Wellingtoncrab

#3 about 12 seconds in starts to look about right to me.

Yeah this is really getting out of hand:

Pretty subjective. Looking at things like the rough details in the normal map, I don’t think that’s what the original model is intended to convey, but I guess I don’t know either. It’s all subjective, but if that is what you are going for you are operating more in the territory of making a skin variant and the base material should remain intact, as I would consider yours to be more of an exception in terms of depictions of armor, which even when ornate, tend to have a more diffuse reflection: Personally given the darker setting I would prefer to use the original.

@Arcturus I am sorry but the elite armor looks significantly less like a metallic response and more like some kind of glass, polished stone, or clear coat. The reflections are too intense and uniform and that is obscuring and smoothing over detail you can see pretty clearly in the original imo. It doesn’t really suit the material or look like an improvement yet to me. When the old material was on screen, your test lighting is actually quite flattering to the specular response, and my reaction was “that looks pretty good, I like that”. Maybe dial down the intensity of the reflection, use something like a colored cubemap so you get a less neutral “glassy” reflection response, and try adding some masking?

@The Black ArrowThanks for playing! This mission was ultimately a collaboration in memory of Grayman, which I was privileged to help with, so I don't focus much on the "who did what" aspects, as everyone involved contributed a lot to what you played. I do want to mention a huge contributor to this mission who was Amadeus. You can see his work across the entire mission, so if you liked this mission and you haven't played A Good Neighbor or Eye on the Prize you should check them out - as they are examples of some the best the game has to offer. Thanks again!

@The Black Arrow Thanks for playing! I am glad you came away enjoying your time with it. Regarding your questions about the story, my advice to players is always just to trust your intuition about it. I do have some hints for you though: Again thanks for taking the time to play my mission - it means a lot to me!

Imo not sure this is an improvement in terms of the metallic reflections, or why it would be desirable to have less variation and more resolution in what will ultimately be an abstraction? But always happy to have another cubemap to mess around with.

They would - just edit the skull loot def to point at your new skin and then every instance of the skull loot entity in every map will have the new material by default without having to edit the generic material. (unless the mapper has already edited this - then presumably wouldn’t want to overwrite it anyway)

Since the skull is a loot item and has a def you could probably just make a new material and specify a new skin for it? I never was able to finish these polyhaven conversions as they were pretty looking outside of PBR, but with this blend mode they still need some work but are a lot closer!

Yes I used a mask color and a custom mask ahead of the cubemap stage on many "metallic" assets, or ones with mixed materials, so they still provide some sense of reflectivity without a light to interact with the specular. I think this still work well for duller metals such a coin - but I will definitely be using your polished metal trick to update some of the ingots.

@Arcturus wow this blend gl_dst_color, gl_src_color blend mode on the cubemaps is like magic. Especially in darker scenes where it was very hard to get across any kind of metalness effect - this seems to have just the right amount of ambient reflectivity. Great find!

@Arcturus In my experience it doesn't actually work fine. Heads mostly work - but with few exceptions the bodies don't usually import correctly. I am aware of the distortion you see in a lot of models t-poses, but even after you import into blender and you move the models to their af_pose or an animation frame they will still usually have all kinds of distorted/displaced vertices and will still have these if you export them back to the game.

Thanks for posting these! Most of the md5s get completely scrambled and destroyed when you try to import them using every blender plugin and version I have tried - so even if you are not planning on doing an animations it's very helpful to have blend files of some character models which are completely intact - as well as nice shading and UVs to boot. How did you actually manage to get these to import into Blender without breaking?

These days a height map is relatively straightforward to derive from a normal map using pretty much any node based material software (there is usually a dedicated node for this). Provided the result is even physically correct, in my limited experience this will not necessarily be suitable to use as a displacement map in the game right away. There will be a lot of high frequency detail which give a noisy result (this kind of detail in a texture remains better handled by the normal map) and the black/white values will need to be adjusted to get both a good displacement effect in the game AND retain any practical versatility in the texture itself (for all the reasons I outlined above). The greater a proportion of the displacement map you get to approaching a value of 1 (white) while still keep the effect you want the better result you will get when you try to go and use the texture in a map. This is obviously very early, and I am just a amateur so consider this advice as opposed to firm guidance. If I am dealing with an existing heightmap I will usually: Level adjust to remove detail and bring the values closer to 1 Apply blur and reduce resolution to further remove detail Prep a corner wrapped material test and begin to adjust the min/max values in the material def and/or steps 1 & 2 in until you get *acceptable* tiling across the transition - this will *not* be perfect - you just want to minimize and to minimize distortion or being able to see *past* the edge via the parallax. This looks like a pretty great example of what you want in a displacement map in terms of the frequency of detail!