Art In Pinkerton

Tag: game art

Blakestone HD textures sneak peak

Recap

I have been working on remastering the textures from Blakestone on and off for several years now, initially dumping and light upscaling them for ease of redesign. From there, I started hand drawing over the old textures adding detail and transforming a blurry pixel-y mess into what you see below.

A key goal is to maintain the spirit of the original pixel art and only add detail that enhances or complements the composition.

ORIGINAL

Alpha concept drawing

The human NPCs are a pain in my rear

Some of the images, such as above, are fairly straightforward and are easy to interpret for the new design. However, some of them aren’t the greatest in the original format or so low resolution that they require more creative effort to bring to life. The scientist’s face, for example, was a blobby mess that lacked defined detail in key places. I had to envision what the new one would look like and that too a lot of back and forth experimenting to get the vibe I wanted.

Setbacks

I do most of my work on my IPAD. I somehow corrupted a couple of my sprite sheets that I had already completed (but like a dummy hadn’t exported yet). That was about 150 completed textures (several of the monsters) of the thousand or so I’m redoing. It was a brutal motivation killer. I had to put the project aside for a while till the pain of it faded and I regained motivation.

Now

As with the TES Arena Depixelization Project (ADP), I’m slowing picking steam back up. I am also long overdue for a few sneak peaks. Please note, that these are still alpha. The combination of trying to keep the same shape and vibe of the amateurish looking originals and the fact that my versions are drawn on the IPAD “look” may seem slightly not ready for primetime (i.e., like a kids notebook drawings) but I have some post drawing steps to take to up the quality some more.

SIDE NOTE: Some of these monsters are incredibly terribly designed. I wanted to change a few because of how childish they looked but decided to stick to the original version. So the goofy monsters are still goofy.

Progress

I have quite a bit done, most monsters have been completed or final designed. The initial security NPC is done, the scientist is 1/2 the way complete, but the other three are still pending. All miscellanceous textures are complete. The walls will be last but are the least difficult to fix.

Enjoy

Martin

October 26, 2025
ADP lives….yet again…well, technically it never died.

THE RIGHT NOW

Let’s just ignore the fact I haven’t posted in quite a bit (or that I started this project 13+ years ago). To be fair, I have released three other Arena mods in the meantime (more on that in the future).

I recently started digging back into the Arena Depixelization Project (ADP), my graphics replacement mod for The Elderscrolls: The Arena, and I have been hitting it hard.

I’m doing a recorded playthrough looking for missed art in the game and general quality control. This has led to me not only finishing missing textures but also tweaking (and sometimes overhauling) 90% of the work already done. I guess over 13 years of game art fiddling has matured my style slightly.

THE SWAMP

I first had to corral all my work over the last decade+. I had 7 different versions saved through the year and some files went missing so I had to extract them all compare and then pull any missing forward. This project was quite a mess (no file discipline at all, the shame). Then I had to relearn the tools, but that didn’t take too long. Then I created a new working directory and archived all the rest to clean up my sloppy work.

In just 2 weeks, I have probably edited almost 100 textures already. As I record my playthrough, I save when a missing (or ugly/mismatch) texture is found and either fix it ASAP or catalog a bunch at once to do in a surge.

GALLERY

Here’s a slew of screenshots I made from the most recent version.

October 19, 2025
“Extracting art from Blake Stone” is not a very funny title (Part 2)

Collecting Pixels

Step one is figuring out how the game stores the art files (textures). Normally what I do is check for the largest files, as they are usually the texture and/or sound archive. However, with Blake Stone, I knew that this game used Wolfenstein 3d-style archives. Blake Stone’s format was slightly different and used the extension BS6. But it was close enough that Slade, a popular tool for actual Doom and Wolf3D games, worked perfectly to extract the files.

FUN NOTE: I started this many months ago. I JUST noticed that BStone has a command-line option to extract textures. #facepalm #hashtags #DOH

You may call me…”Tim…er… I mean SPRITE”

The BStone program looks in the “aog” folder for any textures (Planet Stike has it’s own folder, “ps”). If it finds a texture there, it will use that texture instead of the original. Unfortunately, BStone only supports sprite and wall files. That means some elements can’t be replaced currently (mostly UI and cut scenes). For Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold, there are 1017 sprite and wall textures but there isn’t a folder structure. They all just go into that one folder which makes it easier to manage.

I extracted all textures to a working folder and hit it with a quick and dirty upscale so I could check how it works in-game. After dumping them into the “aog” folder, I booted BStone and enabled “External Textures” in the option menu. It didn’t work. Turns out that the extracted files were names were very slightly misnamed when extracted (SPR instead of SPRITE, etc.). It was easy enough to fix with a utility called Bulk File Renamer. A quick touch up and I reloaded BStone to see if that fixed it.

Stretching them on the rack (by rack I mean in Photoshop)

It worked…sort of. The textures were definitely upscaled but many of them looked squished (skinnier than normal). Quick glance at the readme revealed that rendering of sprites was not 1 for 1 in-game.

After a little experimenting, I realized that every texture just needed to be perfectly square. Maybe the extraction method was flawed, not sure. To fix it, I just made a quick macro on my Logitech keyboard (frequently my savior for repetitive tasks), dumped 100 or so textures on photoshop and ran the macro (it resized the canvases to be 64×64, saved and then closed the file). I just needed to hold down the macro button and let it work through each file. After finishing all 1017 textures, I saved a backup for the inevitable time I make a drastic mistake. (I will share the reformatted originals when I get around to doing Planet Strike)

Up next time…..Version 1 of my Blake Stone HD texture mod

April 7, 2023
Cork on a fork

This is Jiub. Jiub is the first person you see in Morrowind. He also has a fairly unique head so it was fitting to use him as my first experiment. Easy to test. This Jiub, being my first attempt, is a little crude compared to the later images. The transition as I refined the style is apparent. So here’s what I did.

I was watching you sleep

Resize

The initial resolution was 256 x 128 pixels. That’s not a lot of room for sharp lines and clarity. Additionally, it’s a good idea to work big and then shrink as needed so I resized the image to 2048 x 1024, keeping the aspect ratio but increasing the size by 8 times. As the fine lines of the borderland style are important, a higher resolution is preferable. (I tested it when done and shrinking down to 512 x 256 looked OK but 1026 x 512 was ideal for size vs detail).

Create layers

I duplicated the image into two additional layers. I do this so I can have a pristine backup, a working copy and high pass copy (if needed). The high pass allows me to see the areas needing outlines more clearly. I don’t always use it but it’s handy if needed. I created a new layer that is transparent to be my actual canvas for the black outlining. Showing but underneath the active layer would be the working copy or the highpass copy to use as the base reference.

Outline

Jiub 1.0…crude untapered thick lines

Like the video linked in my last post, I started creating outlines highlighting particular feature areas that stood out for change in shape. My variation on this style leans more to outlining surfaces with changes in height but not color fluctuations (e.g. later on when I get to tattoos, I likely won’t outline the tattoo.) I looked for distinctive wrinkles and natural feature as well as abrupt marks like the scar.

As you can see in Jiub 1.0, I failed to refine the lines after I finished outlining. I didn’t use shape dynamics or taper and thin out the lines. Crosshatching was also minimal.

Check

NifSkope and Jiub 1.0

I used a program called NifSkope that lets you see meshes rendered with textures and animation if applicable. It was there that I saw how odd the texture stretched due to the 3d model’s crude animation and UV texture mapping. The eyes looked really weird as the mesh just stretched down a single point to mimic blinking but the texture stretched the area above the eye down with it. The mouth opened up very much like the canadians in South Park. Because of that, I had to go back and adjust the lines to minimize the line bleeding when the textures stretched. You can also see where the original texture has errors such as the red eye’s inner lower corner bleeding onto the eyelid.

Tweak

Because this is a more cartoon-like look, I experimented with using an unsharpen filter on the working copy of the original image to exaggerate the colors and then a smart blur to blend the blemishes away some. Additionally, I added shadows and highlights by drawing on a new layer black and white respectively at 50% opacity and then blurring it to look like light smudging.

Next time, I show the other, more refined textures I completed AND Jiub 2.0.

– Martin

He fell passed out drunk and the guards found a Sharpee

July 20, 2016
Doors and Floors

Get it together man

Now that I have finished the “walls and halls”, it’s time to renovate the doors and remaining floors. I have finished almost all the ground textures though (well a few could used tweaked too). In the past, I just worked directly in the directory where I extracted the files and reinserted them into the BSA from there. However since there are so many IMG files (949 to be exact) and that isn’t the cleanest way to work from a project management perspective, I pulled all the door files out to a separate folder/workspace and created a completed folder to use for importing files back to the BSA.

Must have ran out of paint

Doors, Doors, Everywhere there are Doors

There are 112 door files not including non-doors that would serve as potential transition points (e.g. ladder up/down, stairs, etc..there are about 12 of those). These IMG files come in two variety, framed and whole texture.

I’ve been framed

The framed doors are “framed” with the texture of the building to which they belong (e.g. the Mage Guild door has a frame art that matches the building). To do these, I’ll just copy and paste a wall from the matching set file and layer it under the door so it’ll be a perfect fit with the rest of the building. All exteriors and some interior doors are framed doors, pretty much any door that transitions between outside and inside.

That’s no small wall…it’s a door!

The other type of door is the whole texture door. I have done a few of these previously as you can see in the screenshot. These doors belong to all the interior rooms and are the ones that swing open so you can enter a room. Although they are relatively simple (as they repeat the same textures over and over for different files), I’m hoping to add a little more variety to them.

First things first though, I will test to see if each IMG file is used in game (i’ll probably do them in batches). I have already found several that aren’t. I will likely still redo them just in case. Worst case scenario, if I ever can get anyone to figure out how to decipher the MTF files, I will use them to make new dungeons and buildings.

– Martin

,

February 2, 2016
Do not fear it is “I”

Letters count?

Awhile back I had posted that I had learned that I could update the font files. I never liked the font in Arena as it was too flowery for readability at such a low resolution. Each letter in the fonts was ranged from 3×3 to 8×8 pixels in size. They were all really just super small pictures.

A little rough but it works

If I build it, I’ll build it thrice

I wasn’t satisfied with my previous attempts and decided to quickly rebuild them again. This time, I tested each one out in game to see how well the effect worked. Surprisingly, this took more time than I imagined and I ended up completely revamping each font file 3-4 times till I was happy with them. In game testing allowed me to see where I missed or added a space, what characters didn’t look right, and generally if the font looked ok when playing. As you can see in the picture, the editor lets you click each pixel, one by one. While each character font file can have the spacing and padding adjusted using the slider (thus bigger or small amount of horizontal pixels), the height of the characters was fixed for each font file. Although it would be relatively easy to just rename one of the other font files that have a bigger height setting, I think that might play havok on how the game displays text and didn’t really see the need for it.

Does anyone ever use this option?

Whoa where did you come from!

But I can’t read!

Someone shut off the faucet!

She made it sound like it was practically around the corner

What am I supposed to do with all these points?

Yes…my new mod is a Battlemage. What of it?

Blue pill or red pill?

Through some in for spares?

To determine which font affected which portion of the game, I filled in a different set of characters in each font file as a solid box. Then I just looked to see which font was being used in each portion of the game containing text. Like with the art (and probably sound files), I found that not all fonts were used. Of the 10 font files included with the game, I have only been able to find 4 of them in game. Or at best, the others are used in some obscure corner of the game.

NOTE: The screenshots were taken with a vanilla version of Arena since this mod will be released as a separate mod from ADP.

UPDATE: I released TES Arena ReFonted on the nexus. You can get it here.

– Martin

January 29, 2016
Is that 80’s fashion?

The straight and narrow

Some days I can blaze through images getting 5 or 6 done in a sitting, then other days just part of an image can take a couple days. When it comes to the Arena Depixelization Project (ADP), the easier ones are just patterns (especially ones with straight lines horizontal or vertical). The low pixel count doesn’t really muck up the design too much since there is no need for a “fine detailed” line in those cases.

It kind of looks like….

However, once lines start curving or the image becomes complex, the time required is increased, sometimes dramatically. It’s hard to get non-angular shapes to look good when you only have a 64×64 grid to work with. I find that it takes multiple revisions to get it looking just right. To make matters worse, the source material for ADP contains many pictures that are either so pixelated as to be barely discernible or they generally don’t look very good as you clean them up (such as dress thing for the “angel” in this picture).

Click to enlarge

Close enough for horseshoes and hand grenades

In that image, I had to make some artistic decisions on how “accurate” to the source material I would be. The image is generally too complex to leave unaltered for my “Depixelization” theme. At first, I didn’t even know how to tackle it. I completed all the background wall first and left the “Angel” and the “alcove” till last. The good thing about that is that it let me establish the colors for the image. Eventually, I had to do this one as I only have a few SET files left. I decided to break it up and focus on individual pieces of the angel. I really wished I had made a timelapse of this one to show how much back and forth I did on it.

Mr. Potato Head

I started with the more clearly defined shapes, to include the arms, head, and the key. Those came into place with minimal fuss. Then, I tackled the wings. It took me awhile as the initial version (closer to the source) just didn’t look very good. After a couple of iterations, I ultimately decide to make the wings bigger as if they were more full body sized. Next, I attempted to do the feet. However, they just did not look good, especially when I started working on the weird “billowed” dress/robe. I decided to put the feet off and do the clothing. I touched up the sleeves to improve the “hanging off the arms” appearance. I made my first rendition of the lower part of the robe very close the source version. However, it looked terrible because the source version is kind of ridiculous looking, as if someone tucked an oversized shirt into a skirt. I played with it a little before I decided to just alter the design. I revised it to look more like a regular robe. Unfortunately, the feet still looked awkward, so I removed them and lengthened and curved the robe as if they were hidden by it and it was floating.

– Martin

Click to enlarge

May 9, 2015
Wake up! You were dreaming.
Early on

Morrowind Main Menu (Original)

Back about 4 1/2 years ago, I had just gotten into computer graphic design. I spent the first 1/2 a year experimenting and learning how to use the editing software (GIMP). One of the games I messed with was Morrowind, my favorite game. It wasn’t really meant for any project. I decided to make a desktop wallpaper of the main menu.

At that time, I didn’t know much about GIMP or how to use it effectively. Additionally, I had just gotten my Wacom tablet and hadn’t become comfortable with it quite yet. To make it easy, I used the original Morrowind main menu texture as the base. Because of this, the end result was (and still is) useable in-game. I even went as far as retexturing the New/Load/Save buttons to match the theme.

It’s Alive

I decided to use the box art as a supplementary inspiration when I began working on it. There were some key differences between the two; the major one being the border that framed the box art. I really liked the border and the “daedric” lettering on it. Unfortunately, my source copy of the box art wasn’t very good so I had to guesstimate when recreating them.

Crayola version

I did have a couple goals in mind with an overarching theme of applying a cleaner more art-lik
- To boost contrast, the border was darkened and a similar color was used for the middle triangle.
- The center was lightened with a complimentary but vivid color to liven up the image.
- The “daedric” lettering was lightened up to look more dramatic and almost “glowing”.
- A spot of white was placed on each “letter” and then the smudge tool was used to stretch that white color into highlights.
- A level of depth was created by adding width and darkness to the inner edge of the frame. The “Morrowind” lettering was giving a simple perspective by adding a drop shadow angling to the lower right.
- The dragon emblem was subdued so that it didnt’ overpower the wording. This also gave a subtle layer of interest.
- Lastly, it hard to see but the entire image was given a paper texture filter to create a painted canvas feel.
I use it as my background on my computer for inspiration

You never forget your first

Most of these effects evolved through experimenting with the software and various visual styles that I had in mind. However the whole picture was hand drawn/partially traced using my art tablet. It’s not without it’s flaws and a level of crudeness to the picture shows my inexperience at the time. Despite all that, it is one of my favorite personal pieces because it’s the first complete computer graphic design work of mine.

– Martin
January 8, 2015
It’s getting hot in here AGAIN?
Warm to the touch

NOTE: This kind of a rehash of a previous post from a different angle (slightly) that walks through the process more “visually”.

One of the texture SET files edited recently for ADP was a 4 texture wall set that resembled a wall with lava or fire spots. I had already settle on using a mostly flat wall color to more dramatically contrast the flames/lava parts of the textures. But in order to maintain a uniform look to the fire, the image needed to be built in layers. A good first step is to make a duplicate layer of the original before making any changes, especially major ones. That way, the duplicate can use as a reference when editing the image.
- Layers in GIMP (and I’m sure Photoshop) allow you to create/edit different pieces of a picture individually but still be able to see them as a whole…like may layers of tracing paper stacked together but each having a different element drawn on it.
Cut it out

In this instance, the first element designed was the “wall” layer. Using the Erase function, all spots containing a decent amount of fire were erased. In GIMP, the eraser needs to be set to “hard edge” because of the technical limitations of the image format, it can’t deviate form the original palette or be partially translucent. Later on when the “fire” layer was created, it would be placed underneath this layer so that it show through only the holes.

Sticking to colors in the image, one was chosen as the new wall color. Before mass painting the “wall” (usually just by increasing the pencil/brush size to larger than the image), the “lock” transparency option had to be enabled to prevent the cutout holes from being filled in. Lastly, another complementary color was used to border the cutout sections and add a smidge of depth and interest.

Heating it up

Next, another layer was created for the “fire”. The plan was to fill the whole layer with the fire effect. If the “wall” layers transparent parts are changed (holes made bigger or moved), it wouldn’t need any adjustments. Also, it’s just easier that way. The fire is created by using alternating gradients of yellow to red and then back. This is repeated for the whole image.

Lastly, the final step is to “merge” the two layers together so that they show the wall but with spots of fire. In GIMP, you can right click the “wall” layer and just select “merge down”.

This technique is very similar to the one used on another firery wall that I completed months ago. Additionally, I used it for the lava in my Minecraft texture pack.

It’s fairly simple but still creates that fire/lave effect I like despite the limited palette.

– Martin
December 16, 2014
“I’m not dead yet!”

Not quitting

Real life (RL) hits most enthusiast artists and game modders extra hard at some time or another, as it did me (I had the trifecta of work, family, and computer problems). Since most of us do this for fun, we have fit it into our leisure time. Some days, there is practically no free time. But more often, there is time but because of RL, the mental (and/or creative) juice isn’t there. For extended periods of “down time”, the bigger danger is that the interruption and loss of creative motivation might lead to loss of interest in a project altogether. This is especially dangerous for larger projects where the modder/artist might reflect on the enormity of the work that still needs to be done or if a newer shiny bauble attracts them.

Motivation

The source of motivation plays a big factor in overcoming this kind of stagnation. In my case, the motivation is internal based (i.e. I do mods that I want to see). Additionally, I’m not modding current games so the pressure from the community isn’t a factor either. My projects are my COUNTER to RL stressors. I relax when I’m editing pixel by pixel. Each of my projects is an experiment in artistic design for me.

The Torchlight mod was my first real art mod and there are many things I look back on that showed my inexperience. However, I actually get energized at the thought of seeing how it would look now that I’m (slightly) more skilled. I guess what I’m saying is that if you do projects for yourself first and you enjoy it, it’s more likely that you’ll come back after these “unplanned pauses”. I’ve been working most of mine for several years (on and off) and haven’t ever considered abandoning them.

NOTE

I originally planned to detail my work on some fire walls for Arena but this kind of just happened. Since I want this webpage to chronicle my artistic processes, I rolled with it. Long story short, sometime this week I’ll do that post 😉

– Martin

December 14, 2014