Texture Presentation

[oDDity]

Yes, that does look great. You will have to make your modeling more efficient though, if you want to get much done. I told you there was no need to mke the entire high poly door like that.

[BlackThief]

yep that turned out pretty nice

[Renzatic]

Yes, that does look great. You will have to make your modeling more efficient though, if you want to get much done. I told you there was no need to mke the entire high poly door like that.

I plan on it. Right now I'm more worried about practicing and getting comfortable with the editor, that's why I'm doing the whole door rather than bits and pieces.

[SneaksieDave]

Does D3 support JPG? I'm asking, because as I'm here downloading 4Mb textures, taking almost 20 mins each, it occurred to me to try compressing one as JPG. With PSP5, at just 10% compression ("Low compression, best quality" on the slider), the 4Mb TGA becomes a 177kb JPG. I have the textures both loaded and overlaid exactly, and am flipping between them and I see no appreciable difference at all.

 

Okay, so I'm in the stone age, using dialup. Regardless - hard drive space is also a consideration here. Is there any good reason we're using hyper-bloated TGA format?

Edited May 24, 2005 by SneaksieDave

[New Horizon]

Renz and I discussed the texture size issue one night. Perhaps we need to restructure and keep all of our hi res source textures on the ftp and swap in some slightly compressed textures. If there is that much of a difference and it's not noticable to the eye, I would say go for it. It will sure make downloading from CVS a lot lighter.

[SneaksieDave]

Okay, I just confirmed that yes JPG is accepted and works. And, looks exactly the same with this compression level. Give it a shot - 10%, by PSP or something of equal/better capability (I'm not sure about the algorithms used, etc, in other words) and the textures are identical*.

 

Also, even though this has already been stated elsewhere, I'll re-re-confirm it - Notepad definitely fucks up material (MTR) files. I did the simple edit to test the JPGs and got only black from the editor (sounds familiar!). So I went back and re-edited the original MTR with a hex editor (rather than try wordpad or DOS edit) and it worked perfect. Take note!

 

If the general consensus is not to go with compressed textures, I'm going to do mine locally anyway. It looks the same, and takes <10% of the space (although the download reduction would also help).

 

 

*Actual Difference = +/- 1% * OBF (Obstinate Bastard Factor)

[New Horizon]

I'll chat with Renz and see what he thinks. Would be best to deal with it now, rather than later.

[SneaksieDave]

Would be best to deal with it now, rather than later.

Indeed, now before there are hundreds. And if so, also a good time to eliminate the redundant textures that reside outside of the /darkmod folder. Had to slip that in.

[New Horizon]

Indeed, now before there are hundreds. And if so, also a good time to eliminate the redundant textures that reside outside of the /darkmod folder. Had to slip that in.

:lol: I'll hop on IRC then.

[Renzatic]

I'll be gone for a good bit tomorrow, but I should be back later on in the evening. If you 2 have time, we'll sign on IRC and have a quick discussion about it.

[Fingernail]

Don't under any circumstances compress normalmaps as JPG unless you make sure it's lossless - the compression artifacts result in borked normals which ARE visible ingame. Diffuse and specular should be fine though.

[Renzatic]

You sent me RLE compressed TGA files once, Fing. I remember them being really tiny but not having any artifacts I could see at first glance...we should experiment with that and see how some other ones turn out.

 

And on another note..the door is almost finished.

 

Lit from the left

 

Lit from the right

[Fingernail]

yeah, RLE is lossless and helps compress TGAs. There's no reason NOT to use it.

[New Horizon]

Great work on the door Renz!

 

As for the compression, go for it. We need to knock down the size. We also need to get rid of the old texture directory on CVS.

[Renzatic]

Yet another door...

 

 

BT, does renderbumpflat ever cut off the top edges of your normalmaps? You can't tell in this shot, but if you look at the top of the arch on the previous doorway you'll see that the very top suddenly terminates...that's because the normalmap just ends there for some weirdass reason, and I wanna know how to fix it so I can upload these soon.

[Fingernail]

Never does it to me... all I can say is; make sure the mesh is the right size...

[Renzatic]

The one thing all my recent textures have in common is that they're all 1024y in size. What's weird is that when I first run renderbump and it splashes the image up on the screen it looks perfect, it's just the final results that are fugged up.

[BlackThief]

yay - my first modeled _very_ simple normalmap. 10 minutes in lightwave

 

http://www.thedarkmod.de/intern_screens/ma...brick_local.jpg

 

[Renzatic]

And opposite of your cool texture, is the texture I spent about forever on and it ended up kinda....shallow.

 

 

I would've made it deeper, but my vertex points kept getting weirded out when I tried to bevel it farther. I'll be playing around with it a little more, but right now I'm not too thrilled with the results...the thing barely looks normalmapped.

 

Actually I just had an idea...I'm gonna try and find a way to generate heightmaps off of models in lightwave. That might help with the depth.

[Fingernail]

Renz, you'll have to extrude and scale, or just correct the points by hand in that case.

[oDDity]

Are you guys using renderbump or renderbump flat?

I would use renderbump, and I do even for flat things.

[Fingernail]

mm... renderbumpflat works fine for me for textures.

[Renzatic]

Oddity, I tried searching for a way to convert models to heightmaps in Lightwave but all I could find was crap about doing greyscale bumpmap landscapes.

 

Do you know of a good tutorial I can hit up right fast?

[BlackThief]

just in case you're wondering - I'm still alive however RL is pretty busy ATM, so I haven't got much time to work on textures and models.

 

tonight I found some time and made a wooden crate texture + modelled normalmap:

 

 

I'll do the challenging job of modelling the crate tomorrow, I'm too tired right now.

[oDDity]

Dammit, I wanted to model the crate.