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Submissions of any kind, prefabs, FMs, textures, models, and any other help


Fidcal

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For the record and to know what we are talking about, here is one of the textures Serpentine is helping me with (superimposed on another new one):

 

Stained05.jpg

 

Serpentine has already helped make a good normalmap, but somehow the "stained glassness" doesn't come out -- the coloured portions remain a bit plastic-like even with the specular on it.

Edited by Melan

Come the time of peril, did the ground gape, and did the dead rest unquiet 'gainst us. Our bands of iron and hammers of stone prevailed not, and some did doubt the Builder's plan. But the seals held strong, and the few did triumph, and the doubters were lain into the foundations of the new sanctum. -- Collected letters of the Smith-in-Exile, Civitas Approved

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I've worked with stained glass before, and your texture (It's really pretty, btw) doesn't look much like the sort of material I work with.

 

Many times, panels are very irregular in its grain direction and pattern. Solid, uninterrupted patterns and colors aren't too common (especially with earlier technology.) For example, an opaque mint-green sheet would have no consistent grain or imperfect mixtures with other colors as shown in this picture. You can show that in your diffusemap.

 

Another thing is that each sheet is rarely a flat plane. What you might try is a dimpled pattern in the specular and normalmap.

yay seuss crease touss dome in ouss nose tair

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Thanks rich - one of your older doom3world posts had the exact idea I needed to get it looking more glass like!

(click for larger)

stainedglasscompth.jpg

 

Re: Texture flatness, sadly the source is only 512x1024 so trying to cram in a decent amount of detail into the normal (or in this case height map first) would take far longer and be quite hard to see at most angles. Even at the moment the limitations of the texture being non-transparent are quite hard to work with as illumination will make it look completely opaque and most of the time you will not want stained glass to be transparent as its a pain to have 2ndary sealing and backlighting etc.

 

Anyway, if Melan is happy with the sample I'll go ahead and convert some others of his and maybe make a few builder-centric ones.

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  • 2 months later...

I've now added a downloads folder with a link from http://fidcal.com/DarkMod/index.htm

 

Note that there is no dedicated beautiful sortable webpage list. I don't have time and also this means less delays. Just browse the folders and click on readmes and images and grab any zips. If anyone submits anything I can just upload it in a few minutes.

 

The only submission up there at the moment is Nielsen74's sailboat in the prefabs folder.

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  • 2 weeks later...

CGTextures has recently started uploading a range of decal textures. My questions are

1) Is there an interest in them?

2) Is creating decals a different process from creating standard textures?

I may have a go at them if there is a demand - maybe not right now, but something to consider at a later date.

Come the time of peril, did the ground gape, and did the dead rest unquiet 'gainst us. Our bands of iron and hammers of stone prevailed not, and some did doubt the Builder's plan. But the seals held strong, and the few did triumph, and the doubters were lain into the foundations of the new sanctum. -- Collected letters of the Smith-in-Exile, Civitas Approved

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I'm sure someone else can define this better than I can. You can examine the various material shaders to see how the following is done. The main difference with decals is they virtually always include some transparency. I see them as two types: what I call thick 'n thin.

 

The thick type are like ivy and other foliage or perhaps a ripped poster. They use an alpha channel in the image file to define the visible area. They should be placed at least slightly clear of any surface they overlay or there is z-fighting. These cannot have any gradient transparency - each part is either fully opaque (eg, a leaf) or invisible (the area around the leaf.) These are illuminated by local light and shadow.

 

The 'thin' type are like stains and grime and torch smuts. They use degrees of brightness to denote which sections of the image are visible. These can have a gradient transparency but the downside is they do not react to local light. So a torch smut just reduces the brightness of the light falling on the wall behind it. These can be coloured but the brighter the colour the more transparent and this colour does not respond to local light so a light blue might look like it glows in the dark but turn on the player lantern and now it looks dark compared to its surroundings. These 'thin' decals can be exactly at the surface height over which they are placed without z-fighting although sometimes it is useful to raise them up a little.

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CGTextures has recently started uploading a range of decal textures. My questions are

1) Is there an interest in them?

 

Absolutely. Some of the "dripping grime" ones are especially good, and ours are starting to get a little repetitive. Those would be the second kind Fidcal described, and would just need a "blend filter" stage.

 

The brick ones are interesting, and would probably need to be the first type Fidcal described (a regular diffuse stage with alpha). It's hard to know whether they would look good or not, as they'd need a good normalmap to be effective.

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Fids, whith out stepping on your toes, as the resource hosting page is basic, would you like a hand with maintaining it etc? I would like to whip up a basic but visually friendly(and similar to darkmod.com) webpage. I could do a test page so you can see what I'm trying to aim for. That said does your domain have the bandwidth, would it be better if I set something up on a free hosting site..?

Edited by Bikerdude
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I do also have my TDM mappers filemanager page which is pretty much complete as far as most functions go.

 

It looks quite like the TDM bugtracker, has ajax uploading and various other nifty thing. Only problem is that flups is fighting with my database. Which means that I cant actually add users or anything like that. I worked on it a bit last night, but I don't want to break Ikatara's hosting vps... so I'll have to wait on him to edit the necessary stuff :)

 

Just wanted to say that I haven't forgotten or anything.

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got a link so we can have a look..?

 

It's offline atm, database issue will pretty much result in "unhanded exception" (shit middleware :rolleyes:) pages on 99.5% of the possible pages. Taki said he'd have a look at sorting out the problem on Friday and he's pretty good about keeping to his word/time... unlike me :D

 

It currently looks a bit like this old screenshot : The forum will resize it, so just click it so that the text doesn't look blurred and crap.

mappercontrib.png

 

The font, some colours and spelling have changed since then, still looks pretty much the same.

 

Admin users are able to delete items (to a recyclebin that they cant empty), move things around using cut/paste and create copies of files. Registered users will be able to upload/download/preview images and a few other 'safe' things. Public users most likely will only be able to browse without previews/downloads. I should be able to get previews working on zip files (i.e a pre-rendered preview.jpg of a prefab in the zip). Other files will likely be added to the page in separate sections later if I have any bright ideas eg: a basic material generator for lazy/new folks.

 

So with some luck it'll be up and running this weekend.

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It currently looks a bit like this old screenshot : The forum will resize it, so just click it so that the text doesn't look blurred and crap.

So with some luck it'll be up and running this weekend.

 

Looks Good Serps

 

Yeah, that will be ideal for me if someone can take over contributions. I am doing so many things I just don't have time for any extra work without sacrificing something else.

 

I wont take much to keep an eye on it, so if both you and serps and busy then Im happy to keep an eye on it etc. Besides Ive got a ton of prefabs to upload.

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We should make sure to make it clear that prefabs NEED to be caulked on all unseen faces.

 

I have used one of the 'balcony rooms' or whatever their called (blanking atm) and there are tons of uncaulked faces, since they are func_statics they don't get culled. So by the time you go through and caulk all the faces it's not much of a time saver. (of course I'm saving it for my personal use, but we don't need an optimized and un-optimized vrs in the directry)

Dark is the sway that mows like a harvest

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My privacy screens done. Here's all the files:

http://www.mediafire.com/file/uhwiiv624yzvtg6/privacy_screen_by_nosslak.rar

And here's a preview:

shot00003.jpg

 

EDIT: Newer and slightly improved version.

EDIT2: Don't use this as there seem to be some kind of weird lighting issue going on. I'll try to get it sorted out.

EDIT3:I've updated it again, hopefully it's finished now.

Edited by Nosslak
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The slightly corroded brass is very fitting for it, lending the model a nice weight. Well done!

Come the time of peril, did the ground gape, and did the dead rest unquiet 'gainst us. Our bands of iron and hammers of stone prevailed not, and some did doubt the Builder's plan. But the seals held strong, and the few did triumph, and the doubters were lain into the foundations of the new sanctum. -- Collected letters of the Smith-in-Exile, Civitas Approved

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  • 2 weeks later...

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