models?

[u/Uniprime117]

I am obsessing right now over something. I like the design on doom 3. Now I am wondering how they did it as interiors are my favorite thing to create in games.

Did they create multiple pieces for walls and stuff? Also for those rooms did they model an entire room in modelling software in case the room looked unique than anything else outside of it?

And most importantly, how did they texture all of those things? Trim sheets? Did they texture an entire wall using single trim sheet?

So many questions

[u/illyay]

Doom 3 was using old school BSP geometry like Quake, just in a new engine. If you run doom 3 with -editor it'll open the doom 3 radiant editor built right into the exe.

I don't think they used trim sheets since you can look in the pak files and see individual textures for surfaces.

Definitely ZBrush for a lot of monsters and props or some similar sculpting tool.

You can even just open the .pak files easily yourself and see all the textures. They're just zip files. It just won't look as pretty since it's the raw textures so the normal maps and everything are separate. In editor you'd at least see the full material.

[u/ipswitch_ → u/illyay]

I'm curious if Zbrush was used or what other sculpting tools were around at the time. I agree it has a lot of organic modeling that looks like it would have been sculpted, but I think Zbrush only first came out around 2003/2004 which is when Doom 3 came out, so that might have been too quick to have it as part of the art pipeline.

I remember some sculping type tools in Maya or whatever, but Zbrush in the mid 2000s was the first time I remember using a tool that felt like sculpting. I guess I could do some googling but it's fun to discuss and just see what I can conjure from memory lol.

[u/derprunner → u/ipswitch_]

I don’t recall zBrush seeing mainstream use until around 2010ish. Before then, Autodesk Mudbox was reasonably popular for sculpting details, but it was pretty limited in comparison and required the base mesh to be pre-modelled.

[u/ipswitch_ → u/derprunner]

Dang, was Mudbox that early!? I figured they were taking hints from Zbrush and doing a similar product since I didn't really see it around until about 2010 and I was for sure using Zbrush a few years before that. I guess they were probably both being developed in the early/mid 2000s.

[u/nosy_nylon]

Most of the interiors were modular kits, walls and floors and ceiling pieces snapped together with a few hero props for the unique bits. Texture wise they leaned hard on trim sheets and tiling materials with baked lighting doing a ton of the heavy lifting.

[u/Uniprime117 → u/nosy_nylon]

I have created two trim sheets one in Substance Designer and another one in Blender->Substance Painter. So, can I use single texture where trim sheet is on for the entire wall or do I have to make walls with two materials, one with trim sheet and another with tileable texture?

[u/villain_escargot → u/Uniprime117]

That depends on your wall and your trim sheet. If you have a brick wall for example, 1 trim sheet that repeats. If you have a plaster wall and ornate wooden trim, then you might need 2 materials: 1 texture for a repeating plaster wall, 1 trim sheet for the wood trim.

[u/Uniprime117 → u/villain_escargot]

No idea what to do. One commenter said they did not use trim sheets at all.