Creating a Texturepack: Part 1, Planks

"Why wouldn't I create a Minecraft texture pack?" I thought, faintly remembering my previous attempt that didn't get farther than cobblestone and planks...

Being in the middle of discovering the many possibilities of Tekkit and dreaming of steampunk I thought I could create a texture pack combining those 2 elements... No idea if I'll ever get this actually going.

In my enthusiasm I almost started changing every texture in the game to my heart's desire, but then I remembered something: it is quite some work.
So I had to make some decisions. First of all I would start with Vanilla Minecraft, changing only the original textures. I would also go for a 32x32 resolution (double the original 16x16) to have a bit more space to mess around with.

For the style I would like to have something steampunkish, but a subtle one. Not just placing a gear on every other block, that would just look stupid.
I also want it to be functional, meaning if you play regular Minecraft you will know what you're looking. I've seen packs that change stuff around (for example wool no longer being wool, but some decorative block) and that's not what I want.
Other than that I want to combine mechanical and magical elements, but not too much.
Once I've finished doing a vanilla pack I'll add Tekkit stuff, starting with Redpower (to have most worldtextures under my control and changing tungsten so I would stop confusing it for coal). So basically my aim is having a texture pack that is made steampunk by using it with Tekkit.

But first vanilla.

Where to start?

I always wanted to change the plank texture, as no plank ever runs on forever and is that straight. So there I have my first block to work on.

Wood planks: normal, pine, jungle and birch planks.

So that's where I started.
I eyedroppered the darkest color on the original planks texture, used that to draw some lines, divided that into planks, placed nails in, played around with the L of the Lab color picker and added a bit more texture.
Further was easy: copy the texture 4 times, use with different Level-layers, make the jungle wood more orange (I hate them being pinkish) and paste them in the terrain.png.

That was easy I thought.
Well, it turns out it's not that easy. I had some alignment issues to fix after the "pasting into terrain.png", because in older versions of this picture I had strips of the old texture running from top to bottom, meaning I had mispasted something. But for some reason I insist on having the entire pack unpacked in a projects folder with some template files sitting a folder above it. So every time I have to change something I have to open both terrain.png as the template files, paste the correct texture into the correct place, save both, zip the pack folder, cut and place the .zip into the correct folder and hope I didn't mess up somewhere.
After having done this a few times I started looking for ways to automate this. I downloaded 7zip for commandline zipping, learned some batch programming syntax, did some test runs, noticed 7zip likes to save a folder in a zip folder, so I have to give it every subfolder and every file one level below the level I want zipped (if you have messed around with it you'll understand) and after some time I came to this code:

  REM delete the original file
DEL %AppData%\.techniclauncher\tekkit\texturepacks\ThORVanilla.zip

  REM run 7zip and pack a new .zip file
C:\7-Zip\7z.exe u "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla.zip" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\achievement" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\armor" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\art" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\environment" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\font" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\gui" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\item" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\misc" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\mob" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\terrain" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\title" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\font.txt" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\pack.png" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\pack.txt" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\particles.png" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\terrain.png"
  
 REM Move the new file to the texturepacks folder
MOVE H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla.zip %AppData%\.techniclauncher\tekkit\texturepacks\ThORVanilla.zip

 REM wait "some time" before closing in case there is an error message
PING -n 9000 ECHO OFF

I know I didn't have to make everything a direct path, but I wanted to be sure it worked. And it does so stfu.
So now I only need to run this .bat file to have my entire folder packed and moved to the correct place.

Next will be stones, but that will be for another time.

-ThOR

PS: if you figure you want to use this code don't forget