I've taken influences from steampunk, Art Deco/Bioshock, and 50's futurism blended with many contemporary ideas to build a resource pack designed to accompany my underwater city, Aquain. My pack takes its design cues and style inspiration from these sources, but is primarily practical in its outlook. Function over form. So, for example, when you look at a lot of steampunk style there are often just random gears stuck in every spot possible that seem to do nothing practical except look cool. But gears are a highly practical and useful item, not decoration. So I'll use them when it fits, but not otherwise.
I had wanted to go with a 1950's retro futurism look, but the main design element in that style is radically curved and rounded surfaces. Of course that is very difficult to do with Minecraft blocks. So instead I've gone with a more Art Deco approach. Yet at the same time I really like the rough hewn look of exposed metal, whereas Art Deco is a more sophisticated, polished look. I have a mix of each, depending on the location in the city. Poorer areas of the city will have to deal with metal walls instead of fancy wallpaper. An industrial area will look very different than an upscale shopping district.
I tried for a very realistic look and feel. Yet I wanted everything to be distinctive. Nothing like those 'realistic' packs where everything is a super grainy shade of gray & brown. Also, I've mixed in some 32x, 64x and 128x textures. I know that is unorthodox, but I wanted everything to be as small as I could get away with. But on the whole, most of the stuff I've put in myself is 64x. Very few 128x textures. A lot of the 32x stuff is placeholders from doku.
While the total number of blocks that have been retextured is as of yet relatively small, I've made a lot of use of CTM and other tricks to get the most out of each texture. Because of this, this pack is highly specialized and probably won't look right if you just use this pack to view your build. Some blocks have entirely different textures on their top, bottom and sides. In theory this gives me the flexibility to have a huge number of textures, some with very specific and limited uses. In practice, I'll probably never fill out all those textures since my pace of work is incredibly slow. But much of this pack is based on sharealike textures, so feel free to reuse them in your packs. Just give both me and the original creator credit.
It has been eight years of very, very slow progress, but after lots of requests, I have finally gotten rid of enough borrowed textures to make this public. If you'd like to see this continue to grow I'd love some help. This is too big a project for me, unfortunately. But I'm pretty stubborn and don't give up easily, so I'll continue tinkering with it for as long as I can. So expect infrequent updates for some time to come.
Important: You absolutely NEED Optifine for the texture pack to work correctly. Install one of those mods before using the pack.
The video quality is fairly low, especially the underwater bits, so don't hold it against the pack! Download it and see for yourself!
Check out the Source.txt file in my pack for a more extensive list, but here are a few key sources that contributed (knowingly or unknowingly) some excellent textures to this project (as either placeholders or final textures).
The iron door, light gray stained glass, pink wool, light gray wool, yellow wool, blue wool, cobblestone wall, crafting table, gray wool were used with super generous permission (holy crap, this guy is amazing!! I love these textures!) from: http://www.templarcreations.com
Some of the high tech looking placeholders (like pistons) come from MassenEffect Sci-Fi Texture Pack 128x:
A good number of the placeholder textures are from Dokucraft 32x that is free to use.
The stone slab comes from Last Days (used with permission from dereksmith, thanks!!):