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<1940's style radio news voice>
"Mankrip, fighting snark with thoughtful solutions one post at a time." Cocerello making textures for Quake is not technically difficult at all, you just have to have an eye for it.
Doing a hue or saturation change to an existing set (ie. the IK set) is not hard, but whether or not it looks good is a different question. All you need to make or modify textures is TexMex and a good photo editor that can work with palettes. You must download the Quake palette (just search it its hosted everywhere...) And I suggest you also create a palette file minus the last 32 fullbright colours. Use Texmex to obtain textures from a map, or import your new textures into a wad. Starting with other textures is good for beginners. You will need to load the texture into a photo editor, convert it to RGB based image before making hue and saturation changes. Then reapply the indexed palette when finished. Applying the Quake palette can have devastating effects on your image and you need to be prepared to hand paint pixels that don't look good. Never just drop an image into Texmex, this is a poor approach that leads to ugly textures. Quake doesn't have any actual red in the palette, just crimsons and browns. One of the true reds is a fullbright, and Texmex sometimes confuses your red with this color, so you need to be careful when importing into Texmex. I spend a lot of time with some textures especially working with red. When I make a texture and hand paint from scratch it can take weeks. These 'red' banners took me three weeks to get right and they are mostly violet and pink. Some of the other textures you see here are hue/saturation changes I made in only a few minutes: https://i.imgur.com/Z73qEOP.png I use mtPaint which is free software to create pixel art. Take your time and have fun. Making actually good textures is hard. Finding out the best dithering mode and gamma curve, along other factors, makes a huge difference in many cases. Afterwards, you may often find yourself layering different pixels from multiple diverse approaches to get the best results, while also manually retouching some pixels that gets bad colors in all cases.
But there are lots of poorly edited textures in Quake and in many custom maps anyway, so people got used to cheap approaches and don't know any better. In some original Quake textures we can even find leftover pixels from different texture variations, caused by poor cropping. My main concern was with homogeneity in the methods used so the textures would still be similar to the originals while using the same colours as the others in the pack and not resort to manually editing with this case with Ik. How good it will look, i know i will need experience for that.
Ik textures are very good because they are one of the best on how hard is to spot the tiling and it seemed that making a new ik would be useful and easy to get the hang of it. As mankrip says there is many texture packs with issues even amongst some of the most popular ones but Ikblue seems to not be amongst them and i like to use it for that, as it fits my speedmaps. What caught my attention the most is that i thought that working in RGB was only for new textures and when modifying existing Quake textures was better to work in Quake palette to avoid the problems from converting back into Quake, which can be obnoxious. The shot looks good by the way, but it is taking me some effort to believe that it is from Quake sometimes. Looks too similar but not. Does it have awesome noise sampling? Does it have recolor? Does it have reduce colors? Does it let you mipmap? Can you view the texture tiled?
And biggest of all...does it have directional noise (like for instant wood grain and such)? If your Quake texture editor sucks...look no further than the best. Use Wally! Do you like having a 20yr old editor that crashes all the time? Do you like having an editor that doesn't knkw if it is meant for textures or pak files? Do you like having a program that forgets what pallet it was using? Do you want a program that never gets updated?
Look no further than Wally! TexMex has no gamma correction on its color quantization algorithm. Due to this, it can preserve some image details that gets lost when using better editors to convert truecolor images to the Quake palette. The colors are less faithful, but some details ends up better than in the gamma-correct quantization employed by professional image editors such as The GIMP.
Sometimes, I combine both TexMex quantization and GIMP's gamma-correct quantization to get the best possible results. Texmex is only for getting the textures into and out of your WAD for game use.
You should really be using an actual editor like photoshop. I use mtPaint cause reasons. I won't pirate Photoshop, and for this single use case (non-correct quantization), TexMex is waaay more lightweight.
I use whatever tools that gives the results I'm looking for. Yeah I use it for making multiple brightness variants of textures too. It works ok in this case. Texmex really does feel like a hacked together MacGyver-esque tool, so I don't like to do too much with it.
https://samjcreations.blogspot.com/2018/06/version-de-developpement-gimp-2991.html
Dev version of gimp with great blending in indexed mode. The new official 2.10 has indexed locked for some reason. Sounds pretty neat given GIMP's normally rudimentary support for images in indexed mode, but I don't speak a word of that language and a quick Google Translate isn't helping much so no idea how neat it actually is.
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