Nic75

Lux-- that tutorial is for the full version of Genetica itself, not for the Viewer. Even when selecting "Color only" in the render options, the Viewer renders that dratted shadow. Sorry.

Nearly all of the architecture textures (windows, doors, etc.) have pre-rendered shadows. In other textures categories you'll find similar shadows in any image meant to be representative of a heavily crenelated surface (light from above-left/right). However, in that case the shadow's slight enough that it shouldn't matter... or maybe it does?

Oh, dude, it was way worse than "ugly" It was several magnitudes of godawful. It produced very impressive canyons, and my reaction was pretty much: Ended up just washing out the original image, and didn't touch the threshold settings. Much better.

...which means that a lot of Genetica stuff is gonna be problematic, because it adds shadow. The window texture is one. There's no shadow added in the "daylight" version, so that would be better.

https://www.sendspace.com/file/11xryt That's a link to a ~49mb .zip containing 8 different 1024x1024 textures and their effect maps. If you'd like to use any of them, go for it Notes-- ~ "Granite Techno" is included mostly to show the height differentials that can be obtained with the effects maps (the contrast setting is the one to meddle with to hype those maps). Might be a bit too angular for a good wall/floor texture in TDM, but that's really up to the mappers. ~ The Viewer allows so many options and variations that many of the non-geometric presets can altered to the point where they no longer resemble the original. Eg.: "Highlands" is actually a terrain texture, but I fiddled with it so that it can serve as a deteriorated/eroded plaster texture. ~ "Microbial Tenements" is a stone texture with a slight metallic cast, which is handy-- zoom it right out and multi-tile it, and now you've got a pitted cast iron texture. ~ "Liquid Metal 2" is one of those textures can could be applied sectionally-- you just want *that* section of the texture applied to object X. Nice texture if you want to mock up reflections on metals, and even glass. ...and the rest are just mess-about-for-fun, but some folks might find them useful. "Dead Grass Stone Path" is really nice, and "Long Matted Grass" is almost photorealistic. "Medieval Rose Window (Night)" would fit TDM to a T (although I think it might be better to use the "daylight" version and have the game engine apply shadow). There ya go. Later. ETA: I forgot to say that the .zip contains RENDERED images. They're all .png, not Genetica's .gtx format.

Erm. Okay so I perhaps need to reduce resolution. At 2048x2048, 8 complete textures with their effect maps total a whopping 187mb *zipped*. Eek. Back to the drawing board...

I'll play around a bit, then upload a .zip somewhere. As an example of why the .zip's needed, I've got a window texture open and there are 10 effect maps for that single texture(!). So far the window (as well as some cottage windows), crystal, and liquid textures seem to be the ones that regularly use upwards of 3 effect maps; stone, marble, and the rest use 3 or less. The Wood Workshop is a lot of fun to play with, but it doesn't generate effect maps (grrr!). Not much of a problem, because GIMP can work magic on any image if you desaturate it, then fiddle with curves, levels, and threshold. Example: I'll park that on a cube today to see how much muting the bump needs, but the effect I want is worn, grooved boards, so I think that bump will work okay (just more grey than black, I think). I'll go play with that window, and other things...

You can pick the seed. If you don't like the ones available, the full program allows you to adjust the bumps/normals, noise, and/or light maps to suit yourself. The Viewer only allows you to select the seed, but every texture has upwards of 50 of those. Yeah, the Wood Workshop is pretty cool. My partner's been playing with that instead of playing solitaire And I agree: for "fine-tuning" I prefer to tweak things by hand in GIMP, and I did so for a Wood Workshop texture.

(If this is in the wrong place, could an admin/moderator please move it? Ta.) I went hunting for a metal patina texture and ended up downloading 2 programs. Has anyone else used Genetica textures? They're free and the user license states categorically that they can be used in non-commercial games-- TDM qualifies. The free Genetica Viewer as well as the Wood Workshop can be found here: http://www.spiralgra...iz/products.htm I really wish I had a hundred-odd US$ to spend on Genetica 4.0. Check out their gallery: http://www.spiralgra...biz/gallery.htm To give you an idea of what you can get for free... ...and you can render that texture *and* its bump and noise maps separately. Moreover, you can mess with the settings before render, including seed settings that completely alter the noise pattern spread and type. The Wood Workshop, totally free, is something along the same line, and what it produces is pretty damn realistic (unfortunately I was an idiot and didn't export my last render). Anyway, just putting this here in case others want to grab a couple hundred free textures, a rendering viewer that permits an impressive amount of editing options, and a wood 'factory' that rather much lives up to its name.

That's good to know. Thanks. If I'm reading "lots of times" correctly, then: 1 candlestick with overlap, duplicated 10 times in the same room/area = that overlap multiplied by 10. And yeah, that doesn't sound good. I'm trying to learn this modeling thing right. Ol' horsie ended up looking okay, but my topology was terrible, and I won't mention how many thousand faces went into this: Lesson learned: hammers are much easier than horses

The beam through the wall example is intersecting mesh, which is bad on a calculation level: some game engines go "WTF?!" and you get lag and stutter. Then there's face-count to consider-- the more faces in your model, the harder the game engine has to work. Intersecting faces, even those on the inside of the model, are still counted. The same goes for overlaps-- if the tops of your chair legs are faces, and the bottom of the chair seat has faces, and you just parent the legs to the chair seat, you now have added the faces of the leg tops to the chair seat, and the game engine will have to count those extra polys. Intersecting mesh in a poseable model isn't a good idea, because it can make the mesh skew and stretch in ugly ways. If you want to see what that looks like, download Daz Studio (it's free), use google to hunt up a free user-made/user-morphed character, and move it around. The reason why its "skin" does very strange things is because of intersecting geometry, which affects UV unwrapping. Then there's also what I've been learning about today: intersecting faces, if merged, result in multi-edged ngons, and reducing them to quads is essential in order to get a good UV map. I'll make my next model with edge loops (she says sheepishly).

I figured this is the best place to put this. No lies, just yesterday morning I was still swearing at Blender and not much able to do anything beyond render that damn monkey (Blender users will know what I mean). An hour after that swearing session I found . It needs a few million more views. It's crazy how it's gotten so few, because so far this is the best Blender modeling how-to vid I've come across. Proof? A few hours after watching that, I was looking at most of a horse. He still doesn't have a head and is still very rough (and his conformation needs tweaking: slightly pigeon-toed), but: (caveat: sculpting in clay, wood, and stone is something I've done a lot of, so my first attempt results may reflect that) So anyway, just posting this here as a reference in case anyone else has Blender but is still swearing at it.