Renzatic

Eh. I think I can live without it. It's a little hard to see the marquee selections, but everything else looks decent enough. Here's the link to Part 1 Check and see if it's pretty easy to follow along with as is.

Alright. I'm a goodly way through the first tutorial (probably going to split the whole thing into 4 or 5 separate chunks), and I've got my pictures in, all resized and snug. The only problem is when you click the image to enlarge, it takes you to the wiki file page. I want it to expand inside it's own window. How do I go about setting that up?

Cool. Thanks for the help, everyone. I'll have at least the first part up sometime tonight.

Thanks to Greebo, I now have full access to the Wiki! ...and upon accessing it, I've quickly come to realize that adding anything new to it is a bit more complicated than simply editing a forum post. It seems I have to know at least a basic amount of HTML to get anything done. So now I've got a few questions. I'll list them below in an easy to follow bullet list. -How would I go about adding a new subcategory to the Texture Tutorials page? -Is there local storage for images? I have my current set hosted on my Dropbox account, which'll probably last me a good long while. But if at some point I happen to lose said account... -Is there a way I can conveniently resize my images to fit snugly within the page, a way I can avoid having to go through an make smaller thumbnails of all my fullscreen shots? Can I use Javascript to float the fullsized (or nearly fullsized images) on top of the page? For example, something like this? It'd make navigating the tutorials that much easier. I'm sure these questions aren't as easy as I believe they are, but if you're able to give me some good advice, I'll be greatly appreciative.

Consider Greebo bothered. If he doesn't respond within a day or two, I'll hit up Modetwo. And if he doesn't answer, I'll just go ahead and post the tutorials up on the forums here. That'll give me a few days to finish cleaning up the tuts, at least.

I guess the title explains it all. I'm rewriting my big Photoshop tutorial to be more Darkmod specific, and wanted to post it to the Wiki for future reference. The only problem is that I'm not given any option to register, only to log in. This leads me to believe that permission to edit the wiki is by invite only, and I have to harass one of you here before I'm given access. So. Here I am. Harassing you all. Let me edit the wiki!

No, Windows Live apps don't come installed with the OS. They can't be, due to the antitrust fallout MS had over Windows back in the day. The most MS can do is offer them up in Windows Update, where they're all opt in choices listed under nonessential downloads. And I dunno if I'm reading you correctly here, but it sounds like you're saying the Bing Bar is required to start the OS after first startup. If that's what you're saying, then no, it's not true at all. Hell, I don't think I've seen a bit of Bing propaganda in anything besides Bing. There's no reference to it anywhere in the OS.

TOS. Wasn't that what Atari STs used? If it is, then yeah, it wins. LITTLE GREEN DESKTOP FOREVER!

Microsoft. The new boogyman for our modern internet enabled age. No. The decision to go mutliplatform and not license the source was all Id's decision. Yeah, MS has torn into a few studios in the past, like Bungie, but that's a rare case scenario, connected to them wanting to have a must have exclusive alongside their then newborn console. Beyond that, they usually leave their developers alone. Plus Rage is coming out for the PS3, and has pared down versions of the engine running on iOS devices. It's hardly a 360 exclusive.

The HUD looks and feels quite a bit like old Deus Ex. The only complaint I have about it is that you can't manually move items on your quickbar like you could in the original. Like if you have a rifle in slot 1, and you want to move it to slot 3, you have to take the gun from your inventory, and move it to slot 3 from there. Otherwise, everything is about the same as it was before. Up to and including having to play inventory tetris on occasion. And like NH said, there's a toggle to turn off the big yellow frob highlights. In fact, they're off by default if you play on the highest difficulty setting. Which I definitely recommend everyone should do if they play the game. I haven't seen any choppy animations, but I have seen the clipping bug show up on occasion. It's not a prevalent thing you'll see everywhere in the game, but there are a few places where it looks like a few walls and decals are z-fighting when seen from a distance. One place in particular, the Highland Park factory near the beginning, has an entire set of windows along a catwalk that'll band out until you get fairly close to it. Other than that, the game has been surprisingly smooth and bug free for me.

I'm gonna pop in here to say that the game is absolutely (and surprisingly) spectacular. It isn't dumbed down, it isn't consolized (YMMV on the 3rd person stuff though), and lives up to its namesake gloriously. I'd say more, but I've already raved about it enough over at TTLG. Of course not all of you will like it. There has been enough changed that might irk some people. But that doesn't change the fact that a company I wasn't exactly expecting to release an intelligent, difficult game that caters to PC sensibilities turned around and did exactly that. So, upsides. Load zones: Yeah. They're in there. But some the larger load zones in HR could easily fit 2 or 3 Thief 2 OMs inside of them. AI: Smart (most of the time), vicious, acute, relentless. Playing on the highest difficulty almost requires you to play as a stealthy opportunist, even if you're playing as a more action oriented character. There is no going up against 3 or more guys in a full frontal attack here. You will die, and die hard, if you try. Level design: I haven't seen a map that quite matches Versalife from the original DX yet, but everything I've seen thus far shows that it's very much a possibility later on in the game. It's open, allows for multiple ways to achieve your goals, and doesn't feel forced or linear. It feels like Deus Ex, in other words. And not a dumbed down, pale imitation. I'm talking Deus Ex. Though opinions will differ, it's at least impressed me enough to say that I now have high hopes for Eidos Montreal, and all their future games. It's definitely worth the money, if you ask me. If you're sitting on the fence about it, try out the old beta leak that came out a few months back. It's a little less polished, and the AI isn't quite as strong from my experiences with it, but it'll give you 10 hours worth of game to decide if you want it or not.

Hey, Nosslak. I have to say, you're a helluva modeler. Props on your skills. And also, what with imitation being the sincerest form of flattery and all, I thought your lamp post was so nice, I aped the design a bit for something I'm working on. Here. I expanded a bit on the arms and the lights themselves, but the post itself barely has any differences at all in comparison to your original. Since it's more or less your design, if you want it, I can upload it and post it here. In the meantime, keep up the good work.

Quick question. How would one go about doing seafoam? Just laying a flat water texture won't be enough. I want a nicely animated shore, but I have no idea how I'd go about doing that.

Yeah, after doing a bit more playing, I've come to a similar conclusion. It's not the end all be all texture mapping tool. It has trouble with low contrast textures, much like any normalmap generator, and produces spongy textures if your shades aren't working together just right. But on the plus side, it picks up details with incredible fidelity. I ran some more ornament textures through it, and saw it can pick up and sharpen little bots and bits better than even Crazybump. And yeah, it does lag out and go unresponsive on me for a few seconds when generating 2048x textures. That's a part of the occasional flakiness I mentioned in the first post. But still, it's definitely an amazing little tool that gels excellently with Crazybump if you own it, or works as a good replacement if you don't. It won't change my entire texture mapping workflow, but it'll supplement it quite nicely. Also, the grass stuff. I'm about to do a ton of foliage, so I'll keep that mind. Thanks

We'll all have an easier time with our new textures at the very least. It seems all you need is relative high contrast between your highs and lows. Not exacting like you usually have to do, but just enough to give njob something to work with. I'm impressed.

Well, it doesn't have a 3D preview. I'm running the heightmaps through Crazybump and displaying the results. It's a pretty simple program overall. Doesn't even let you scale your textures to fit the window, just displays them full size. But simplicity aside, you can't argue with those results. Here's another texture I ran through it. An old busted mossy wall texture I never got around to finishing. Once again, straight color diffuse, no pretreated heightmapping... Without diffuse With diffuse For a straight run through, that's better than it has any right to be. Very good voodoo magic indeed.

So while I was hanging around on the Polycount forum, doing my usual thing (begging desperately for help), I came across this interesting thread and found Njob. Long story short, it's a free, slightly occasionally flaky, normalmap generator. We've all seen a thousand before, and usually they're middling at best. But I figured I'd give it a roll since it came recommended from another thread. So I go on CGTextures, grab a rather clean ornament texture, and ran it through. No prep work here, this is from the straight photo off the website. These are the results: With photo diffuse Normalmap/heightmap only I mean that's off a damn color diffuse texture, and it came out as good, if not better than, most of my greyscale bumpmap prepped textures. It's so damn clean, too. No high frequency noise whatsoever. For another test, I took one of my old diffuse textures and ran it through. It already had all the shadows cleaned off it, but I wanted to see how it did. Not half bad. Not half bad at all. The only downside is the normals come out a little flat, but that's easily fixed in Crazybump. The heightmaps are great right out the gate. I don't know what voodoo magic this guy is using, but it is good voodoo magic.

I'll give you a basic rundown on how I think it works. Keep in mind this is all halfassed conjecture and semi-educated assumptions, so I could be making this far more complicated than it needs to be. To get to it, Tron over at D3W said you can use multiple masks to achieve more control in your megatexture baking. So with that now known, I think there are two ways I can get a usable texture out of Megagen. One. You design your landscape texture in layers. Like you take a single texture in your 3D paint program, tile it a bunch of times, add a black mask, and start splashing in detail on your mesh using a white brush. This is emulating the aforementioned node system, and you'll tell the generator via text file something like "This is mask 1, I want it to reference sandstone. This is mask 2, I want it to reference grass". Depending on how detailed you want to go, you'll end up with anywhere between 3 to 50 masks that you bake into the final product. Two. This is the one I'm hoping works, because it'll net me the most control. You design your maps in chunks like what I did above. When your finished modeling and painting your entire landscape, you'll want to take all your chunks, rescale and organize your UVs, then export a mask of each individual UV chunk by itself that references whatever corner of the UV you placed that particular chunk, then finally weld your mesh together. If you go by my scale, you'll end up with roughly 64 textures that each contain a single UV referencing one of your chunks. You bake that, and get the exact texture you painted. The downside to this is that it's slightly time consuming, require exacting precision with your scaling and placement, and probably take forever to bake and eat a metric fuckton of ram. The upside is you know exactly what you're gonna end up with. I'm gonna experiment with method two by making 3 more chunks and trying to render a 4096 megatexture. If it works, it'll be my preferred method. Ultimately though, it might be complicated to the point that only the most stalwart, brave, and skilled will want to attempt it. Now in a perfect world, I'd try to get some genius programmer type to look through the pre-exported megagen files from Quake Wars and see if he could whip up something from that based around megagen. After all, everything Carmack does, from textures all the way to map files, either reference or produce a readable text file. If it contained pertinent information, said genius programmer type could reverse engineer something that'd allow people to use the QW world builder to make maps for Doom 3. I have no idea who'd be willing to do that, so for the time being we're stuck to the abovementioned methods. And I'm still not sure how you edit around the finished product. Like how will I place my grass, my building mesh, my throwaway details, my light placement? Is D3Radiant secretly able to display megatexture files? I dunno. I still have alot of questions here that need to be answered.

A little update. I've been harassing the guys at Doom3World on how to do megatextures in D3. So far, it seems very possible, and might actually be very handy once I figure out the ins and outs of the thing. The only downside is I don't have the amount of control I'd like. I can't just go in and paint stuff. I have to make textures and set them up according to slope and height. On another note, I figured I'd try to see how making a landscape out of multiple meshes with a single texture would turn out. This approach might actually end up to be pretty feasible if I do it properly. Right now, I'm playing around seeing what I can do and get some good practice in, and came up with this. The texture is a little big at 2048x, but since I don't want to add a normalmaps or a specular, I could easily get away quite a few DXT compressed textures that large and have it barely take up any memory. With all the detail I'm planning on adding, you probably wouldn't notice that they're not normalmapped. And the mesh? Just 242 tris. I could make an entire cliffside and end up with less geometry than that stupid lamp I made a little while back. Course I'd rather have access to fully paintable megatextures, but we'll see what happens. Just got back from Doom3World. Detailed paintable megatextures are a go.

Now that I've done a little bit of reading, I believe I'm starting to understand how this works. See, Megatextures, at least as they are in Quake Wars, are organized by nodes before the final bake. For example, you start out with a base texture that covers all your geometry, like sand for instance. That's node 1. If you want some grass in there, that's node 2. You can then go and start painting, dabbing, transitioning, ect. Want some rock? Node 3. It goes on and on, and I think you can have as many nodes as you want. Now before you start painting, you have a few modifiers you can play with. Like where one texture ends and the other begins is marked by a height, the smoothness of the line of demarcation between textures is a ramp, where textures go based on steepness is slope, and the smoothness of transition is blend. All this neat stuff, nodes and all is grouped under what's referred to in engine as the surface tree. Now after all is said and done, the end result of all this rather easy to understand technojargon is you're basically painting stuff, adding more textures to paint on more stuff, and throwing around a few modifiers to help you out a bit. In short, it's alot like the system used to paint terrain in Oblivion or NWN2, cept you have no limits on anything, and the end result is baked into one giant contiguous texture. It gets a little more complicated in Doom 3. There aren't any tutorials anyway, so I have to take information as I get it. But it looks like you're doing all of this via text, with no real control over what goes where. This is what I've gleamed off the readme, and a few files inside the zip. It doesn't seem too terribly promising. I'm hoping you can make an uncompressed megatex in Quake Wars and simply throw it over into Megagen to be ported into Doom 3. If you can't, it might just be better to fall back on the tried and true methods. For now, I think my best bet is to post a message on Doom3World and see what answers I get. Wish me luck. edit: figures I figure out something new right after posting this. It looks like you can export a small version of the megatexture, edit it somehow in photoshop, then port it back in to get then full res treatment. That'll help out tremendously, though I'd prefer to be able to play with it on a mesh. ...maybe I can. Since I'm building the terrain off a heightmap built in a 3D program. I could take the original model, UV it, then overlay a slightly larger version of the exported mini megatex (like 4096x) to paint on detail. It's starting to make a little more sense now. But I think if people want to do their own megatextures inside of TDM, they'll have to get at least fairly decent at using Blender or something similar.

Well there we go. Now I just have to figure out how to apply it to a mesh, reference the mesh to the megatexture, and hell...make the megatexture itself. Based on the little I've read, it sounds like you're slapping together a bunch of 2048x textures and using the ReactorEngine EXE inside the zip to produce a combined massive 16k*16k res texture. I'll need to read up on it some more, but so far, this is damn promising. edit: the readme file isn't exactly too helpful here. It tells you how to extract and convert a file to a megatexture, but not from what or where. And unfortunately, the original creator's website is down. Looks like I've got alot of trial and error fun ahead of me.

Looks pretty cool. I'll try the demo out and see how she does. I've also been using Modo's nifty fur features to make the grass textures. It's a helluva lot easier than going in and painting out individual blades of grass in Photoshop, but I haven't been able to get a nice, realistic set of grass out of it yet. Man, if I had access to Megatextures, I wouldn't be having this discussion. I'd be out doing my thing with a goofy grin on my face. Thing is, unless something's changed I wasn't aware of, the version in Doom 3 was just a testbed for the technology, and didn't get properly integrated into the engine until Quake Wars.

Good deal. The tiling_1d thing was the only bit that confused me, so I went with what it sounded like I should do on the wiki (also I would've loved to check out the .mtr files inside of TDM for reference, but the text formatting was screwed up on my comp). I'll keep all this stuff in mind for the next set of textures I whip up.

I'm going to have far more than just 50 alpha mapped textures in there. Probably more along the lines of 300 or so at least, since I'm going for fairly thick grass, roots, ivy growing on the side of my building, and other various cool looking details. I've got a couple options for the grass. I could probably clump huge amounts in a single model so it doesn't eat up the entity count. I could also try and do billboard grass, which will only take up 2 tris per clump, but might look weird with the grass always orienting itself towards your view. But no matter how I do it, I'm gonna have alot of alpha maps in a single scene. Right now, I think the best thing I can do is follow your advice and try it out. If it works, then it'll be awesome, if not...then I'll at least have some new assets to donate to TDM.

My plan is to have maybe roughly a half acre of traversable land, basically the area surrounding my building, with the rest of the landscape (moors, in case you're wondering) stretching off in the distance. It only has to be sharp and detailed in the immediate area, with the rest of the area getting more and more generalized the farther out you go. If it get too blurry, I could just shrink down the landscape mesh a bit and fog off the distance. That'd still look impressive, and be easier on the resources. Right now I'm trying to find the most efficient way to do this. Vertex painting is the best from a texture performance standpoint, but having to split apart my mesh for each transition will end up with the map having alot of excess vertice lying around. Decal patches would work for some things, but not for the entire map. I gotta find that nice balance that can net me the best looks without sacrificing much performance. edit: just thought of another question. How expensive performancewise are alot of alpha mapped textures crammed into a single scene? I've already got a few experimental tufts of grass modeled out. They're just 4 tris each. But I'm worried having a whole bunch in a single scene will hurt performance.