Atheran

Oooh boy. It's been a good few years I haven't checked these forums. Good job @Dragofer. Those assets were bad and honestly, big part of the reason I stopped helping around here. My workflow was atrocious due to (in order of importance): 1st) Lack of knowledge and experience. I had just stared dabbling in 3d modeling/texturing as a hobby for less tha a year to any serious degree at the point. Now it's been a few years, worked on a couple of games in a serious team effort, went to uni about Game Development and working on my own game right now. As such this has been fixed to a big degree. 2nd) The tools themselves. I couldn't stand Lightwave (still can't) and was seriously focusing on PBR workflows and the traditional texturing felt wrong to me. I'll keep an eye around for a while now and if I see progress on that second one (as in being able to use the tools I know, because there was nothing wrong the way it was, just not for me) I might try and help again. So once again, good job on my old assets, glad the community is still going and.. Sorry for bailing out on all of you, especially @grayman and a couple others. Cheers.

Nah. Not that much of a deal. If people can do the conversions themselves (it only needs a copy of LW either a trial or cracked) I prefer the developers working on awsome stuff. I just don't want to use pirated versions, even if it is for a simple file conversion.

Lost you guys with what you're trying to do now All I asked was for an obj importer in DR. I know there is an exporter allready, altho' iirc it threw me some errors later down on my workflow so converting from lightwave was a better option in my case. EDIT: Even better... An fbx importer. That way we could transfer a lot more details with the mesh Animation anyone? A question now. Does DR also support height maps for height details? I know we don't have tesselation to use them but can we use them for texturing height details? Or I have to bake such details on my normal map?

AO maps usually give a nice feel of depth and/or soft shadows. In the renders of the generator I simply used a lambert material with soft AO and one point light in case it helps you understand what they look like

I still believe adding support for obj in DR is easier than writting mini programs to convert file types but to each their own I guess. As for the engine I started building the low-poly mesh and doing retopology at the same time. In that way I'll end up with pretty good UVs hopefully. After that I'll try to bake the normal maps from high-poly to low-poly (not my cup of tea, baking the normal maps, that is). If I manage to get some good looking normals then perfect, otherwise I'll have to up the polycount a bit on the low poly for some needed details but we'll get a sqare(ish) model. Then it's texturing time but all this will take me until next week probably as my time is limited. For the texturing part, does DR use AO maps, or there's no need to bake stuff like AO/lum/etc etc? I know for fact I don't need to bake a height map because tesselation is not a thing yet but what others do I need besides diffuse/normal/spec?

Well... As I said in the General forums I'm creating some stuff for myself and I'd post here if I thought they could fit TDM. These models are basic high-poly ones with no textures/no low-poly version and no UVs yet. I'll create those as I need them. If anyone wants them for his mission I can try and create UV's textures/normal maps and low poly models but I will NOT convert them to lwo or ase as I lack the tools to do so. If I create anything for anyone I'll give the obj or fbx along with the textures. How you convert them is up to you, if you want any of these models. For now this is a high-poly of a generator. it's 3 meters by 2 meters by 2 meters in dimensions iirc and around 5-6k polys. Not sure what details will be transfered to a low poly version and what details will be made in normal map yet. As for the textures I imagine it to be copper-ish. The last image shows the front part which has a couple of steam pressure meters or something but that will have to be textured.

I think I do. Let me check it out. But it's much easier/faster to recreate them in my opinion as the Marvelous Designer can output square UVs (well not square but the basic shape that the patron for the cloth has). As for the models they have NO normal maps. The problem with them if I remember correctly was the UVs. But if I find the time I can recreate some of the furniture. What I can't or won't do is convert it to be usable by DR. I still can't find any kind of converter that works from obj or fbx to the file types DR uses and I'm out of trials for Lightwave. I can give you the meshes (or even create new ones) but unless I find a streamlined workflow from Maya/Zbrush to DR I can't do anything and that's one of the reasons I said I won't be making any models specifically for TDM. If however anyone wants raw meshes in either obj or fbx without textures/normal maps, depending on my time I'll try and create themand post them on the initial thread I started for models. I'll also post there any work that I'm doing that can be used in TDM in any way (working on some steampunk machinery at the moment for example) but anyone who wants to use them will have to convert them himself.

Allright. I guess it's time to explain why I'm getting lost every now and then. I tried to help people back in summer by making some sheet covers which ended up in failure and in slow development on my part as calculating sheet physics on a crappy laptop is harder and much more time consuming than I believed it to be. I then got back to my house and my desktop planning to repair my work or even start from scratch if repairing proved to be harder that doing it from scratch. As I had moved in a new house I had no internet connection for a while and when I could finally browse the web again my motherboard lost some of it's pins so I was left with low RAM preventing me of doing anything. Right now, I bumped my RAM up to 12gb and got a new graphics card so I could certainly do some work but I guess it's too late for those sheets now and I've already let people down twice. So probably I'm not going to start doing models for TDM as I hate letting people down whether it's my fault or not. At the moment I'm quite busy with planning a game I always wanted to play and I lost some time learning Unity for it when Unreal is the choice for a game like that, so now I'm learning Unreal from scratch. As for the game, it's going to be a survival game set in a post apocalyptic version of our world. Something like fallout but the main concept will be survival, random NPC's and quests and the thing is that the humanity will be brought back to a steampunk victorian era. Well the part of the humanity that survived at least. Why victorian steampunk? Well... I love victorian steampunk and I really feel like this is a "realistic" outcome of a global massive war. The people who live still have some knowledge left so I don't believe we'll be back on stone age and steam machinery is a concept easy enough for the average human to understand. I believe that if I for example survived a war like that, I'd manage with the help of some other survivors to build a steam generator for example compared to electronics and micro-processors. Anyways that's what I'm working on right now, mostly to learn on how to use a wide range of tools and not to produce a game of such a scale. Thing is I'm stuck... I have no friggin' idea on how to populate places (either terrain or indoors) to make something look realistic. I can't plan my props accordingly and I have no clue on how many iterations of a specific prop I'd need to avoid art-fatigue. I understand a victorian steampunk theme is very closely related to the art style of TDM so I'll post here any props or models I create and if you people like them I'll do my best to port them to a format DR can use but I can't promise anything as the pipeline from fbx to lwo requires the use of lightwave and this software is something I cannot learn. I tried but I can't. To prevent this from becoming a massive wall of text I'll cut it here. I'm sorry for anyone I let down in the past *looks at Bikerdude* and while I'd really love to support TDM with new models but I guess it's better to let down myself than others. I hope you'll all understand my choice on this and while I'd be happy to help I can't promise anything again.

Based on the screenie you posted I'd say nay, but I visited the thread and now I say it's awsome. If things can be tweaked then it's even better (too much spec on floor for example)

I have no idea on how to make LOD stuff... But... How shadow casting works? Does it need a shadowmesh to work? Or is it simply raycasting in which case I believe a double sided mesh would work? For example. The way I did it before was a plane for the cover itself and then a shadowmesh for the shadows. If instead of the plane and the shadowmesh I had a 3d object for the cover with normals on both sides of it, would it work for both the visible mesh and shadow casting? Asking because creating the shadowmesh takes like 80% of the time I spend on the rest (simply because of the folds, I have to move every vertex manually to keep everything under the cover).

Mind uploading a texture? I'd like to check it out. I'll send it back in like 10-20mins for someone to try it in game enviroment.

Quick question. As I'm making them from scratch what would you want the polycount to be? I have huge problems with topology trying to keep it to 1k. I can make the models as before at 1k polys but the topology is quite messy and that would make hard any adjustments to the meshes later. From some testing I did in order to keep the curves WHILE still having good topology brings me to about 3-4k. I can do either low polycount and great topology but not both probably.

So I understand, the dirt stains etc work as layers right? Sorry for the noob question but I have no idea how mappers make things look good If so then you're right...

Might be but the alternative is having most of those textures twice. Do you think it's a good idea resource-wide? It's relativelly easy to add stains or dirt in Photoshop but doubling the number of textures might be heavy for the engine to search through.

Well just tell me what you need then