(Texture Editing) Help with filthy textures

[Doominer441]

I'm making a map taking place in a crummy hotel, and I want the textures for the bathrooms to look suitably filthy. I did some palette work to convert parts of the tiles to green to imply mildew, but that wasn't enough I felt. So then I found these textures of the gungy stains from the PANEL textures and started applying those to them. They certainly look dirty but the effect looks rather tacky, as if they were just pasted on and not naturally-accumulated dirt and filth. I'm at my wits end and if anyone else were to give me any advice for what to do, I'd really appreciate it.

DTILES.png (2.59 KiB) Viewed 78 times

DTILE2.png (7.5 KiB) Viewed 78 times

DTILE1.png (7.35 KiB) Viewed 78 times

[Enjay]

OK, I'm no artist, and I'm sure that other people will have far better suggestions but, as I see it, the first problem is that the background is meant to be three dimensional tiles. They have shading on them to highlight edges - generally lighter on the top and one side, darker on the bottom and the other side. So, your grunge should have similar shading that aligns with the shading on the tiles.

This is just a very, very quick edit (~3 minutes) so it is by no means a finished texture, and I think, perhaps, I should have made the effect more obvious, but I think it shows the idea at least.

or maybe (more restricted palette)

I also added a slight hint of blurring around the dirt blotches. Not sure if that works or not. Probably not.

Another thing you can do is, in your graphics program, paste the dirt as a new layer, then adjust the transparency of that layer until it shows just enough of what's behind it.

[Doominer441]

Unfortunately my textures are going to be Doom Graphics, not png, so some of what you're suggesting isn't feasible (and if I adjusted the shading, to make sure there's no aberrations when converting to Doom, it'd have to be manually adjusted since Paint.net doesn't have a way to restrict to a palette). I will try to experiment some with your shading idea though, I never considered that.

[Enjay]

Even with the limited Doom palette it should be possible (perhaps eveneasier). Several of the original id textures show something similar.

[Doominer441]

How exactly did you shade the stains? The restricted palette converts perfectly to Doompal so whatever you used there could work (although I also think part of my issue is the stains are all too large and obvious when they should be more subtle, especially on the tiles where big shit-brown stains like that shouldn't occur unless someone had an accident.