Renzatic

Hmm, might take a little forward thinking, but that shouldn't be too hard to pull off. But for simplicity sake, what about using a 4096x texture? No normalmap or anything, just the diffuse by itself. It'll end up being huge, of course. But with it just being a single texture, it shouldn't be too much of a drain on performance. Think it's feasible?

TDM Ready Textures, with the high res textures separated under _hires for your convenience. I doublechecked most everything, but since this is my virgin go at the new texture structure, I'm sure it'd be in your best interest to doublecheck everything yourself. edit: Hey, I just found an error! In the tdm_nature_dirt mtr file, take the _1d off the diffuse. Everything else checks out.

Hmm...don't think I'm quite following you. The way it sounds, you broke up the mesh so you'd have, say, grass to dirt on A-B, then dirt to rock, on B-C. That right?

Okay, I think I just about got it. Thanks. I've already gone through most of the texture packs inside TDM, checking for any repeats or any naming conflicts. So far, everything looks good. You already had one texture from the catacombs set in there, so I'll go ahead and add the rest. Altogether, you have about 12 textures coming your way, the base textures from my hallway, and all the textures from the aforementioned catacombs (except for the hanging moss, once again, that's one of Method's). Right now they're sorted and tidied up in their appropriate folders. All I have left is writing the material files, then I'll post it all up here for you all to doublecheck. edit: another question. Do you all want me to pack them so that you have one .pk4 per material like you have it in the mod, or just one big .pk4?

Simple question. I want to make a terrain, and I want to make it fancy. To achieve that without butchering texture resolution by attempting to UV it direction, I figured I'd do some vertex painting. Even came across a nice tutorial on how to achieve it. I've got one question, though. Can I use more than 2 textures per terrain? That might work well for caves, but I want rocks, and dirt, and mud, and mindblowing transitionary textures, and all that good stuff. Something that's hard to do with just two textures. So can it be done, or do I have to break a terrain apart into dozens of tiny chunks to get the detail in and still maintain resolution on the UV?

Depends on how ornate you want to go. If you want to do everything inside of Dark Radiant, cylindrical patches for your bannisters and a vertex edited brush or two for your handrails would be a good way to go.

I called them as such because of this entry on the wiki: "Object Type descriptor first (mostly for very specific-use textures) - it's a window, a door, a chest..." ...which seemed to make perfect sense until I got to the folder structuring and saw there were no entries for walls, floors, ect. From the way things look like they're set up, I should just nix it entirely and start with wood_ or plaster_, right? tiling_1d marks a texture that only tiles in one direction, right? And the _sh stands for Swamp House, which is my little theme I'm building all my textures and models around. I'll probably just end up taking it out altogether and organize everything along with the rest of the TDM textures. No, not at all. If they worked like that, I wouldn't have bothered bringing it up. Long story short, if they're set up properly, it'd seem like you're playing through a completely seamless map instead of one that's been partitioned. My only concern was sound propagation, and now that you've mentioned it, wondering if the AI would cross the threshold. But according to Tels, the engine should see them as regular visportals, so this shouldn't be a problem. I'm gonna give it a try and see how it works. I still think they're worth experimenting with.

The geometry of the building itself is where using a Prey style portal would have an advantage over regular portals. Think of a cube brush with a door frame prefab placed flush against the face vs. splitting the cube to make geometry for the doorway, the interior, ect. Each polygon you save can be put to good use elsewhere. To get more indepth, think of designing a super detailed building in Lightwave. Now designing it as a block, with your only concern being the outside details allows for more freedom in alot of different ways. First off, you can use your geometry more efficiently when you're not worried about what's on the other side of a wall. Secondly, you can simply design a bunch of different buildings in LW, and drop a ton in a row to make a city street. You don't have to worry about going step by step for each building you plan on being traversable. And the interiors? The exact same case as the exteriors. You have much more play with your geometry, and you don't have to worry about making cuts and changes that could effect your exterior geometry in unforseen ways. It allows for more much give, cuts down on the variables, should be a bit easier to portalize, and allows you to design your maps that much more quickly. Doesn't matter if you're using BSP or exported geometry. If it's done right, you'll end up with cleaner, more detailed maps. Granted, there are probably some negatives I'm not seeing here, and it obviously wouldn't work in all situations. But still, there are advantages to it that are worth looking into in my opinion. edit: another plus I just thought of. It could allow you to change portions of your map far more easily than it otherwise would. Want to add another room to your map, or tweak your street just a little bit? Simply because you're dealing with wholes, instead of small interlocking pieces, you have less geometry to deal with, less divisions and potential texture alignment issues...in short, it'd be comparative cake to do.

On another note altogether, I've had this idea on how to make mapping a little easier and potentially allow for alot more detail. I think I might've mentioned it way back in the day, but no one really knew back then. Things might be different now, so I'll try to toss it out again and see what answer I get. I'm sure you all remember that you can do portals in Doom 3 much like the portals in Prey. Well, I had this idea where basically you can separate interiors and exteriors by using this instead of designing your buildings completely. In my mind, it'd be easier to work out, easier to portalize, and potentially let you get a bit more crazy with the geometry. You could make buildings with highly ornate facades that are really nothing more than blocks with static meshes hanging off them, yet still look like they're perfectly detailed inside and out. If it's done well, your average player wouldn't be able to tell that the room he's looking in at from the street is actually halfway across the map. The only downside I can think of would be sound propagation. Beyond that, this could allow for far more detailed streets and exteriors, done more quickly, and all without sacrificing much on the performance front. What do you think? Good idea...or not?

One quick question on the naming convention. We'll use my plaster wall for an example here. It's plaster, rotting, tiles in one direction, and is a beigeish brown (or more of an off mocha light caramel if you want to get fancy). So if I'm following the naming scheme correctly, the diffuse should be called wall_sh_plaster_rot_brown_001_tiling_1d.DDS. Sound about right? And my previous textures that started this thread are already packed and sorted, right? If not, it's no problem adding them to the mix. edit: the current state of things. I left all the door and window textures out, since they were just placeholders til I got their models done (though I should go ahead and add the square window back in).

Alright. I can do that. I'll have them ready by this weekend. Also, should I include the high res in a separate folder, or just the shrunk-down TDM ready textures by themselves?

Good point. I've probably deleted all the previous pics to make room for other stuff since. Cept for the door, you've all already seen these before, but here goes... The Hallway (map included in the zip file) The Table (in Modo) The New Door This didn't fit in well with the rest of my theme, but it still might be useful to someone somewhere. Cept for being overly large, I know the textures are probably alright. It's the models I'm most worried about, since I'm still a little green at doing ingame stuff. I'll see about getting the textures ingame myself. It's just a few folders and a material file after all. Wouldn't take me more than half an hour. Just one question, since I'm designing this as a theme, I'd like to keep them grouped together as such. Could I add them in under their own folder, or mix them in with the rest of the TDM textures?

Bonus texture time: A Square Door I was cleaning out the project files, getting rid of stuff that didn't quite pan out. This one might actually be of use to someone, so I figured I'd upload it for everyone to try out. Also, what about some feedback? Now that you've all got a goodly chunk of my stuff, you got any criticisms or suggestions to throw my way?

Yeah, it's very possible. Even with all these various companies claiming that their upgrades are painless and issue free, I'd never install an OS without doing a complete wipe first and going in fresh.

I've got 7 installed on my parent's little 1.6 Ghz Pentium Dual Core with 2 gig of ram and an onboard Intel graphics card laptop. It's a computer roughly equivalent to yours, and absolutely hauls...even after 6 months of regular Mom-Use. You have to have something amazingly twisted up in your computer to get 7 to go that slow. Check your performance tab under the Task Manager and see if something (probably a virus) is taking up all your CPU cycles or eating all your ram. If you find something suspicious, go google it and see if you can find a fix-it solution.

see the noShadows and nonSolid modifiers? Just add twoSided right underneath them.

I would recommend CS3 over CS2. There are a few very handy options in it you'll find yourself using quite a bit that are lacking in the previous revs. And avoid CS4 like the damn plague.

I've never used Elements before, but the way it's described on that help site doesn't sound like the normal process. If anything, it sounds like it's loading a second B&W image, and using it as a mask. See if you have a channels tab buried somewhere in there. When you open it up, you'll see RGB, Red, Green, and Blue channels. What you want to do is make a new channel, which is always Alpha 1, and paste your black and white image into that (FYI white being totally opaque, black being completely transparent, and shades of grey being differing levels of transparency). Once you do that, hit the RGB channel and fill it in total black. Afterwards, click-select all the channels, and the end result will look something like this... Alpha Texture. With the red being the see-thru bit, and the black being totally opaque. This is a good way to preview what your texture will look like ingame. Save the result as a 32-bit TGA, and do your thing from there to get it in TDM. Now if worse comes to worst, you might have to get a trial version of PS or Gimp to do this. Elements, as far as I know, is aimed more at adjusting colors in photos, and doesn't normally deal with the deep level texturing stuff. edit: here. The finished alpha texture. Test it out and see how it works.

MS Luv ITT. Readyboost is more about using your flash drive in lieu of your HDD for the swap file. It'll basically speed up boot-up times as much as installing a 2nd HDD specifically for your swap file. In other words, it really won't, but it'll help snapify your tasks inside of Windows by a goodly bit. Specially if you're on a RAM limited machine. Which leads me to my next bit...why the hell are you using Vista on a 512 meg machine? Vista doesn't perform well on anything with less than 2 gig. Even 7, which is much more efficient with the resources, doesn't like having anything below a gig. Upgrade your ram, or install Xubuntu or something. Cuz no matter what you do with Readyboost, or how much you fiddle around with your swap file, you won't get good Vista performance out of your comp as is.

Sounds like it doesn't have a proper alpha. Did you place the inverted texture in the alpha channel? Did you remember to save it as a 32-bit TGA? Also, what editor are you using? Photoshop or GIMP?

Exactly what it sounds like. Your trees are just silhouettes, no color. You can drown the color channels in all black to keep from getting white bleeding in on the edges of the alpha. The inverted version of your texture above placed in the alpha channel with the rest being all black will achieve the exact look you're trying to go for without any nasty artifacts showing up. Your material file should look something like this... textures/blah/tree_drop { qer_editorimage textures/blah/tree_drop.tga noShadows nonSolid { blend diffuseMap map textures/blah/tree_drop.tga alphaTest 0.5 } } edit: though not necessary for distant objects, you can also add twoSided if you want the texture to appear on both sides of a polygon.

Eh, you don't have go through all that. I'll get it all together myself at some point, fixed up, resized, and everything. For now, just consider it a collection of halfway decent stuff you can cull from and tweak for your own maps. Oh, and I forgot to add one thing: the much lauded and frequently spoken of table.

Update! Here you go: http://www.sendspace.com/file/2rrkaz FYI, I realized I forgot to take red_ivy out of the archive. That's actually a texture from one of Method's D3 maps I aped so I could experiment with alpha mask materials. I don't think accidentally including it will be a problem since this shouldn't spread beyond the forum here. But if you want to send the stuff off to friends and family, remove that one texture before you do. And yes, things are kinda sloppy and there are alot of improvements that need to be made here, which I intend on doing when I finally get back around to it. For now though, it's great for archiving and playing around with. After all, there's no reason for me to just sit on them while I'm off doing other things.

Yup, sure is. Though without a shadow or collision model, unfortunately. Right now, I've put things on hold while I've dealt with some nasty problems that have arisen in my life recently (nothing too horrible, but it hasn't been fun in the least). The good news i it looks like I'll be getting some more time here soon, and I'll probably pick up my map where I last left off. In the meantime, I'll try to upload the textures and models I've (mostly) finished for people to play with. I'm gonna see if I can share a link via Dropbox. If I can't, I can send the 100 meg Doom 3 ready files to someone who can host it for me. Or if you really want to go extreme, the 3.5 gig of original PSD files and multiple models if anyone wants them for some strange reason.

So I go read up on a few tutorials, redo the entire UV from scratch (again) for efficiency, and end up with the new table. Much, much better in my opinion. This one I didn't have to cheat much in Photoshop, it's all baked from the HP top to bottom. AO and everything. I tell you all, I didn't expect to spend nearly this long on this damn table. Oh well, at least I'm learning something. HALLELUJAH! It is done. And this time I mean DONE! The diffuse looks great ingame this go round, and the normalmap is far, far better. I even managed to get it down to 850 tris. Beyond some cosmetic work on the diff and normal, I am closing the book on this one. Tels: I've got your new cage light started. I didn't go into it with a plan though, so it's kind turning out a little...funky. Like it's too wild fantasy looking. I'll let you be the final judge of it.