Texture blending model panels

[Fidcal]

Just occurred to me probably I need to put the vertexcolor keyword with the specular as well. I'll try that later.

[Fidcal]

No different. Even with the specular removed from the stone, the snow is brighter on the model than the same texture on the brush.

 

It actually looks better in fast ambient mode and I'm wondering if the specular problem is to do with the test rendering method on SVN.

 

An additional error is that even in fast ambient mode I can see that the far edge of the model still shows maybe half of both textures. Yet it is vertex painted totally black in that area so it ought to be solid snow. It's not the bump map because it still shows even if I remove the bump map.

[Tudor]

Well, you made it look a lot better! Therehas to be some way to get rid of the sharp edge though. I suppose alphamapping wouldn't be appreciated by light sources either? otherwise you could have it overlap slightly and alpha-fade between the underlying surface and the blend "patch".

 

Also, that specular thing looks really odd.

[Tels]

Still, good work! The snow still looks much better, speculars or not. What I'd like to see is blending between gras and dirt just to see how it looks.

[Fidcal]

I'll try and do a grass/dirt later.

 

There is something odd going on here. I redid the model vertex painted it all black. That should only show the texture with the keyword inverseVertexColor but it clearly shows both. I must be doing something wrong but I don't know what. Forgetting the integrating with brushwork for a minute, the model itself should be able to blend completely from 100% of one texture to 100% of another, not 25%/75% one to 75%/25% of the other as it seems to be.

 

Also, each time I change the vertex color to test Blender now adds a new material level of the basic compass texture which I don't know how to get rid of. I'm not even touching textures. I don't even know how to add more than one texture to the actual model.

[Bikerdude]

This is spot on Fids, how far away is a tut on this..?

Edited March 21, 2010 by Bikerdude

[Fidcal]

Glad you like it Biker. It's unknown how long it will take me to work out the best way to do this but if you are waiting for this I could make some test pieces you might be able to use. I could use someone actually to beta test and let me know what problems there are and what they need changing.

 

If you have some small simple parts of your FM you have in mind, let me know the two textures and I'll make up a panel or two for you to try. If it works OK for you then leave them in and we can try some others. You only have to lay the panels down and align the textures on your brushes to the models. As mentioned, there is a problem with shiny textures but grass, dirt, and stone, may be OK.

[Fidcal]

Here are a couple of grass to two types of dirt...

 

[Crispy]

Looking great Fidcal!

 

Only a few nitpicks (you knew this was coming ):

 

• I see a white seam near some of the snow/pavement blends. This is probably caused by texture wrapping. Try using the clamp material shader keyword to get rid of the seam. (If it works, it should be done on all blends, not just snow, because it will be present in all cases, just less noticeable.)
  
• The fade is nice, but they're all perfectly straight. I realise these are test pieces; just noting that some irregularities would be nice. Since this is done using vertex colouring you'd need to add more polygons to get this effect, though. Which might be annoying, since you're using Blender.
  

 

I'm not sure exactly what your workflow is here, and I'm not very familiar with Blender, but perhaps the material-stacking issue and your "25%/75%" issue are related? I don't see the "25%/75%" issue in your screenshots though, so I'm not sure what you mean exactly?

[rebb]

The specular problem sounds odd indeed.

 

Are you keeping the material setup closely to the texture-blending materials found in vanilla Doom3 ? ( for example textures/rock/rock03_skysand1 in rock.mtr )

 

Maybe you can post your current material setup here so it's a bit easier for others to check for possible errors. Or is it on the SVN already ?

[Fidcal]

Thanks for feedback. I'll put my test material def below for ref.

 

@Crispy: I'll check out 'clamp' and see if it helps. I had noticed that line but thought it was because the panel is 0.125 higher and it was the snow specular somehow.

 

This test is one texture tile long. I intend to try varying the edge rather than keeping it exactly straight but it does not want to be too much or it will show the repeats. But then texture does that anyway. Needs testing.

 

I'll post an example of pure black vertex paint with snow (which still showed the impression of stone even though the bumpmap was disabled.) I agree this problem does not seem evident in the grass test but I thought maybe it was just obscured. because of the detail whereas the snow is fairly clean. I don't know what you mean by 'material-stacking' - ah - you mean when I found several duplications of the material in the model? Maybe. I've since started a new model with one material and I intend to watch it closely to see if it starts cloning the material and when. I cannot actually remember how and where I added materials before in that old tutorial. I'm sure it was in the buttons panel but can't see it. In this test I don't actually add a material. I think there is a default and I only add a texture at the uvwrap editor. In fact my default setup includes the compass texture in the uvwrap editor.

 

@rebb: I used the archery ground material def as a start. I'll take a look at the doom one you mentioned. Thanks.

 

Here I've commented out the specular stage as not needed in this last test...

 

textures/training_map/archery_ground

{

noSelfShadow

surftype15

description "grass"

 

qer_editorimage textures/darkmod/nature/grass/short_dry_grass_dark_ed

 

/*****

{

blend specularmap

InverseVertexColor

}

***********/

{

blend bumpmap

map textures/darkmod/nature/grass/short_dry_grass_local

InverseVertexColor

}

 

{

blend diffusemap

map textures/darkmod/nature/grass/short_dry_grass_dark

InverseVertexColor

}

 

 

/*****

{

blend specularmap

VertexColor

}

***********/

 

{

blend bumpmap

map textures/darkmod/nature/dirt/earth_cracked01_local

VertexColor

}

 

 

{

blend diffusemap

map textures/darkmod/nature/dirt/earth_cracked01

VertexColor

}

 

}

[Fidcal]

Looking at textures/rock/rock03_skysand1 it is the same type of material def. It does include specular so it must work correctly presumably. (well it does work in mine but does not match the brushwork. In a complete terrain model it might not matter.)

 

I'll check out the stacked material theory now.

[Bikerdude]

I could use someone actually to beta test and let me know what problems there are and what they need changing. If you have some small simple parts of your FM you have in mind, let me know the two textures and I'll make up a panel or two for you to try.

Yeah some parts of the garden could do with some blending, would it be easier for you to look at the map..?

[Fidcal]

@Bikerdude: Yes, good idea. Can you upload it somewhere and pm the url? Is it obvious where the garden is? If not, tell me the name of any entity in the garden so I can find it in DR.

[Fidcal]

In this new shot you can clearly see the edge where the model and brush meet. The model is very bright by comparison. Where it fades to dirt it does seem to be OK because this dirt has no specular. This is the same model as for the earlier grass/dirt test; I have only changed the material def. I double-checked this morning to be certain and the model in the map does indeed only have one material so no stacking there.

 

As well as the bright specular you can also clearly see the dirt showing through right up to snow edge of the model. At that edge the vertex paint is 0,0,0 so it ought to be only showing snow. In this view it also shows the bump map. But the bump map has its own VertexColor keyword and ought not to be showing. Even if I disable the dirt bumpmap completely I can still see the dirt texture right up to that snow edge. Here is my modified def...

 

textures/training_map/archery_ground

{

noSelfShadow

surftype15

description "grass"

 

qer_editorimage textures/darkmod/nature/grass/short_dry_grass_dark_ed

 

//*****

{

blend specularmap

map textures/darkmod/nature/snow/snow_rough01_s

InverseVertexColor

}

//***********/

{

blend bumpmap

map textures/darkmod/nature/snow/snow_rough01_local

InverseVertexColor

}

 

{

blend diffusemap

map textures/darkmod/nature/snow/snow_rough01

InverseVertexColor

}

 

 

/*****

{

blend specularmap

VertexColor

}

***********/

 

{

blend bumpmap

map textures/darkmod/nature/dirt/earth_cracked01_local

VertexColor

}

 

 

{

blend diffusemap

map textures/darkmod/nature/dirt/earth_cracked01

VertexColor

}

 

}

[Bikerdude]

@Bikerdude: Yes, good idea. Can you upload it somewhere and pm the url? Is it obvious where the garden is? If not, tell me the name of any entity in the garden so I can find it in DR.

already sent you a pm..

[Fidcal]

OK, area around the generator is a perfect first test. Single edge, grass to stone, no other alignments to worry about, even oriented the same way as my first test model. This is useful for me to work out what problems mappers would have placing these things.

 

The main difficulty would be aligning something like grass and dirt visually. In this case I placed the model exactly half way. Fortunately you can see the mid-line of the model. I gave the model the stone texture for its editor image as it is easier to align. Then I set the stone in the alcove to texture natural which it already was. Now I hid the stuff in the alcove to see what I was doing. Next I scrolled the stone texture in the alcove to align with the model. Next set the grass to natural so it is not rotated or wrong scale. I am uncertain here but I suspect you may have a slightly different scale for the grass so to use this model you would have accept the default. It would be very difficult now to align the grass texture so instead I copy the texture coordinates from the stone in Surface Inspector to one of the brush grass surfaces then copied that to the others.

 

I have a faint suspicion I can see the join. Might be due to the 0.125 height so I'll take another look at that. It will be a shame to have to cut out a trench and lower the model 0.125 as it's extra work. Can't have that can we?

 

 

 

 

I'll make a prefab of this and upload it so you can insert it in your map Biker. (so you don't need to stop working on your map.) This is independent of any changes I make with the method or even if I don't proceed with it. So it will always work in your FM. I'll look at the other edges you mentioned and see what I can do with those.

[Bikerdude]

OK, area around the generator is a perfect first test. Single edge, grass to stone, no other alignments to worry about, even oriented the same way as my first test model. This is useful for me to work out what problems mappers would have placing these things. In this case I placed the model exactly half way. I'll make a prefab of this and upload it so you can insert it in your map Biker, I'll look at the other edges you mentioned and see what I can do with those.

 

Ah cool, I'll try and come up with more areas for that then..

 

Yeah, most of my scales are either 0.35 or 0.5 and I change depending on the textures. If you get time could you do a little video of what you described (I suggest using Camstudio screen cap s/w as its free)

 

Smashing, thanks for that Fids..

 

nb. on a different note, regarding the stones that the player would walk on - there is no noise when the players does this any ideas or will i have to make up my own stones...

Edited March 22, 2010 by Bikerdude

[demagogue]

If there's no noise for a surface, an easy hack-fix that works anywhere is to put down a brush with a "no-draw X material" texture on it, with the X being stone or whatever sound you want. You don't see it, but you get the footstep sounds that you want. (Or you can mess with the material file of the object and do it the "proper" way, but I haven't done that myself yet.) Is this what you're asking about?

[Bikerdude]

Or you can mess with the material file of the object and do it the "proper" way, is this what you're asking about?

This is what i would like to do, so I`ll try that..

[Fidcal]

No point in doing a tutorial yet as I'm still working out how to do it myself and what works best. I'll certainly be doing a wiki tutorial if this proves useful. At the moment a tutorial is of no use to you without a set of models unless you know how to model?

 

Don't hold back your FM for this - there is a lot of work for me to do still to develop this. It's not in a finished state. As an example I next tried the first step but not very successfully so far. I scaled it down to half size. Crouched down it looked promising but standing up the light showed the right angle of the step. I then tried a small patch bevel but it was not much better. I'll try later with a slightly bigger bevel and a much narrower vertical grass strip. If it works I'll try to find out how to build a bevel into the model but I have no idea how to do that yet.

 

Closer inspection of the turbine area showed that the faint trace of a join was in fact in the texture itself and the edge is much further in between the engine and the pipe. I've seen this before when aligning textures that you start to see the canals on Mars effect.

[Fidcal]

This is closer to the right height - very low with a bevel - but I think the stone texture got stretched on the model somehow so I need to do more tweaking.

 

[Baddcog]

Well, I'm glad you're looking into this.

 

I did a quick try at painting vert colors but had no results. I was thinking the paint color would show on a model (I have done that with Ogre). But blending tex would be great.

 

I was going to use it to add shadow/grunge to my ceramic pots for a test.

 

I know this adds more to render, and thus is a possible slowdown. But materials like the ceramic vases tend to be used quite a bit in each mission over a variety of objects. So if we get some good blends of ceramic and stone with dirt we could update alot of stuff like pots, vases and statues to have clean/grimy versions (or just make them appear to have AO bakes).

-------

 

you're probably aware that objects are vert lit. So even flat basic shapes like those stairs will light more smoothly if they have a few sections, rather than one all the way across/top/bottom. I ended up adding extra polys to my timber bed's blanket because of this and it made it alot better.

[rich_is_bored]

I had a bit of luck with writing an ASE export plugin for Dark Radiant. It's very much a work in progress and I should mention that I'm also using my own ASE import plugin to load the data into Blender 2.5 so it's probably not very useful at this point.

 

At any rate, this is what a vertex blended patch mesh looks like...

 

 

ATM, it's just dumping the resulting ASE to the console. It doesn't handle vertex normals. And it doesn't handle errors so it'll probably bomb out if you try exporting a brush or a group of objects.

 

That said, if you'd like to tinker with it I've uploaded it to google docs...

 

exportase.py

[Fidcal]

I posted this at blender artists too but maybe someone here might know....

 

Need a uv wrap exactly 64 x 2 but how?

 

In the image below is a calibration image I am using to line up some texture sections in a doom3 mod level. The image represents 128 x 128. That is, if I make a plane 128 x 128 and exactly wrap it with this and export it to my level then it exactly matches a brush of the same size and texture.

 

Now I need some smaller sections. This one needs to be 64 x 2. I've roughly resized it but without any grid or size reference how can I make it exactly 64 x 2? Snap to grid is not working well here either and does not even remove the kinks from the vertical right line. Probably I'm using it wrongly.