Outlaw

First off I'm back. I've been over-medicated the last month or so that has caused me to be unable to work on texturing at all, and now I have forgotten most of everything I had learned about texturing. For those that don't remember me, you can check out this post here http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=1996 On that note I would like to say that I am having my medications brought down to the FDA guidlines. When this happens I think i'm going to work on coding for the doom 3 engine instead of texturing. Now that I have gotten that out of the way, I would like to wish you all the best of luck on your project. I hope that your deal with being able to use hundreds of new textures goes well. Last thing I want to say is, thank you, for everybody who has helped and complimented me on my brick texture, and that I look forward to using your tools in the future. Outlaw

Hi AtariThief. First off your textures look good, and I really like the reflection you added to one of the textures. They might look even better if you use a photoshop filter. Its called unsharp mask, and you can find it under filter->sharpen->unsharp mask. Contrary to what you might think this filter does, it actually will sharpen up the textures. For example in your first and second pic that you posted, I noticed that they look kind of pixelated. I know they are old textures, but if you use the unsharp mask on those textures the seashells will probably sharpen up a bit. If you do use the unsharp mask let me know how it turned out, or even better post some screens of the before and after shots. Keep up the good work.

Thanks for the kind remark Fingernail. That was the first texture that I applied a proper normalmap too. I used the heightmap template method to create the normalmap. There is still some tweaking I need to do like make it tile a little more seamless and play around with the normalmap some more. Also I got rid of the specular heighlights because it made the texture lose a lot of detail. I think that making specular heighlights is actually harder to do than making a nice normalmap, either that or maybe I added to much specularity when I was playing around with the texture last night. What settings should I use for the normalmap plugin for photoshop? I'm currently just using the default settings and playing around with the scale setting under the heightmap generation. I'm also just pluging in numbers till I find the right one that I like for the scale in the normalmap filter. Is there a, right way, of putting in numbers for the scale, or a general range of numbers to use? Any help on this would be much appreciated. Edit: Updated my album again this time showing off a better tiling brick texture with a new heightmap, localmap, diffusemap, and a house I made awhile ago. As always I love to hear constructive criticism about what you like about it, what you don't like about it, and how I can make the texture better. Here's the link again http://photobucket.com/albums/y182/Outlaw706/

Thanks again for answering my question BlackThief. For those that don't know I've been talking to BlackThief through PM about general questions about the mod team as well as questions about texturing, and he has always answered my questions in a timely fashion. I think I went and talked about my disease to much and didn't quite leave enough information about me and my passion of playing the thief series (even the third one too), so I'll leave more information now. I started off the thief series with the second one, which I got a hold of the demo when it first came out. I still remember getting yelled at because I had spent all night, and some in the morning, downloading the 100-130MB file on a modem. I also probably still have an old pc gamer magazine that has an advertisement for thief 2 with the, new at the time, geforce 2 video card. I now own all three thief games and they are still fun to play. As for me, when I'm not swallowing pills I edit doom 3, spend less than half my social security money on computer hardware, video training and books on various computer subjects, and I read technology news on the internet. As for editing doom 3 I've probably read through almost every single tutorial on doom3world that exists except on how to implement models into doom 3 and I also must have missed how to make a proper normalmap for texturing. Back to the social security income, I am elegible for it because according to the United States Government I am an incappacitated child, even though I am getting close to being 22 years old. I first heard about you guys over at ttlg when I was trying to figure out why I was getting a texture memory error for thief 2. I didn't register right away because I didn't think I could be much help but I'd thought I would go ahead and give it a try. Well thats all I can think about posting right now. If you guys have any questions for me please feel free to ask me. EDIT: Updated my album with new pics of my localmap, heightmap, and ingame shot. http://photobucket.com/albums/y182/Outlaw706/

Sparhawk I'm sorry to hear that somebody you lived with who may have been schizophrenic became dangerous at times. I hate to hear bad things about people who have schizophrenia. I know when I was at my worst which was just around two years ago I would become angry and dangerous, not to other people but to myself. For example when a doctor got my parents to hospitalize me, I was actually refused one of my medications that I use to take to help calm me down. So instead of punching the lady I went into the room they gave me and punched the window which at that time I didn't know was security glass, which doesn't shatter if you've never had the chance to punch it. It didn't hurt me, but if it would have turned out to have been a real window I could have gotten glass stuck in my knuckles and that would have hurt most likely. Also you don't have to worry about me NOT taking my medicine. To me, its not an issue. Anyways 1% of the population of the world suffers from schizophrenia. Most of the ones that have been diagnosed are probably locked up somewhere which is probably the minority of the world population of people who actually have schizophrenia. I know now that I have been a schizophrenic all my life and never knew it until I was 18 and was diagnosed. Now onto a texture question. Should I be creating .tga or .dds texture files or both? I was reading a little bit over on doom3world that when you use either .tga or .dds files, one or the other makes loading times take longer, but is there a quality difference? Any help on this would be appreciated.

Thanks for posting a reply to my long post Macsen and Renzatic. Also thanks Macsen for the good laugh about how my brick texture turned out to look like chocolate bricks which I do mean. Also thanks Renzatic for the kind remarks about eventually being good at making textures. I've only recently just gotten photoshop, and doom 3 is the first game I've ever even tried to make a texture for. I don't believe I'll ever be as good a texture artist as most people can be because one thing I lack is creativity. This is mostly caused by having schizophrenia. In schizophrenics there is a lack of certain kinds of creativity in my brain. I'll try to explain it as easily as possible because thats something I do not lack. Basically if you can imagine that the nerves in your brain are like a busy street with all the cars (information) traveling at high speeds. Also in your brain there are bridges and in schizophrenics these bridges are often pointing upwards not allowing any cars to pass. So you can see that the information is there its just not being allowed to pass because the bridges are pointing upwards. So the creative bridges in schizophrenics are usually pointing upwards and not allowing the information to go to that part of the brain or out of it. But its not like that throughout the entire creative parts of the brain because I can creatively come up with ways of hurting/killing people pretty easily. This is NOT something I'm proud of but I have to live with. Last I know most of you are old enough to understand the contents of some or most of my posts related to my mental illness. Just for the record I have never acted on any of the thoughts in my head and that I'm actually a really nice and polite guy. If for any reason any of my posts become disturbing to anybody please let me know and I'll refrain from talking about the parts that are disturbing. Thanks again for all the people who have looked at my post and to Macsen, Renzatic, and anybody else who decides to post a reply. EDIT: It took me about 25 minutes to write this last post so I didn't get to see your post sparhawk. Thanks for replying and I'll keep practicing with the texturing.

Note: If you do not want to read the whole thing then skip down to the last paragraph for a summary. First off I want to tell you how impressive your work as a team is. What can I say other than everything I've seen so far looks very professional and I congratulate your team's hard work and dedication. I cannot wait to be able to create my own missions with your tools and look forward to your campaign. Now on to me. My name is Jon and I live on base at WPAFB (Wright Patterson Air Force Base), OH. I am not in the military but my dad is. I currently do not have a job or go to school because I'm a paranoid schizophrenic. For those not knowing what my illness is let me explain a little. I'm paranoid because I do not trust anyone, and I always think something bad is going to happen to me or to other people. I'm a schizophrenic because I have basic visual hallucinations, and extreme auditory hallucinations. I see flashes of lights everywhere I look and I hear voices. For those wondering if I have a split personality, I do not. Schizophrenia does not mean split personality but rather split mind. Most of my thoughts that I have are dillusional. I currently see a psychiatrist once a week, and between my medication and supplements I take over 80 pills a day. If anybody is interested in exactly which medicines I take and the milligrams I will be glad to post them. I hope that last paragraph wasn't to long to read. As to what I spend my time doing, I edit games and buy either computer hardware or training videos for different applications and subjects with what little money I get from the United States Government which is not a whole lot after buying half of my supplements every month. I hope I didn't sound ungrateful to the United States Government in that last sentence, its just that I've seen more military doctors in a span of a month then most people seen in a lifetime, and only one doctor wanted to take my case. Now I need honest criticism on two textures that I've created. Please note that they are WIP. Here's the link http://photobucket.com/albums/y182/Outlaw706/ I also put up in jpeg form the diffuse, local, specular (only on the brick texture) and an ingame shot of both textures. I'm still learning about how to create proper height templates and making a normal map off of that. The local maps were created by using the 'desaturate' command in photoshop and then running the nvidia normal map plug-in filter for these textures. When I learn more about height templates I'll apply them to these two textures and every other texture I make. I know this was a long post so I'll summarize it up right here. Your team's work is most impressive and I can't wait for the tools and the campaign. I have several mental illnesses some of them I'm not going to post, so that gives me a lot of time to dedicate myself to a project, and I would love to help out The Dark Mod project in any way I can. Last thing don't forget to leave constructive criticism on the two textures I created. Thanks for reading especially if you got throught the whole post.

I'm not so sure this will help, but it might help you in the future. There's a program called CCleaner. Its a free program that can clear out all of your temp files, history files, and cookies all very quickly. I run it once a week and I've gotten it to clear out 280 something MBs of spyware and other crap that you get when using the internet. It also comes with a registry cleaner which will tell you when there is something wrong with an entry in the registry and can actually fix the problems. For example it can tell you if there is an activeX problem in the registry or tell you if you had something left over from some program you uninstalled. Again its very quick and even allows you to make a backup of your registry. Now how does this help you? Well if it is a spyware/malware problem than this will most likely clear up about 90% of your problems with spyware/malware. I've run this program on 6 different computers and I have not had one problem with clearing out the registry or other internet files. Hope this helps. Jon