Dave's Texture Contributions

[Gildoran]

Ok, I've added your wooden boards texture as darkmod/wood/wall/boards_new_001. (I didn't put it as floor since it doesn't wrap vertically) I made a few changes from your original texture though: The diffusemap was brighter at the top of the image than the bottom (perhaps due to glare reflecting off of it?) so I tried to even it out some. I've also darkened the diffusemap a little and added a slight hint of a specular map. (even unpolished wood is usually somewhat shiny) I'm still not quite sure the diffusemap is at the right brightness... it's hard to find something noticable without making it look like plastic. Anyway, take a look at it and tell me whether or not it seems close enough to the original.

[Gildoran]

What material did you picture fancy_01 being made out of?

[SneaksieDave]

I wasn't really sure... I guess it would be a carpet or a wallpaper, maybe?

[SneaksieDave]

I can see the boards texture fine now. I'm going to make some touchups to the diffuse so it tiles better (the stuff mentioned earlier which didn't get included) but I'll use what's up there now as the base, and get the modified version to you soon. I'm not sure if it will affect the normalmap, but if it does I'll generate a new one.

 

I was wondering about brick_005* - do you mind if we make those as walls instead of a floor? It's what the source was, but more importantly, that over spilling mortar would make for some very difficult walking on.

 

Besides that and the remaining ones, I'll start to make the fixes to existing textures in the thread I opened, and I've got plenty more to prepare.

[SneaksieDave]

There seems to be some display problems with some of the editor previews. Anything to do about this?

[Gildoran]

As for putting that in floor, the reason I did so was because it wraps very well both vertically and horizontally. Check out the Texture Organization and Standards to see how I've been mostly using the categories. The reason I did things this way, was because there were a lot of textures that were very ambiguous about their category, and I figured that'd be the easiest way to make things unambiguous.

 

As for the texture preview, mine does that too... I think it's because the light-source is at the position of the camera in the texture preview window, so the specular maps tend to appear very whitish. A lot of the vanilla D3 textures do that for me too.

 

Regarding the fancy_01, is there a reason it's rectangular? It looks like it's made out of two nearly identical squares. As far as I can tell, both halves look the same, so I'm tempted to cut the texture in half to reduce memory usage. Would you have a problem with that?

[SneaksieDave]

Didn't see your edit. If you want to cut up fancy_01, just be aware that I had to do some of the scrolling fill-ins by hand, so they might not exactly match up. It might be tricky to find a smaller exact tile region.

 

The final version of that %&*# wood texture is now up on FTP.

 

http://208.49.149.118/TheDarkMod/Textures/...e/woodfinal.rar

 

At least it better be final. I made it tile horizontally better, and fixed some light problems and the ugly ass giant groove in the center. WAY too goddamn much time has been spent trying to get this friggin thing to look good.

 

Most Hated Texture! Well almost.

[SneaksieDave]

A pretty decent setback tonight. I've been wanting to make cornerstone textures, like the one attached below for example, for some time now. I thought about the idea of using decals for cornerstones, and that could still work, but then you need extra geometry, and it'll have to be one grid unit out or there will be z-fighting, blah blah blah. So instead, I took the existing texture and hand patched some different colored stones onto it, and got decent results. This is skipping ahead past the concerns of bad tiling for this purpose due to how big the stones are here, and the concern of whether to use one texture for left and right or just one split down the middle (the former won out, because it's just much easier on the user, AND because of the previously mentioned largeness of the stones (two meet in the middle and create bad vertical tiling as well )), etc., etc. Anyway, so a few hours of attempts and some success, some failures later, and a whole lot of tweaking and reloading, I find out the worst news of all from the finished product. The DDS compression does lose some quality, even if a small amount. As I placed my new TGAs (derived from the DDS files, because I don't have the original TGAs to work with anymore) alongside the original DDS files, there is a noticeable seam. Ugh.

 

Anyway, the end of the story is that I'm going to start over for the diffuses with DG's master images. Sigh. I have to redo the normalmaps too, probably, so that they'll all match.

 

Bleh.

[Gildoran]

Sorry to hear that. Hopefully two DDSes made from the same TGA will tile ok.

 

Hmm... I just had an idea. Maybe the tiling problems aren't from the DDS file, but are similar to problems I've had with edge textures that are supposed to tile on one side. You know how graphics cards interpolate pixels that are between texels? That also has an effect on wrapping. Try this: On the new image, keep the rightmost column of pixels the same as the original and see if it wraps ok. (I'm wondering if it'll look ok even on the file made from the DDS)

[SneaksieDave]

Gave it a shot, and it does seem to get rid of a seam in render mode, for the most part, for some reason it still doesn't tile well. I'm guessing the compression does just enough 'damage' that there's no turning back (point to remember). I'll just redo 'em, I guess. The hard part, anyway, is going to be remaking that normal map by hand, which needs redoing either way.

[SneaksieDave]

I'm going through this process now, and surprise, it shows the same effect. I believe the interpolation is exactly the problem (if this is what you meant, Gil): when the cornerstone, which touches the edge of the texture, is light, the occasional seam which comes up is light. When the cornerstone is dark, the seam is dark. Also, the closer you are, the less it happens, and the further, it increases a lot. I assume this is because D3's internal mips are interpolating lower and lower res, causing the color to smear right over the edges, making them.. well, suck.

 

To combat it, I've tried adding the leftmost four(!) pixels of width to the right, cornerstone edge. Helped only a little, it still happens. Sure I could skew the texture way off center to beat this (probably), but then it's not precanned-ready-to-use for the mapper; they'd always have to do a manual offset instead of having simple lining up. I assume I could also bump the resolution way up, and have a 15Mb texture (no).

 

Let me try that decal idea. :-\

 

Edit: no, decals suffer from the same problem (in addition to sucking because of extra work and a noticeable edge)

 

Edit: maybe I could make a single pixel wide black line on the cornerstone edge.

 

Edit: forget it, it doesn't work, at least not at this resolution. I'll now make the cornerstones *themselves* standalone decals, instead of being attached to the parent texture. That will work, because there will be no interpolation, and the author can then also put them anywhere = easy to use. The sucky part is, they will have to be used like decals - on patches, which means more work and more geometry. Oh well. Now I need to figure out how to make transparent spots on textures...

 

Edit!: LOL this is a nightmare. Don't even know why I'm trying. :-\

[SneaksieDave]

Having spent the entire day on this, and seeing the end result looking mediocre (and this is AFTER finding out that the reason I couldn't save an alpha channel is because of a bug in PS6... thanks Adobe! Way, way up yours! :thumb: Then I had to fumble through the process blindly in PSP5), I run into blackness in render mode making me wonder... can you even have transparency on a normalmap? The diffuse works fine.

 

Does anyone know? A quick, simple, "no" would end my suffering.

 

 

I think I've gotta back to mapping. This... other shit is driving me nuts.

 

Edit: forget it, it looks like shit anyway. Not good enough for the mod. I'll either figure out a way to fix the glitch on the original full texture method, or I won't be submitting them. On the happier note, I did reproduce the stone textures and they look better than before, so I'll put those up as soon as my energy for this returns.

[Gildoran]

You can't have a transparency in a normalmap.

 

If I may make a suggestion...

 

What if you put the cornerstones down the middle of the texture rather thanthe side? Thay way you have both sides of the cornerstones in the same texture, and they wrap around the corner pretty well, and wrap with the other textures too.

[SneaksieDave]

Relief. Thank you. I should've just asked that 3 hours ago.

 

Yeah, that's what I was saying a couple posts back, but then it's not easy for the user to just plunk plunk plunk down three blocks with similar alignment.

 

Then again, that would have been the easy solution, compared to what I just went through all day. I'll probably try that, because I don't really want to give up on it. It won't tile nice square units, but hey, it should at least work.

 

 

Edit: of course, let's HOPE that works. If the overall distribution of pixels changes the compression 'signature', it could still do the same crap. Ugh.

[Gildoran]

My impression is that you just plunk down a block textured with the edging, then adjust its size in the editor so that the texturing comes out right. After that, you move it into position, and copy the texture onto adjacent walls, then copy their original texture back, but without altering scaling/translation, which leads to a perfect seamless transition. ...so hopefully it won't be any more painful for D3 mappers than doing anything else with texturing. (though admittedly I think D3's texturing capabilities are sorely lacking)

[SneaksieDave]

But if they have to shift it halfway...? Better than nothing I guess.

 

Either way, it's too bad for them, it'll have to be this way. Then again, this will probably require me to do all the normalmaps over AGAIN, because I imagine adding new light/dark areas to the base image (or altering them at all) will change the height distribution, and then the normals I just now put up are again obsolete. Sigh.

 

Anyway, I just put up new versions of blocks_008, _009, and _010. Numbers _009 and _010 now share a normalmap. High res versions are up on the highres repository. Had to make one change to the material for the shared normalmap. New DDS's from the normalmaps will need to be generated for those who can view them.

[Gildoran]

Forgive me for not seeing this, but... if the blocks are the same shape, and all you're changing is their color, why do you need to update the normalmap?

[SneaksieDave]

That's only if I use base images with altered texture lightnesses and color shifting to do heightmap tricks (so throwing off the light and dark ratios will likely change the normalmap generated - this is an assumption - if the range is light grey to dark grey, or 3-6, and then suddenly you add in full white and full black, so the range is now 1-10, I have to assume it would change the normalmap completely, not preserving original height ratios, and instead establishing entire new ones for that map). I'm trying to avoid that; so far so good.

[ascottk]

You can't have a transparency in a normalmap.

 

Does that apply to doom 3? I know tds had some normal maps that had transparencies. Those were mainly used for hair.

[Gildoran]

Yeah, I'm refering to D3.

 

Ok, truth be told, you can do normalmap transparency via blendable textures, but it usually requires vertex colored mesh to indicate "alpha". (I'm using the term "alpha" loosely)

 

Edit: Responses to this post were moved to another thread.

[SneaksieDave]

Success! Coming soon...

[SneaksieDave]

Added some cornerstone textures as shown in this kinda crappy picture which doesn't show off the brightness very well. There's a dark stone with light and dark cornerstones, a light stone with dark and even lighter stones, and a redstone/sandstone setup.

 

Gil, I imagine you might want us to do some space saving here with that alpha trick, but I wasn't sure how to do it and these were building up, so I figured I'd get these up first and we can revise one by one as we go. Happily, they all share the same normalmap.

 

Anyway, put corners on those boring buildings!

[SneaksieDave]

Updated blocks_008 one more time (sorry Gil). I think this time, I'm finally happy with the normalmap as an aging, crumbly stone (previous versions were too... "pillowy"). The diffuse needed a tiny touchup because the source image had a bad tiling spot.

[Dram]

Nice

 

Definately useful for steampunk housing

[Gildoran]

Wow... blocks_008 look nice. I've converted the normalmap.

 

Could you provide a mask (as a black and white image) for the shape of the corner blocks?

Also, could you provide a diffusemap of the lightest possible blocks?

Thanks.