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Ungoliant's mapping questions


ungoliant

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ok barring the self_lit model problem, everything is 99% working with the new entity!!!! seems it likes to be atdm:, god only knows why, and does not cast self shadows by default, god only knows why, but the light still lights up the model by default, which i do not want (because the skin is self lit by design and does not need help from the light).

 

Also, the light seems to stick directly to the origin of the model, or possibly the origin of the model sticks to the origin of the light, i dont know which. i cannot find a way to move these things apart (because they are not def_attached, and the origin spawnarg does nothing helpful). barring a redesign of the model itself to create a new origin, is there a way to separate them?

 

after these 2 issues are sorted out, this things ready for submission.

Edited by ungoliant
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lol i submitted the whole thing already. check the submission thread. the selflit problem and inability to unbind the origins of light/model persist, but they are small problems, and i consider this to be in a releasable state. if the problems can be fixed, i'll definitely update it though.

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  • 5 months later...

ok I started up some blender tutorials recently, but I'm having problems wrapping my head around UV mapping (har har).

 

After i've unwrapped a set of faces with some seams thrown in, if i want to re-do the unwrap in a different way, maybe with different seams, how do i get rid of the old unwrap?? i can't seem to find a way to wipe the UV/Image Editor area clean to start over again.

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don't know blender. You should just be able to throw a new uv modifier on it and start over. (that's how Max and every other programs works as far as I know.)

 

A few of the light entities have (1.07) have the skin_lit/unlit props on them. Not at home and wont be able to look until fri night. 1.08, a few more have them but not all currently.

I gotta say it's a bit hard to follow what you are doing/trying to accomplish...

 

Most of the lights in 1.07 use skin_lit and skin_unlit properties. You need two skins with the proper shaders (self illum, no shadows, what ever you want them to be).

 

atdm: is just a prefix for TDM (but the a makes it show at top of list). Not sure who did that but it was a long time ago. I suppse we had started putting entities straight into the base folder... then later they were moved into darkmod/... folder structure. so yeah the 'a' really isn't needed now but you can't change it without breaking maps.

 

that should have no effect on an entity at all, just a name.

 

There are two light offset params. One is editor offset and it shows a dot where the light will be so you can adjust without going in game. The other is for in game. Both get the same numbers.

I think it is simply light_offset and light_offset_editor, though I could be wrong. 1.07 has these on all lights.

It might need the def_attach to work.

 

Why will def_attach not work for you?

Dark is the sway that mows like a harvest

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don't know blender. You should just be able to throw a new uv modifier on it and start over. (that's how Max and every other programs works as far as I know.)

 

not sure what you mean by "uv modifier", but apparently the faces of the object seem to retain UV information i cannot get rid of. If i select a face in edit mode, its corresponding face still shows up as it was in the uv/image editor no matter what. Doesn't matter if i change the seam placement and hit unwrap again, the uv information of the object just seems to stay the same.

 

Most of the lights in 1.07 use skin_lit and skin_unlit properties. You need two skins with the proper shaders (self illum, no shadows, what ever you want them to be).

I don't think i really need two separate skins, do I? What I really wanted was just a single property applied to the entity or material. I've successfully created an entityDef that has both a light and a model using "editor_setKeyValue model" in the def, but I cannot figure out a way to prevent the light from shining on the model. selfshadows taken care of already. The "selfillum" property you mentioned sounds promising.

 

There are two light offset params. One is editor offset and it shows a dot where the light will be so you can adjust without going in game. The other is for in game. Both get the same numbers.

I think it is simply light_offset and light_offset_editor, though I could be wrong. 1.07 has these on all lights.

It might need the def_attach to work.

 

I can manipulate that dot manually by dragging it still, but i wanted a way to move the entire light entity or the model closer to eachother at some default value so that the users don't need to worry about it. def_attach is definitely not happening at this point, since its 99% set up the way i want already.

 

Why will def_attach not work for you?

Both the light and the model require spawnargs, which afaik is not possible with def_attach, but i got that fixed up already without def_attach.

Edited by ungoliant
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thank you for ending my fruitless and frustrating search on how to do that. After creating a new model and trying again, this time unwrapping, then creating a different set of seams and unwrapping again yielded good results. no idea why I was having problems before, but I suspect user error :rolleyes:

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more blender problems.

 

AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'name'
location:<unknown location>:-1

happens when exporting to .ASE, and only occurs after setting up a model with 2 materials applied to 2 separated meshes. Not sure if this is related to the objects, material, or texture. I've named all my materials and textures, and the object names are 'cube' and 'cube.001', so i don't understand wtf this thing is complaining about. I'm not exporting any unnamed objects of nonetype wtfbbq!?

 

edit: fixed. somehow my objects ended up with some blank unnamed materials that didn't show up in the outliner panel. deleted. exported.

 

re-edit: ok I did that wrong too, apparently 2 objects will not export separated anymore with the newest script that works with 2.61, they must be joined, or something. works for me, that's much more convenient than the method on our wiki.

Edited by ungoliant
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Modeling question. Exactly how does vertex painting affect d3 material shader properties? for instance what will the footstep sounds be like for, say, glass and dirt mixed together. How would it affect normal/spec maps in painted areas?

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I believe the typical vertex color and inverse vertex color setup is can have multiple stages per vertex color. To my knowledge, there is no way to "vertex color" audio shaders (crossfade?) ?

Edited by nbohr1more

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I wasn't thinking it would crossfade soudns or anything, i was more wondering how the dominant material would be chosen for footsteps, and if the normalmap for 1 material would be chosen over the other, or if d3 would somehow overlap norms/specs.

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You should have a look over a material shader intended to be vertex blended. This should answer all your questions...

 

textures/hell/dirt02sharprock02noshadow
{


      noSelfShadow
  	 noshadows
  	 stone
   qer_editorimage    textures/hell/dirt02sharprock02noshadow.tga

   {
       blend         bumpmap
       map        addnormals( textures/hell/dirt02_local.tga, heightmap( textures/hell/dirt02_h.tga, 8 ) )
   }
   {
       blend         diffusemap
       map        textures/hell/dirt02.tga
       vertexColor
   }
   {
       blend        specularmap
       map   	   textures/hell/dirt02_s.tga
       vertexColor
   }
   {
       blend        bumpmap
       map    addnormals( textures/hell/sharprock2_local.tga, heightmap( textures/hell/sharprock2_h.tga, 8 ) )
   }
   {
       blend        diffusemap
       map        textures/hell/sharprock2.tga
       inverseVertexColor
   }
   {
       blend         specularmap
       map        textures/hell/sharprock2_s.tga
       inverseVertexColor
   }


}

 

This is a material shader specifically setup to blend between a dirt texture set and a rock texture set. Only one surface type is permitted per material so it's stone footfalls for the entire surface unfortunately.

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Check the archery in the training mission. It has a blended grass/stone ground. But unfortunately that has only one footstep sound set. So what I did is make a separate model of the stone path by deleting all the grass parts in blender. Export that model, give it a no-draw-solid-stone texture and place it a tiny amount like 0.01 above the visual stone path.

 

edit:

something I thought of later. Better to make cut your vertex blended model where the transition is from grass to stone and give each its own sound. :)

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blender workflow question: for something relatively simple like a stalagmite, should it prove easier to start on the low-poly and do something like subdivide to make high-poly, or would it be easier to sculpt a highpoly first, and then do something like retopo to the low poly? (i have a use for the high-poly, so i do want both).

Currently I'm almost done making the low poly by hand, but i'm wondering if i should have gone the opposite route.

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Start with lowpoly, shape it, subdivide it with Multiresolution modifier, sculpt. Bake normalmap and ambient occlusion using option Bake from Multires. This way you work with only one object. Although I never tried Bake from Multires option. EDIT: I just tried it and it didn't work as I expected. Anyway mulitiresolution is a way to go because you sculpt low and high poly at the same time.

It's only a model...

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at the same time??? wow that sounds about a bazillion times easier than what I was planning. Also, I was going to utilize the original TDM stock diffuse, normals, spec for the final product, but save the AO image by itself, then overlay it onto the diffuse stage in the d3 material shader, using some alphatest. I figured adding that stage to a diffuse would make it a lot easier to skin multiple times, and not require new source images. Am I thinking straight, or is that ridiculously out of whack?

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You can use a blend or multiply stage in the shader. But I have had iffy results. It's hard to get exactly what you want.

 

However, if you are baking a normal map from the high poly, then you can't just use the stock TDM normals. You can still use the diffuse and just combine normals from your bake and the original though. I'm doing this for pillars. Let's you use skins but cuts down on textures needed (mainly 5+ diffuses/speculars).

 

If you get a good AO blend let me know, was going to try it with my pillars too but haven't gotten to it yet.

-------

 

LOD is implemented now so you can just make entities with your high and low. Though a sculpted high is still probably too much detail.

 

I like to start with a low, have it uv'ed and ready to go, then bump up details. Though I haven't sculpted much or done any 'auto-decimation'.

Dark is the sway that mows like a harvest

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multires modifier can be scaled while working on it. if you have a base of 500 polys, and a multires modifier on top of it that you are working with, say, 100K polies, when you are done sculpting, you can tune down the subdivisions as much as you want all the way down to the original low-poly. so you can, for all intents and purposes sculpt an uber-high poly, scale down to high poly, and still have a working low poly. In that way, if you're making LOD models, and your highest sudivision is 5, but your highest LOD should be 4 subdvisions, you could export subdivisions 4, 3, 2, and the low poly, and yield 4 LOD models out of the uber-high poly you sculpted with. pretty cool.

 

Actually you can't really use subdivide on your basic lowpoly any further down, so that would probably take some actual effort if your lowpoly is like 500, and you wanted some 200, 50, 20 polys. At least for me it would, maybe there's some blender functions i need to explore still.

Edited by ungoliant
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Perhaps if the stalagmite is to be very simple baking normal maps is an overkill. Perhaps a generic, bumpy normalmap will do. Baked textures have disadvantage because uv map is constrained to size of the image, so you can't tile textures.

It's only a model...

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that was the exact problem that came up in my head as well, really need to scale into tiling areas. AO question... AO is based on directional lighting only? or ambient as well? can you even make an ambient light in blender? seems like sun, hemi, point, etc, but no ambient for rendering / baking, unless i'm not looking hard enough.

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You don't need any lights in a scene to bake AO. You only need object in the neighborhood of your object. In this case it will be the highpoly model.

 

post-2001-0-14052700-1333397971_thumb.jpg

 

In the World tab you can check Ambient Occlusion box and then increase number of samples to decrease amount of noise in your AO map. It will of course increase bake time.

It's only a model...

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Actually you can't really use subdivide on your basic lowpoly any further down, so that would probably take some actual effort if your lowpoly is like 500, and you wanted some 200, 50, 20 polys. At least for me it would, maybe there's some blender functions i need to explore still.

There is another modifier for that. I think it's called decimate.

 

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