Nosslaks stuff

[STiFU]

Regarding the compile issue, just start all over: Drag a brush, choose a texture, click on "make room", place player-start, your model and maybe a light. If it still happens afterwards, the origin of your model probably isn't setup right. If its origin is outside your sealed area (outside the room), d3 will report leaks IIRC.

[Tels]

I guess Springheel likes it lol

 

Me too Looks brilliant, can't wait to see it in a streetscene!

 

Edit: Also, you can check the origin of your model with "vertex mode" by pressing "v". ASE export for blender:

 

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/11399-ase-export-script-for-blender-253-beta/page__view__findpost__p__223393

[Nosslak]

Regarding the compile issue, just start all over: Drag a brush, choose a texture, click on "make room", place player-start, your model and maybe a light. If it still happens afterwards, the origin of your model probably isn't setup right. If its origin is outside your sealed area (outside the room), d3 will report leaks IIRC.

Thanks, it works now. The problem seems to have been that I assumed that if I pressed the Make Room button it would make the next room that I created a room, instead of making the room and then pressing the button.

 

Thanks to you I created this pretty picture:

 

Me too Looks brilliant, can't wait to see it in a streetscene!

 

Edit: Also, you can check the origin of your model with "vertex mode" by pressing "v". ASE export for blender:

 

http://modetwo.net/d...post__p__223393

Thanks! I'm using Blender 2.49 (as Blender 2.53 isn't entirely bug-free) and the .ASE exporter for that works quite well, it's just that I have to configure the material section manually and I'd hope to skip that step, but that doesn't really seem possible.

[Sotha]

Thanks to you I created this pretty picture:

 

Yep, as I mapper I have to say that I'd like to have those beautiful lamps in my map. I do not understand much of these things: is the model now ready or is there something invisible work still left? It will be interesting to see what you will create next.

[Nielsen74]

as fare as I can see it´s "just" the shadow that needs a bit of work as it´s ovenly the post that cast a shadow and not the lamps them self!

But other then that I think it looks brilliant too

[Nosslak]

Yep, as I mapper I have to say that I'd like to have those beautiful lamps in my map. I do not understand much of these things: is the model now ready or is there something invisible work still left? It will be interesting to see what you will create next.

There's some small stuff left. For instance I will have to bake all the textures to a slightly altered UV-map as the bottoms don't light up correctly, because I made UV-seams on a flat surface apparently and I will also have to make a definitions file where all the lights and other stuff needed to be packed with the will be stored. Could someone help me make such a file?

 

I will also make a wall and ceiling (hanging) version but those are practically done, I just need to bake the textures from the regular one.

 

as fare as I can see it´s "just" the shadow that needs a bit of work as it´s ovenly the post that cast a shadow and not the lamps them self!

But other then that I think it looks brilliant too

I thought that was strange as well, but if you make shadows for the lamps themselves, then there would be some shadow for the player to hide in. It was all pretty fuzzy and I didn't really understand it but it's better this way, or so I hear.

 

Here's the other two:

Edited August 5, 2010 by Nosslak

[Springheel]

Is there an additive blend on the lamp glass part? It should glow on its own.

[Tels]

There's some small stuff left. For instance I will have to bake all the textures to a slightly altered UV-map as the bottoms don't light up correctly, because I made UV-seams on a flat surface apparently and I will also have to make a definitions file where all the lights and other stuff needed to be packed with the will be stored. Could someone help me make such a file?

 

Sure. If you have TDM you can have a look at an example in:

 

Here is a starter:

 

http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Basic_Material_File

 

I thought that was strange as well, but if you make shadows for the lamps themselves, then there would be some shadow for the player to hide in. It was all pretty fuzzy and I didn't really understand it but it's better this way, or so I hear.

 

Not really shadowmeshes on the lamps, more like shadow (aka light) textures. (a shadow mesh for the pole is fine, tho as it alows other lights casting a shadow from the lamppole) Don't have a handy reference handy, but if you create a light in DR, and select the light entity inspector, you can set a fall-off image, which is the light texture.

 

textures/lights/biground1_streetlamp_4fold.tga

 

would be an example.

[Baddcog]

Yeah, he put the 'lit' version of that glass on the model, I think it's hard to tell because there is so much light in that shot.

----------

 

Nosslak.

 

You don't really need to worry about the def or light texture right now, we can handle that.

But to give you an idea what they're about.

 

Go into DR and right-click in an ortho view, go to 'create entity', lights/switchable/lampost... create one of those lamp posts. (a lit - or non-unlit which ever is the case but that's another story...)

That's what a def file does, it makes it an entity (otherwise you already know how to place a model.)

 

(delete any lights you have in your testmap - light sources, not light models)

 

Then go in game, you'll see that this entity lamp already has a light source. Makes it alot easier on mappers. That's part of the def file, an attached light source that spawns in game.

 

 

You'll also notice that the lamp 'appears' to cast some shadows. (it has a bright circle with dark lines through it).

That's the 'light texture', which makes a square Doom3 light look round, and also looks like it is casting some shadow from the bars on the lamp head.

And that's what the light texture looks like too, Just a black and white texture: a black square, with a white circle [that has black lines through it])

So we need one of those for your lamp. What I'm thinking is a black square, with 3 white circles that kindof overlap. Then some black lines that spread out from center across the white circles.

I was gonna try my hand at that this weekend, I've got a double lamp post that I think needs a similar tex too.

 

I think your lamp is going to need a larger radius than most lampposts too. With 3 lights it would deffinately cast more.

-----------

Asthetically I think I'd make the wall plate larger on the wall lamp.

-------

Oh yeah, I'd go back to a more pointy shadow mesh myself. Then it kindof looks liek the light 'tapers' off around the pole and the shadow blends better. If you do a square top like that it gives a really blunt 'I stop here' look to it.

***TDM rant***

Just so everyone else knows where I'm going with that, my streetlamp has a cone shaped shadow, added quite awhile back and it helps to cast a shadow from the pole when a lamp guard walks by.

I had actually mentioned we should do that to all the poles... But some things go unnoticed

And my streetlamp spotlight has a full shadow mesh (so it doesn't cast light upwards, but if it only blocked light going up and not across the pole... it would look weird...) of course it might be best to make a parrellel light, but maybe not because they can act weird...

 

**end rant***

[Nosslak]

Is there an additive blend on the lamp glass part? It should glow on its own.

There is an additive blend on the lamps from the in-game screenshot, but not on the two latest images because they are just renders from blender with a simple diffuse texture without anything fancy.

Edited August 5, 2010 by Nosslak

[Nosslak]

You don't really need to worry about the def or light texture right now, we can handle that.

But to give you an idea what they're about.

I really appreciate that. It was not particularly fun trying to figure out how to do the material file and everything else and I don't expect this to be much more fun.

 

Asthetically I think I'd make the wall plate larger on the wall lamp.

I actually considered making it smaller, but I'll try to make it bigger and see how that looks.

 

-------

Oh yeah, I'd go back to a more pointy shadow mesh myself. Then it kindof looks liek the light 'tapers' off around the pole and the shadow blends better. If you do a square top like that it gives a really blunt 'I stop here' look to it.

I'll try that. I know you told me before but I wasn't sure, but as it is now it looks pretty crappy so I'll try it.

 

I'm open to suggestions if someone wants to request me to model something for them. Otherwise I have started some work on a privacy screen as that is one of the items on the required models list.

Edited August 5, 2010 by Nosslak

[Serpentine]

To be fair, the best way to pick up anything to do with art is to just extract one of the fm pk4's, such as training mission.

 

The pre-built map has loads of 'realistic' areas for testing how a model fits into things, there is an example texture/material def and a few other things. You can extract one just as you would any zip file.

 

But once you get the hang of working with doom3 it becomes quite comfy... sort of.

 

Looking very nice so far, didn't expect it to look so good in game, but more than pleasantly surprised!

[rich_is_bored]

In the future, you can spare yourself the trouble of placing things in a map for testing by using the testmodel command in the console. This way you can load up an existing FM and just plop it down in a suitable spot no map editing required.

[Fidcal]

To take the screenshots above I obviously used DarkRadiant, it was very frustrating and hard for me (as I'm new to it, and there was no tutorial telling me how to select or delete stuff) ...

 

There is a quick reference to keys and mouse controls. It's not fully uptodate but probably 99.9% OK. There is new stuff not in there yet but the basic controls are valid.

 

http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Dark_Radiant_Keys

 

Also there is an A-Z Guide to mapping with Dark Radiant. For your purposes probably from Preparing to Build to the end of that page might be of help if you get stuck for the very basic select, drag stuff...

 

http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=A_-_Z_Beginner_Full_Guide_Start_Here%21#Preparing_to_Build

[Nosslak]

To be fair, the best way to pick up anything to do with art is to just extract one of the fm pk4's, such as training mission.

 

The pre-built map has loads of 'realistic' areas for testing how a model fits into things, there is an example texture/material def and a few other things. You can extract one just as you would any zip file.

 

But once you get the hang of working with doom3 it becomes quite comfy... sort of.

 

Looking very nice so far, didn't expect it to look so good in game, but more than pleasantly surprised!

Yeah, I'll test that the next time.

 

In the future, you can spare yourself the trouble of placing things in a map for testing by using the testmodel command in the console. This way you can load up an existing FM and just plop it down in a suitable spot no map editing required.

Nice! Seems like it would save a lot of time for me then.

 

There is a quick reference to keys and mouse controls. It's not fully uptodate but probably 99.9% OK. There is new stuff not in there yet but the basic controls are valid.

 

http://modetwo.net/d...rk_Radiant_Keys

 

Also there is an A-Z Guide to mapping with Dark Radiant. For your purposes probably from Preparing to Build to the end of that page might be of help if you get stuck for the very basic select, drag stuff...

 

http://modetwo.net/d...paring_to_Build

I can't believe I actually missed the part about selecting stuff in that tutorial. Failed.

The streetlamp is finished now. Should I upload it as an attachment or how do this work?

 

EDIT: After making some adjustments and trying to save the diffuse with my alpha map as a DDS DXT5 texture it seems that Photoshop doesn't want to save my alpha-channel anymore. When I try to just open the .DDS file in photoshop I can see a totally blank channel named Alpha 1 and I have checked many times just to be sure that the alpha channel is on there when I save it. What should I do, lads?

 

EDIT2: I heard I will need to invert my normal maps green channel (or Y if you want), but how do I do this? I assumed you'd just open it up in photoshop, select the green channel and use CTRL+I, that is what the tutorials on the internets say I should do, but my normal map turns cyan if I do. So how do you do it?

Edited August 6, 2010 by Nosslak

[Arcturus]

I use GIMP normalmap plugin for inverting channels but from my experience you need to invert the x axis when you're working with Blender.

[Serpentine]

Re texture formats :

Specular: DXT1

Diffuse (no alpha): DXT1

Diffuse (w/ alpha): DXT3

Mormal maps : TGA

Colour weighting for diffuse : red=0.3086, green=0.6094, blue=0.082

 

I recommend using AMD Compressonator for working with DDS saving, tho it is a bit more manual than nvidia's photoshop plugin it does make life easy in the long run. It also easily lets you change the alpha map and such.

 

When moving from TGA -> DDS once you're happy you will have to use the dds directory. For example moving the file:

[doom3/darkmod]/textures/darkmod/metal/black_sheet.tga -> [doom3/darkmod/]dds/textures/darkmod/metal/black_sheet.dds

However you would still refer to this as "/textures/darkmod/metal/black_sheet", so you dont have to change anything in the material def. Only the dds file is placed in the same place just as a subdirectory of dds (remember to move your tga too)

 

If you try use the dds and dont move it, you will get a black texture in game.

 

for more info please check DDS Creation on the wiki

 

As for inverting the normal, this is what a good one should look like when lit from different directions : example

 

Try copying that image into photoshop and inverting the different channels, the border will change to represent the colour that you have inverted but the actual normal map in the middle should not change drastically aside from which side is lit by the colour.

 

And if you need any help with this stuff, just send me a pm and we can sort out irc/gtalk or something if that suits you (I know these thief folk don't exactly do normal communication, I do however)

[Baddcog]

I don't know about the alpha thing, that's weird.

 

To invert the green just select the green layer (now it'll be greyscale to look at), ctrl+a to select all, image>adjust>invert and you'll see the details 'flop'. save.

 

I like to have a small test map, it loads in 3 seconds as opposed to 1 min+ for missions with tons of stuff.

[Nosslak]

Re texture formats :

Specular: DXT1

Diffuse (no alpha): DXT1

Diffuse (w/ alpha): DXT3

Mormal maps : TGA

Colour weighting for diffuse : red=0.3086, green=0.6094, blue=0.082

Oh, I was under the impression you used DXT5 as that is what Baddcog told me. Also is that colour weighting important? Because I don't think I can adjust that in Nvidia photoshop plug-in and I couldn't get the Compressonator to work, it just resulted in one of those black textures you were talking about.

 

As for inverting the normal, this is what a good one should look like when lit from different directions : example

 

Try copying that image into photoshop and inverting the different channels, the border will change to represent the colour that you have inverted but the actual normal map in the middle should not change drastically aside from which side is lit by the colour.

 

And if you need any help with this stuff, just send me a pm and we can sort out irc/gtalk or something if that suits you (I know these thief folk don't exactly do normal communication, I do however)

Baddcog said that he had to invert my normals and Arcturus says I should need to as well but strangely enough it seems to work without any modification.

 

I don't know about the alpha thing, that's weird.

Apparently photoshop won't keep the alpha channel if I am working from a jpeg file (which I had assigned an alpha channel) and saves it to DDS, so I failed again.

 

Also I am noticing some kind of shading error or something:

Do you know how to fix it?

[Baddcog]

Are we using dds3? DOH. I've been using 5, not that I have made many lately. But they so work fine.

 

At first I didn't think you needed to invert the green channel, but after examining the lighting very closely something seemed off. It's hard to tell because the details are so small.

So I inverted it to test and they look alot better imo.

 

See right above the light gem, The shadow is on the left of that 'middle rib' and the light appears to be from the left, the next rib to the right of that is more noticeable, It makes the recessed part look like it's protruding. But then up top it looks like it goes in, it's kindof an optical illusion thing.

 

that might also be causing the shading issue, you don't have any weird spots on your normal do you?

[Serpentine]

Are we using dds3? DOH. I've been using 5, not that I have made many lately. But they so work fine.

 

Officially we use the aforementioned formats. DXT5 will work but there's really no reason to use it because we only have 'hard' alpha.

DXT1 will compress diffuses much better and using DTX3 is just a good practice for hard alpha as it wont try blending or anything funny

I wouldnt bother going back and changing stuff, but it's just something to remember

 

(I also *think* that DXT5 support was only officially added in a later doom3 patch and it sometimes gives me black textures when I mess around, never worked it all out)

 

Inverted normal stuff

Yeah now that you say that it's quite possibly an inverted normal map there

 

Noss, any chance you can upload these somewhere and I'll be more than happy to check it all out!

[Nosslak]

I've uploaded it all here:

http://www.mediafire.com/?cz9hv0822yxlmql

[Serpentine]

I've uploaded it all here:

http://www.mediafire.com/?cz9hv0822yxlmql

 

Ok wow, the normal map is pretty broken (blender is completely messing up the channel floor values)

 

Some parts do seem to be inverted while others arnt, going to try manually fix with some magic - but I'd have a look at blender's settings or some tutorials or something. I really don't know enough about it. There's also the option of using xNormal which is meant to make life a whole lot easier for these things and it's also free.

[Nosslak]

Ok wow, the normal map is pretty broken (blender is completely messing up the channel floor values)

 

Some parts do seem to be inverted while others arnt, going to try manually fix with some magic - but I'd have a look at blender's settings or some tutorials or something. I really don't know enough about it. There's also the option of using xNormal which is meant to make life a whole lot easier for these things and it's also free.

I'll go and try make a new normal map with xnormal then. Though I should probably tell you that I've never gotten a good result out of that program.

[Serpentine]

I'll go and try make a new normal map with xnormal then. Though I should probably tell you that I've never gotten a good result out of that program.

 

Ok, it's actually two problems :

Firstly the black areas and such seem to be caused by the mesh, I separated out the main mesh, and ran a script over them to merge close/duplicate verts (I also normalized the face normals(not normal map!)) but I don't think that changed anything noticeable. Pic don't worry about the alpha etc, that's only because I cut out the other meshes. I think you were trying to make hard edges or something, I really don't understand much about actually making models

 

The second problem is the normal map, the one in the pic is greatly modified and still not 100%, so redoing that would be a good thing as the manual changes are quite a pain. Take your time, watch some tutorials or whatever, maybe try a newer version of blender or xnormal just don't get put off by starting out issues