Renzatic

I'm using Windows 7 now, and I haven't had any problems with any of my various programs running alongside Aero except for D3Edit and DarkRadiant. It wouldn't be so bad if all I had to do was fire up a basic Windows theme, but anytime I disable Aero, all my OpenGL programs slow down to a stuttery crawl. Is there anything I can do to speed up DR in Basic or get it running with Aero enabled, or am I stuck with bad performance issues? I could dual boot XP or Linux if it came down to it, but I don't want to do that unless I have absolutely no other options.

Getting a model into Doom 3 if that's what you mean. I tried it a few times then went off on another tangent. There was some stuff I needed to learn before I'd even consider it worthwhile to get a model ingame. What you're looking at there is actually 2 models. 3 if you count the doorknob which isn't in the shot. Altogether, it's about 2100 tris. Considerably higher than what I was aiming for, but I had to add alot of geometry to get all my curves and edges working together with the normalmap without looking sloppy. I'll probably upload it alongside a bunch of other things I'm working on when I'm finished. Kinda get a basic theme going on. Right now, I want to redo the diffuse to make a closer fit with the new floor I've done. After that, I'll finish up my arch I've started on, my new wall texture currently in progress, and probably a baseboard and trim I've yet to fire up depending on how much time has passed. When I get all that, I'll be posting here and see if you all want it or not.

ABOUT TIME, HUH? It only too me...what...like 7 months to finally get around to it? It's kinda simple. I'm not too terribly pleased with it, despite all the talking over it I did on the T3 forums. But it's a good first step. I learned a ton about a ton, so it's all good.

Yorick? Screw Yorick! Alas, he made bad pie.

I wouldn't say that. Remember the Atlantis levels in Anniversary, specifically that one bit in the tower? The spastic mind-of-its-own camera absolutely killed that section of the game. If I had to make a choice between playing through that one bit again, or pulling my fingernails out with plyers...I'd go with the fingernails and plyers. That said, I played the Underworld demo recently and loved it. The camera is a little iffy, but isn't so bad it ruins the game. I'll be grabbing me a copy soon enough. Probably get her close to a wall and rotate the camera around so its facing her. I never noticed that myself, but it's a cool little touch.

Ahh, gotcha. My bad. If you do anything cool with my textures, post a screenie or two here. I like seeing what people do with my stuff.

I don't mess with DDS textures, and they're all tested and shot in D3. I do convert them from TGAs to PNG files before loading them up to the site, but that's supposedly a lossless coversion, and shouldn't be giving you any troubles. Right now I can't see the attachments, so I'll have to wait til I get home to see what they're doing. In the meantime, if you want the original TGAs, just ask and I'll find a way to send them.

Quick question. I want to make a muddy pool of water, smooth brown, somewhat still, cloudy enough so that it only gives muddy reflections of light sources with only a hint of the surrounding area. Something kinda like this, but with far less ripples. I'm thinking I might need to track down a fresnel shader to get it to look right. But I'm also thinking there might be a simpler way to do it using basic material keys. Since it's been a long time since I got deep into D3 materials, anyone have any suggestions to get me rolling on this? Also, I've got a couple more textures up on the Master Builder Store if anyone wants them.

I got quite a bit more than this done, probably a little over halfway on the geometry by this point, but I decided to give it a go earlier to see how it'd turn out. I kinda like it. I've still gotta run it through Zbrush to rough up the shape of the rocks a bit. Right now they're a little too clean and well defined. But after that, I think it'll end up looking fairly decent. Still, it's alot of work for a single texture. I wish I knew how to control gradients better, so I could do all this in PS in about a quarter of the time.

This is, by far, the most complicated model/texture I've ever attempted. Figured it was time I moved onto something beyond basic squarish geometry. I plan on doing two versions, one with and without vines. Even though I'm basing the shapes off another texture I whipped together, I'm not gonna be using it for the final diffuse. I'm doing it all from scratch, from the basic shape here, to the roughing up in Zbrush, to painting it in Photoshop/Modo. I want it all to be mine. Lets see if I have enough skill to make it look natural and realistic. Next up, I think I'm gonna take the big plunge and start doing organic stuff. Also, I got a Wacom tablet. A Bamboo Fun to be exact. I love it. I drew that. It's my art.

I think they just have that in there to sound extra fancy and technical. I've ran both 16 and 32 bit textures through the normalmapper, and I think the only way I'd notice a difference is if I zoom up the texture 1000x and pressed my face against the monitor. Yup, that's it. I would've linked to it myself, but CGTextures likes to hide their URLs.

Hell, it's easy once you figure out the basic rhyme and reason of it all. Read up on that tutorial I mentioned (www.cgtextures.com, then the tutorials tab for reference), it'll help you get started down the road to awesome normalmaps. Also, I did a little write up on how I made that one wall I parallax mapped over on the T3 forums. It's alot more time consuming than the usual method, and not quite as precise, but it can make for some decent normalmaps.

He's a little bit better at it, but I think his technique is about similar to mine. I've taken some of his diffusemaps and ran it through my little process, and the resulting normal was close to what he made. It's basically a mixture of desaturating your diffuse, screwing with the levels, tweaking your lights and darks, then doubling up, overlaying, blurring, and adding different textures to your normalmap. They've got a good tutorial on the normalmapping process over at CGTextures. Crazybump helps with the process, but it can be done easily just using the Nvidia PS plugin or Gimp

On one hand, good job so far. On the other hand, that's one lumpy fucking horse. Edit: Out of curiosity, how easy is Blender to get into if you're coming from a Lightwave/Modo background? I've always been interested in the program (it's free and all), but looking at shots of that overcomplicated UI brings back bad Max memories and makes me shy away. Despite that, is it fairly user friendly?

Try....www.masterbuilderstore.com. If you read my post over at TTLG, all you had to do was go to the first page of that thread, and you would've found it.

I know, and it is. It's the reason why I haven't committed the grey one to the public at large. But for those of you wanting the texture, it's finished and up on the Master Builder Store. Next up: MESHES!

If you're desperate for doors, I've got a pretty good one lingering on my harddrive I could donate. I never uploaded it because it's not exactly a regularly shaped door, and it'd be difficult to do anything with it using regular brushes. Maybe now that I'm starting to do meshes, I can give it another lease on life. Here's a pic if you're interested. I also threw my new door in alongside it to show its normalmap off a bit better.

Damn, Cog. I'm too lazy to reply to all that. Instead, I'll just say thanks for the help and post up a pretty picture for everyone to stare at. Doors & Dirt & Rocks The textures are up on Judith's texture site if anyone wants to grab them. If you want the original .tga's, I'll upload them to rapidshare and post a link As far as the door texture is concerned, I realized my diffuse wasn't quite working out the way I intended (considering it was supposed to be metal instead of wood and all). So I dumped the old one, and redid the base door texture from scratch. The results are what you see above. It's a good thing, really. I thought the old one was a bit too bland and oversaturated. And no, I still have yet to get a model ingame. I'm doing that tomorrow. No excuses.

No round knobs? How's this then? Or hell, you can look at it up close and personal. I could easily convert it into a simple texture. That's what I originally intended on doing, and why it's somewhat proportional in the UV map (despite the groves between the door plating, which can be easily fixed both in the editor and in PS). But as usual, I ended up goofing around, and did more than I needed to. But even most of it can be baked into a normal. Don't know if I'm quite catching what you're saying, but there's no reason why you can't just export an EPS of an arched door UV texture and do the exact same thing with a differently shaped mesh. Anyway, I gotta head. Feel free to post pictures in my thread. Won't hurt my feelings in the least. Be liberal with the critiques on the mesh. And lastly, I'll be doing the low poly mesh and texture later this week.

I'll go ahead and upload everything tomorrow for everyone to goof around with and critique, though eventually I'll to do the low poly myself whenever I get a chance. Also, I made a hinge! Helluva bit of work for something people'll barely even notice. I need to start doing big crap.

Once again, I'm not dead. I'm working two jobs at the moment, which means I don't have time to do much anything else. Gotta feed my ten illegitimate kids and all that. But to show I'm still here, and that I've been making progress slowly and surely, I'll post a quick screenshot of a door I've been working on. My second job has me sitting around doing alot of nothing for the most part, so I finally got around to playing some Ultima Underworld. It inspired me to make this particular grungy door. The base itself is a texture rendered from a high poly source and applied to a single n-gon, the knob (shown here) is still in the high poly phase. Maybe one day I'll get it ingame...something I have yet to do. Also, I think it might be time to move away from all these simple objects and try something a little more complicated. Texturing takes the largest part of my time, but the models themselves don't even take me more than an hour to do.

From 4000 polys to 202 without any real noticeable drop in quality. Course it's still a fairly simple mesh geometrywise. I still Gotta add cracks, bumps, a diffuse, clean up a couple of issues, and all that good stuff. Still, this one is off to a far better start than the shutter.

To show I'm not totally dead here: arches. Haven't had much time here as of late. Hell, I still haven't managed to get my shutter into Doom 3 properly yet. But I'm still here, working in my spare time.

I'm using Modo. Basically Lightwave, but slicked up for the 21st century. I just got through looking at the models and material files that came along with Thiefs Den. It looks like there needs to be a seperate material for every stage of the texture. I just had one with all three textures packed in underneath it, and the material name pointed towards the folder, not the texture itself. I think that might've been my problem right there. I'm still not sure how I add the collision and shadow meshes, though. I didn't see anything in the TD folders that pointed towards any extra meshes, and there aren't any extra layers on the model with them in there. How do you do that?

Collision sounds simple enough, but I'm still a bit confused on what the shadow mesh does. From the sound of it, it's just a block with a material applied to it that acts, I assume, as a projector of sorts. I'll look up all this stuff on the wiki tomorrow, but I still could use some help on getting it all in the mod. Everything I've read makes this about as clear as mud, and Modo, with it's weird material editor, isn't making the issue any easier on me. Edit: I wasn't quite satisfied with one thing, so I went and added 3 extra shutters to round things out and make it look better. Current poly count now sits at 628. Too high?