Search the Community

Hi this is bad marine ass from the Planetdoom and doom3world.org forums and I just thought I'd stop by to wish you guys good luck. I'm both a Doom and Thief fan, and I can't wait to see what happens when the 2 games get married I'm also a solo modder (current project is Doom 3 Aftermath), that means I do most of the work by myself like mapping, modelling, coding and texturing, and since I'm relatively new to the modding scene, I hope to learn more from teams like yourselves and I'm sure I could help out a bit with you guys if you're too busy or anything. Best of luck to the Dark Mod!

Hey I would like to personally thank you for your help on the doom3world forums for various questions I have asked. Thanks for the support and the help! Good Luck on your mod!

There is something called texture blending. It works with vertexes..not sure how exactly. Something about painting the vertexes, then assinging a blend material or something...

maybe you have to export it as a md5. they can have several material shaders per model.

Thanks! BTW: The model with the lamp raised one question (at least for me). When UV mapping I can load a different texture for different parts of the model and assign it there. Now the problem I have is that in D3 you can only assign one material per model, is that right? So you would have to create a UV mapped texture. Do you know how to do this? In case of the lamp we would need some alpha on the glassy part and with a proper UV texture this should be possible without having seperate models. If you know how to do this can you post some instructions?

And a fragment shader for real-time refraction and distortion, of course. That is all in the material. But it means a separate texture for the glass bits, please.

Well damn, these are looking far too good to go next to mine! Are the UV maps handy somewhere? Right now I have the textures done with all three material shaders applied, but it's just a brush. Obviously I can't slap a normal for one frame on the model for another and have it look right, so what do you suggest? Currently they look like this: Btw, I have a great tapestry texture if you come up with a model for it.

Sure, you can tackle the nobleman. Be sure to check the concept art thread. http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=344 As far as the technical details, that's outside my area of expertise. You'll have to ask either Deep Omega or oDDity about that. As well, oDDity has made available a male and female template which I am encouraging people to use as a base for our characters.

I did my textures manually in about one hour. It only took s o long because I didn't know how to do it better. Now I learned to animate and it should take less then 10 minutes to do this. Should be pretty simple. Just model the gem and then make a render in 16 steps with animating the material brightness for the gem. I guess that LW can do this and copy each render to a seperate image. Blender can do this as well, and I think this is pretty basic functionality for most 3D animation packages. The gem should be rendered against a black background with Alpha included so that the background will be removed when imported in-game.

I managed to get it sorted out, I didn't need any .def file actually, just wrote a material shader. I got the lightwave normal map plugin working (I just needed to get the LW8 version) so I didn't have to bother pissing about with renderbump. I can tell you now how to get a complete textured, normaled, speced static mesh into Doom using Lightwave, but since no one else here uses LW, there isn't much point As for getiing animated characters into the game, I'll cross that bridge when I come to it...

Why oh why wasn't this posted on our forums!? Congrats oDDity.

We will need a loadscreen as well. I just added it to the GUI design document. So please start thinking on some concepts. http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showt...st=0entry3674 Do we want this to have a simple progress bar (like it is done for D3 levels)? I could think that the ornamented bar, that Springheel was showing for health/stamina, could fit rather good. On the other hand I must say that the original design is much more interesting to look at. The one with the clacks and whirling hands, not the boring one from T3. What I have seen from the GUI screens sofar they contain no machinery. Maybe we can add some as this is an important part of the Thief universe and atmosphere.

I remember this being brought up before, NH, and I think it's a good idea. I don't know that each crystal should be *dark* at first, but they should look like a normal coloured crystal until drawn. As it is drawn, the following animations might be appropriate: Water: As drawn, a material shader is added to the crystal so that it actually becomes transparent, as if it were now *made* of water. A few drops of water fall from it before it is fired. If we could make this effect seem to be spreading *up the shaft of the arrow* it would help deal with the troublesome problem of why guards never notice the arrow shaft lying beside a put-out light. Gas: As drawn, swirling green gas can be seen moving inside the crystal. Moss: As drawn, small plant tendrils spiral up from the crystal. Fire: As drawn, a heat-haze effect is added, and perhaps a bit of smoke. Flames can be seen moving inside the crystal. These are definitely neat ideas, but I think they should be put at the very end of the list of Things To Do. We could easily release the mod to the public without this, and then add it later as part of an expansion.

No, renderbump is the normal map generation software that is bundled. It sucks ass. This is why I did the high/low poly dealy already, using ATI's normal map renderer. What you need is the material file line that tells it to use a normal map. No idea what this is, as I was never able to get it working.

Ok, we have had plenty of discussion of what the lightgem should look like, and I think we have reached a consensus of sorts. http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=48&st=25 Now what we need is someone to actually create the thing. I would be willing to do it, but honestly, I'm not quite sure how. Is this going to be a 3d model? If not, how is it going to be animated? I know it's not as simple as just making a single image in Photoshop, but someone is going to have to explain how to approach this so that we can get going on this.

Gah! Omega, check out the 2 page discussion on this very issue: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=43 We came up with a number of reasons why this might not be feasible and/or fun.

Or the other thing could be that the shop is a pre-mission map. The question is if this adds really fun if you have to do it all the time. On the other hand it serves as a testbed for map creation. http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=43&st=0 I have a pretty good idea how this could work in terms of game mechanics as it would have been a part of the city section. If there is interest in this I could write up a description how I think it should work.

Anybody care to explain how I can activate the normal mapping? I used the bumpmap in the material but I think this is wrong. What is the command of the map that I must use for this?

Great! So it had some effect to do this work. When you post it, please make a new thread though. Makes it easier to keep track and when I look through the forums to collect the consensus for the design.

Great! Could you take look here http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?act=ST&f=3&t=285 and assign or create some concepts for the other screens as well?

Yes it does. Trust goldfishguy. Apple Macs traditionally used to default at 72dpi for screen resolution but anything up to (and sometimes beyond) 96dpi is common these days. Take a 17" screen. 800x600 (about 62dpi) is going to be a different resolution to 1280x1024 (about 96dpi). comprendez. good. But anyhow goldfish guy, Springheels right too. Ain't no one got a 300dpi monitor. Not many folks have a 300dpi printer for continuous tone images for that matter. But yeah. Huge images on the internet is just rude. Post little pics if possible please. Or link to larger piccies if needs must. Life is nice and cosy when you are young and healthy and with good eyes - like you and me. 800x600 on a 17" screen is good for anyone a bit far sighted or a bit over the hill though. Feel sorry for anyone checking the forums on a web enabled phone.... (something I do from time to time)

Maya is the best overall 3d app available yes, but I spend a lot of time hanging around the CG commuity, forums etc, and Lightwave is regarded as the best poly modeler available. It has it's shortcomings obviously, no history, edges or NURBS are the main ones, but it's just so fast and intuituve once you learn it, and you can also virtually 'sculpt' in it , in a way not possible in other apps, apart from ZBrush. I used Lightwave 8, but it's virtually identical to lightwave 7 and 7.5, most of the changes in the newer versions were made to Layout, character setup and animation.

Ah, thanks. Applegeeks' forums aren't bad for tutorials either.

If you're interested in some good tutorials and critical feedback, there are a couple good forums to look at. Epilogue is one that has a lot of stuff available that might help. http://www.epilogue.net/cgi/phpBB2/

Well I read in another post o the forums here that 7500-8k polys is the target for characters. I'll have no problem whatsoever getting to that level from the current 30k It's never a good idea to have large details like the belt buckle just a flat plain with a normal map, it's always best to have some basic geometry there as well that more or less follows the high res shape. That's not a problem though, there's a plugin for Lightwave call qemLOSS which does just that job. I'll have to get this textured and normal/spec mapped and into Doom to see what the final effect will be. I currently have no idea how god/bad/average it will look inside the game.