Spooks' Mapbook Thread

[Spooks]

It's like a scrapbook, but for mapping!

 

Hello, personal threads are all the rage so it's time I made one! I plan to be posting my forays and experiments in mapping, level design, scripting and whatever else in here. Here's to many, many pages!

 

OK, let's start it off. You may remember that back in November I posted some screenshots of a cubemap slapped on some materials. Now that I'm at least a tad more educated on how materials work, I wanted to go back and see if I can improve on what I wanted to do.

 

Firstly, here is a clip of a default material without a cubemap reflection on.

 

Now here's the same material with a cubemap stage.

 

The stage was just something I found and copied off a shiny tile and it's really simple - it goes like this:

	{
        blend gl_dst_alpha, gl_one
        cubeMap     env/blueroom
        texgen      reflect
        } 

As you can see, the result looks pretty unrealistic. The odd thing here is "gl_dst_alpha". It tells the stage to take the alpha value of the destination, which would be what's on screen I suppose. For a texture like our wood there, this is useless, since it's not transparent, the alpha is always going to be constant. In this particular case "blend gl_dst_alpha, gl_one" might as well be "blend add".

 

Replace gl_dst_alpha with gl_dst_color, however, and you get this.

 

It's quite subtle, but I like it a lot. It's still not ideal, from far off it's almost invisible, I would like some way to make it a bit more pronounced but none of the other blend modes achieve the same effect. If anyone has any ideas, shoot.

 

Another thing I was wondering about while looking into the materials is this portion:

	{							
		if (global5 == 2)		
		blend add				
		program	ambientEnvironment.vfp
		...
	}

It's supposed to only work when Ambient Rendering is set to Enhanced, but there's no difference if you delete this. The ambientEnvironment program only seems to work when Ambient Rendering is set to Simple as a matter of fact, set if (global5 == 1) and you can see the actual effect. Putting a cubemap in this stage makes it looks pretty nice, actually, that would be a nice look to achieve but again, I can't get it working with Ambient Rendering Enhanced. There's another program, the bumpyEnvironment program, but it seems to just do what the envmap/texgen reflect stage does.

 

edit: here's how the cubemap looks under the ambientEnvironment stage:

 

 

Note that you don't get that Fresnel effect with the dst_color, gl_one blending stage.

Edited April 15, 2016 by Spooks

[Spooks]

Okay, here's a question for you all. I looked around and it seems TDM has three options for Ambient Rendering, but I was never aware of that since the options menu only displays Simple and Enhanced (Enhanced being the equivalent of what I read being described as "Normal"). This stuff has been in since 1.03 and putting it in the console actually makes a difference, but hell if I know why it isn't in the menus. Can anyone give me a rundown?

 

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/13676-whats-the-difference-between-ambient-modes/ Reference thread.

 

edit: hey here's a post

 

edit edit: The one reason I'm investigating this is just trying to get better looking cubemapped materials.

 

edit the 3rd: it's not worth updating the thread over this, but I'm just going to edit in this snippet I posted on Epi's thread, because I think this code's about the best I'm going to get for cubemaps for now and it's nice to have it here in one place. I suppose I'm done with env stuff for the moment.

{
maskcolor
map makealpha (textures/darkmod/tile_s_bright) //here I use the specular of the texture
alpha 0.5		//this darkens the alpha by half, modify it as you wish
}
	
{
blend gl_dst_alpha, gl_one
maskalpha
cubeMap      env/gen2
texgen      reflect
}

Edited May 30, 2016 by Spooks

[kingsal]

Oh awesome, I was wondering how to do cube maps in TDM. The effect you've managed to get looks great.

Are those cubemaps you've created or are those stored somewhere in the default materials?

 

Thanks!

[Spooks]

TDM has two default cubemaps as far as I'm aware, env/gen1 and env/gen2. They're both pretty generic, so I made the cubemaps myself with the envshot console command. Right now it's a bother to be putting cubemaps directly into materials rather than having an env_light entity and if you want, say, a texture with two different cubemaps, you'd need to make/use two different materials in DR. However, I think keeping your cubemaps blurry and generic looking, and limiting yourself to about 3 max in your map might reduce the bloat in a practical scenario.

 

The code snippet from the second post is what you'd want, since masking reflection by an image's specular map is the most logical way to do it, regarding how real life light works. The gl_dst_color method is also good, however, since it ensures you won't get shiny materials in complete darkness. On the flipside, it over-brightens bright areas, so watch out for that.

[Spooks]

Thread's a bit bare so here's a little update. My WIP is going slowly, got some layouts going, it's taken me the longest time to actually think up a story worth telling. Probably a dozen or so ideas thought up and trashed. Last night I did a little building mock-up of an aesthetic my FM could take. It came out alright and since it's probably not going to be in any playable mission you can feast your eyes on it here. I don't know if it's really what I want to go for, but it might be a nice new style to have in a TDM mission.

 

[grayman]

The single lit window beckons. It says, "What's going on up here?"

[Bikerdude]

Ah..very pretty shot. Nice see the detail levels in your mapping style have increased!

[Dragofer]

Quite a lot of Victorian vibes going on there.

[Spooks]

Not working on this right now, so it goes in this thread rather than the other one. Three month old work:

 

[Bikerdude]

With the way your using lighting and specular, you would never think that this is the same game - brilliant work Spooks. I take the dirt we are seeing is a decal with speculator..?

Edited September 30, 2018 by Bikerdude

[Spooks]

It is a custom texture, along with the blend for the walls. We don't have canal muck/wet sand so I thought of making one myself.

[RPGista]

Mesmerizing. Love the materials, great atmosphere.

[JackFarmer]

Incredible.

 

The walls are made of brushes and the ground is a patch with shifted verts?

 

How many light sources are in this particular shot?

[Spooks]

You got it right on the geometry front. Lights in foreground? Two. Green spotlight and a blue moonlight that is only really visible in motion (though you can spot the specular on the right wall). After the gate you can count three more.

 

I've grown dissatisfied with the state the map this particular screenshot is from and I'll very likely be gutting it and redoing the greybox to something less rushed. This was supposed to be the speedbuild, but I guess I can't let speedbuilds be that when I sink my teeth into them. For now though, and this is a rare diary entry in my own thread that I should probably be updating more often, I think I'll come back to an old WIP, roll up my sleeves and do some much needed work on another sewer section.

[JackFarmer]

Just revisited a few of your other shots you provided here on the forum.

 

Your application of shadows reminds me of Friedrich Murnau movies.

 

I am looking forward to seeing your future works because this is really outstanding.

[Spooks]

I've never been great at paintovers, I lean on the cartooning side when it comes to art. Oh well. I'm trying to figure out some sort of look for this little environment I've greyboxed.

 

 

I need to lower the scale or come up with another enviro idea but I kinda dig this one tbh, I'm not too picky.

[demagogue]

Reminds me of the area around the start of Behind Closed Doors (the "back way" around). You might get inspiration looking at it again.

I learned a lot from just opening it up in DR and looking at how things were put together.

 

The scaling looks to be almost exactly twice the size of your drawn version, which at least would make the math easy to work out in re-scaling it.

[RPGista]

Looks pretty cool to me. So you are using the paintings to design the spaces? Thats very interesting.

[teh_saccade]

I think it's always a good idea to have some drawing / sketch or not only the area, but also some scenes and of the mission itself - it's easier to work from a reference than sit at DR and go, ok, I'm building another mansion.
Taking photos of places for inspiration is also useful, is also good as you can nick the textures of the materials.

Looks as if spooks might have learned some oil painting techniques at some point.

[Spooks]

Hey, here is a little note-to-self/funny tidbit of note. Nbohr1more alerted me earlier to the presence of r_testSpecularFix in the beta thread and I've been checking out the differences intermittently while testing for other stuff. Overall it does look a bit poorer, there's less fresnels to go around, but it's definitely better math, metal is actually shiny now more often than not. Anyway, point being I was going through some of my old WIPs for testing now and I noticed a very stupid trick that the fix broke that I thought you'd get a kick out of seeing.

I was making a glass material a long time ago that was basically a heathazewithdepth.vpf stage with a blend filter for the color of the glass afterwards and no need for a diffusemap. Consequently, I seem to remember that I couldn't make regular lights reflect off it, it seemed to need a diffusemap for that purpose. I ingeniously set up this code block:

	{
		blend 	diffusemap
		map		_black
		rgb 8
	}

What it did was miraculously make specular work without the need of a specularmap keyword to be defined, and upping the rgb (to 8 and above) made it factor the lights more strongly.

I loaded this map tonight and I saw that the specular practically disappeared between r_testSpecularFix 0 and 1.

I dug in and realized that the mere rgb factor on the diffusemap used to bump the specular and that furthermore that was the reason I couldn't get the specularmap keyword to work without a diffusemap in hand. I reformatted it like this now and it works the same:

	{
		blend 	specularmap
		map		_white
		rgb 1
	}

Here are screenshots of the difference that having a specular makes on this particular surface, for illustration:

I managed to notice it now and I don't think anybody else uses this trick in their maps (even I don't anymore), but I think it's a very good abject example of exactly how this got fixed 

[datiswous]

On 4/15/2016 at 8:39 PM, Spooks said:

edit: here's how the cubemap looks under the ambientEnvironment stage:

I'm strugling to notice what I'm suposed to see. Is this about the reflection of the scene what is seen on the wooden wall?