Any way to fix this texture stretching?

[Skaruts]

In the center of the arches. If there isn't, I'll cover it up with something, I guess.

 

Edited February 10, 2014 by Skaruts

[Lux]

Yes there is a way but I don't recall exactly how to do it. It is available in the Edit menu I think as well. Like "paste projected"...maybe CTRL + middle click?

 

I've been taught to create a separate brush and put the texture on that, then copy that texture off the flat surface and then paste projected.

 

Don't waste time covering it because it is fixable.

[Skaruts]

Ctrl+mmb (paste projected) is how I managed to align all those textures. But they stretched on top. If I do shift+mmb (paste natural) the texture stays fine, no stretching, but then it doesn't seem to align well with other arches and walls.

 

EDIT: is there a way to cut a patch in two? If I could cut them I could use two patches for the arches. If I place brush on top and paste its texture into the arch, it aligns well on top but stretches on the sides. So if I could exclude the bad parts on two patches, it could work.

Edited February 10, 2014 by Skaruts

[RJFerret]

Technically yes, two methods, via text editor or spreadsheet: http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Patch_Splitting_-_Basic_Tutorial

[Mortem Desino]

DR Texture Tool, my man.

[Skaruts]

Well, I managed to solve my problem one way. But I don't know if the additional patches it took to achieve is a good thing. Do patches affect performance anymore than brushes do?

 

Here's how it looks and all the patches I used:

 

 

Basically I created a bevel instead of an end cap and aligned the texture from the brush to the patch with paste natural (shift+mmb). I then just copied the bevel patch along the places where there was no variance. Then I started copying it to other places where I had to move vertices, and the way I solved the stretching involved with moving vertices was to copy and paste the shader either from the walls to the new patches or from one patch to another (only from and to the ones going in the same direction). So I had to play around with that.

 

In some cases the shader looked mirrored, and I've been trying to replicate this on another set of arches and I'm having trouble solving the mirror problem. Also in some cases I needed to rotate the shader 180º and it instantly aligned well, in other cases I still needed to copy/paste the shader from the adjacent patch once more after rotating the shader. Somehow it worked out.

 

Note: I didn't mess with horizontal or vertical shifts on any of them. It was wall shift+mmb and rotation changes (I'm not sure if I did any ctrl+mmb somewhere).

 

I'm still wondering if there isn't a faster and more intuitive way...

 

DR Texture Tool, my man.

There's nothing in there that helped with the way I was doing it before.

 

EDIT: Wait, scratch that. I thought you meant the surface inspector. Gonna check it out.

EDIT2: Still doesn't seem to do anything useful about the stretching. So far.

Edited February 10, 2014 by Skaruts

[RJFerret]

To answer the patch performance question from my experience/studying, they might produce more tris than brushes would to represent the same thing, or they might not, it depends on the shape. Patches adjust themselves to fewer, if fewer are needed, or you can defeat that system and use the "patch inspector" (view menu, shift-s) to manually dictate (fixed subdivisions), however that'll perhaps require more tris depending on the shape of geometry.

 

Patches do tend to produce a smoother contour given an amount of tris. Also it seems patches produce tris more regularly shaped (closer to equilateral), which graphics chips love more than long narrow tris you frequently can get with brushes.

 

But the reality is it'll be way overshadowed by performance due to lights, AI, and other factors.

[Skaruts]

Thanks.

[SteveL]

Like RJ said, don't worry about a few dozen extra tris in view from your patches. The engine will happily crunch through half a million if you don't torment it with lots of overlapping lights or poor visportalling.

 

You *can* fix stretched textures with the texture tool by manually spacing out the rows and cols of vets, but it's not the quickest way to do it. My technique for aligning curved patches is to use the surface inspector fit tool to cure the stretching and get them all to the same correct scale, then use the texture tool with all the patches selected to line them up nicely in texture space.

[Sotha]

I usually texturize those vaults like this:

1) make a bevel (that is a half end-cap)

2) twist the bevel into the vault shape.

3) clone so that you get a full vault from the bevels.

4) create a brush. Rotate the brush so that a face of the brush is oriented roughly in the same plane as the bevel. The bevel is curved, and the brush is straight, but simply rotate the brush like this:

5) Then apply the texture you want on the brush face (the face that roughly aligned with the bevel. The face that is nearest the bevel in the above schematic.) Scale it to reasoable scales

6) copy the shader from the brush and paste it onto the bevel.

7) finalize with surface inspector (texture rotation, align some brick joints to the parts where the bevels meet and so forth.)

[SteveL]

Thanks Sotha. I'd been meaning to ask someone to elaborate on the copy-from-brush method as I couldn't see from other posts what it means to line up a brush with a curved patch. I'll have a play with this later.

[Obsttorte]

You can use both paste methods, depending on what you are aiming for. Another possibility is the fit option in the surface inspector, which can be very helpful, too.

 

Regarding performance: A tri from a patch eats the same performance as one from a brush. The engine can handle a very high amount of tris. As long as they are not hit by more then two til three light sources at the same time, nothing bad will happen, especially not in narrow indoor areas.

 

The only real difference between patches and brushes is that patches have soft edges, while brushes have hard edges. So if you want to create something edgy-looking, you use brushes, if it shall look smooth (like your roomtop), you use patches.

[nbohr1more]

I think that patches do some auto-optimize (like func_static) and I also recall that they don't seal the void (like func_static). This big architectural difference is that

they support vertex normals internally. Not sure if you could use a "vertex color" based material (blend) with them but it might be cool to test.

[Obsttorte]

Vertex coloring is only supported on models, not on patches or brushes.

[Skaruts]

I have to take back what I said about the Texture Tool not being useful in my case. I used Sotha's technique with the diagonal brush and then I played around with the texture tool until I figured out it's intricacies, and it helped a lot. Before that I was having trouble replicating what I had done before, when attempting it with different textures. But this way it worked out very well.

 

Just had to take care of a few seems by simply flipping the texture coords in the texture tool. Tends to happen when you're copying and flipping brushes around.

 

 

One problem I have with it, Sotha, is that when I needed to repeat the process for the clean brown bricks (without the white bricks) to mix them in there, I had deleted the diagonal brush and had to figure out the position once again, and it took me a while.

 

Do you have any "reference" that you use to know where exactly to place the diagonal brush whenever you need to do it from scratch? Something that makes it not be so much guess work when doing the first time. I assume (haven't tested) that the position should vary depending on the shape of the bevel arch too...

Edited February 12, 2014 by Skaruts

[ungoliant]

as far as physical positioning i select the item i want it to be next to, then unselect it, then drag out the new brush in the top-down xy orthagonal view right where i wanted it. this will put the item roughly where you want it, then just use 'rotate and scale' tool, and rotate it 45 degrees along the x or y direction (in this case i think thats what youd want with those bevels) and you should be good to go.

[Skaruts]

I was trying different positions and the fact is that there's always some stretching and shrinking in some parts of the bevel. So I guess the position of the brush is arbitrary. In fact, it seemed like simply pasting natural from the wall to the patch does the job just as well, considering both ways will invariably force you to use the texture editor to make some adjustments.

 

So as long as one can make it align properly, I guess it doesn't really matter how you do it. Tis my conclusion.

 

I believe the stretching happens because the texture editor doesn't have much flexibility when dealing with patches that have 8 subdivisions. Actually, never mind what amount of subdivisions the patch has, the problem is that the texture editor only gives you 2 "subdivisions" to work with, instead of whatever many the patch has, so it's virtually impossible to eliminate some kinds of distortions.

Edited February 13, 2014 by Skaruts

[Sotha]

I usually just put the diagonal brush so that it is rotated like shown in the picture. Try to get the brush face plane to be oriented in the same plane as the midmost plane of the bevel.