The first stage is to 'capture' the textures from the game. Follow the instructions on the Glidos site to capture textures:

http://www.glidos.net/retext.html?lang=en

Note that many of us have already captured complete folders of the first few levels and will be posting them up on my new website coming in the Spring. Capturing complete texture sets with everything in place is very time consuming and tricky if you want to do it 100% correctly. But simply capturing wall and floor textures is easy if you play through an entire level from start to end.

My current site is here:

http://www.resonantedge.com/trx/

The stuff on there is woefully out of date, but shows what's possible. The largest texture you can create is 256x256 so it's not up to modern standards, but it's enough to add extra realism.

Here's some threads on the Vogons Glidos forum that you can have a read of that you might find interesting:

Tomb Raider High Res Texture Project
TRx Texture Feedback
Tomb of Qualopec / JC
Lara home-3
Tomb Raider Xtra as a community effort?
more fingers in the pie
My Take at Cave Textures
PNG Transparency issues in replacement textures
Error in 'Texture Correction' instructions

There's no similar way of increasing texture resolution on the other TR games, but Paul has previously hinted that something similar to Glidos could be used on DirectX games... it doesn't yet exist though!

MikeHawthorne wrote:

Can this be done in any of the other TR games?

Actually yes. You have to use a third-party editor called TRe3D which works from TR1 through TR5. Difference is, you have to edit and redistribute the original level files (which is most probably not authorized), while Glidos applies the new textures on the fly over your original TR1 levels.

But I thought TRe3D was still restricted to a max of 64x64 pixel textures?

There's an awful lot you can do with TRe3D, including using textures up to 256x256, making diagonal walls (TR3+), preventing texture deformation on slanted polygons and more... It really whips TRLE's ass, if only because you can build levels for any of the classic TR engines, not just TRLE (TR4). Some people have even built levels for TR1 (TR1 Gold actually) with TRe3D, and they work like a charm in Glidos.

Btw, the new URL is dxtre3d.com.

Ah, but that still maps a 256x256 area onto 4 distinct tiles, you still can't use hi-res textures (mapping 256x256 texture onto a single tile) without Glidos, right?

Turbo Pascal used to work on a former project called RView (Tomb Raider Room Viewer) which allowed you to view/edit the textures and light sources of any TR commercial or custom level, and apply 256x256 textures on single polys. It's been superceded by TRe3D for a couple years now, but I'm not sure if you can apply hires textures from withing TRe3D (which was originally used to build levels, not texture them) or if you still need RView for that.