Castle; Model's And Texture's

[Crispy]

Very pretty!

[mikebart]

thanks for the compliments

Upload didnt work, Ive just gotten ftp commander and am trying again with that so fingers crossed.

[sparhawk]

I realy enjoy building the Ivy onto models its very easy and if you use the right peices it can be very effective,

 

 

That looks very impressive.

[PinkDot]

That ivy looks very good! And it's interesting idea to build it with pieces. Can mappers do that as well using small patches (just like polygons in 3d app), so they could grow some ivy around their arhitecture made of brushes?

 

And that arch - I can't believe those details were modeled! How long did it take you?

[Springheel]

Yep, that all looks excellent. We'll have to see if we can use that ivy for our vine arrow.

[New Horizon]

We'll have to see if we can use that ivy for our vine arrow.

 

I was thinking the same.

[mikebart]

pinkdot; if you can clip patch meshes you should be able to fit the texture onto a patch mesh and slice it up that way, im realy not too experienced with doom3ed though so I personaly would find it easier to manipulate in a 3d app, if you can export your brushes to .obj's then you could build the ivy around the model in a 3d app and then export it into doom3 and align the ivy model to the brushes.

 

I cant remember how long the arch took I made it about 9 months ago, but most of the detail is made up of lots of small models, so theres alot of copying, dragging and dropping wich speeds up the process alot.

The problem is that there's also alot of wasted polys so performance wise its not the best method.

Ive come to the conclusion that this isnt realy the best way to acheive detail in a high poly model and im now combining this method with putting bumpmapped and normalmapped textures onto the highpoly model itself for the little nicks, cracks and dents etc.. and using the highpoly models for the more shape defining normals, any bumpmap or normal map put on the hi poly model gets added to the final projected low poly normalmap, <--thats something I didnt know at the time I built that arch and im getting much better results now.

 

With the ivy, Ive got an idea for acheiving shadow for the underlying polys through vertex blending, it would only require one extra 8bit map so it wouldnt be too taxing on texture memory I already added an ambient occlusion pass to the diffuse so that the leaves wich overlap each other dont look so matted together but its very subtle.

[Domarius]

Having the ivy in re-useable peices is a great idea, and it shows

[Springheel]

With the ivy, Ive got an idea for acheiving shadow for the underlying polys through vertex blending, it would only require one extra 8bit map so it wouldnt be too taxing on texture memory I already added an ambient occlusion pass to the diffuse so that the leaves wich overlap each other dont look so matted together but its very subtle.

 

I only understood half of what you said there but it sounds cool. Is this something you've already done or is it WIP?

[mikebart]

its just an idea, actually im not realy sure it would work, sorry I did it again.

But if it does I think it would look pretty cool, you know how vertex blending is used on a terrain using 2 materials like rock and grass or something, we could use that technique to paint shadow onto the ivy, so you'd have the ivy diffuse for one colour channel and the shadow colour for the other, ill ask around about vertex blending alpha channeled materials

[Domarius]

Depends if the Doom 3 engine supports vertex blending...

[mikebart]

doom3 does support vertex blending, I know cause ive used it on terrain models but im not sure if it supports vertex blending with alpha channels

[PinkDot]

pinkdot; if you can clip patch meshes you should be able to fit the texture onto a patch mesh and slice it up that way, im realy not too experienced with doom3ed though so I personaly would find it easier to manipulate in a 3d app, if you can export your brushes to .obj's then you could build the ivy around the model in a 3d app and then export it into doom3 and align the ivy model to the brushes.

I was rahter thinking about solution for mappers who are not familiar with 3d app. I think if you scale and translate texture on the patch, you can have only desired part of texture on the patch - same result as slicing plane in 3d app. I don't know if those uv coordinates would stay the same after manipulating copied patches. Alternatively we can make simple - 1 rectangle models with those fragments, and then mapper could convert them to worldspawn geometry, so they don't break entities limit.

But you don't have to worry about that - we will look after your ivy...

[mikebart]

that sounds like a good idea pinkdot.

just a quick post before I go to bed, I got the vertex blended shadows to work with some help from modern and blackdog at d3world heres a link with some screens.

[SneaksieDave]

modern?? He's supposedly a contributor here. I guess he's not coming back afterall. Hasn't visited for 6 months.

[PinkDot]

modern?? He's supposedly a contributor here. I guess he's not coming back afterall. Hasn't visited for 6 months.

If he has decided not to contribute anymore for this mod then he didn't succeed it!

[SneaksieDave]

Well, he said 6 months ago that he was a bit busy and lost some desire to mod, but that he'd be back when it came back to him. Maybe if he's posting on d3world, it's returned.

[mikebart]

I dont think modern ever lost his desire to mod, he's been focusing on an urban themed project, I've been following it quite closely and learning alot from it too.

link to moderns project

[PinkDot]

mikebart - your ivy looks more interesting now. I'm not that advanced in materials in Doom yet but I'll definitely will take a closer look into that in near future.

[mikebart]

mikebart - your ivy looks more interesting now. I'm not that advanced in materials in Doom yet but I'll definitely will take a closer look into that in near future.

 

Neither am I as far as shaders go, Id like to learn more about writing them but ive got a feeling its something ill always need help with.

[SneaksieDave]

Huh. I guess he just lost interest in TDM then. A shame, the stuff he showed us was cool.

[mikebart]

Huh. I guess he just lost interest in TDM then. A shame, the stuff he showed us was cool.

 

well maybe, but he does provide alot of information regarding his techniques on d3world wich are benifitial to the doom 3 community as a whole, i'd definitly recommend looking into his lighting and colour correction techniques for the darkmod atleast to get an idea of what can be done and then perhaps simplify it to your needs.