Stridor
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Joined: 9/8/2007
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quote:
ORIGINAL: benpark
Alright, I have a day to deal with this again (and maybe part of Sunday).
After looking at a few schemes, I think the complex 3D model of the tree isn't working. The lighting ends up reflecting in odd ways on the planar "leaves", and we risk taking a bit of a hit for the lower end users with little return.
I am trying different textures on the existing 2-plane rectangular models we now have, and they look good in fM so far. If anyone knows the answer to these following problems, it would help a great deal:
I am having some issues with the way the game handles alpha channels. In fM, you can set the color for a transparent area. Does this over-ride any alpha settings? Or is it better to just do the alpha channel in PSD? If PSD is the solution, what are the best settings to save as- .bmp, .dds etc. PzC has 3 different texture types for trees(!), though one must be the LoD one.
Ben,
The reason why PzC has some many different texture types is the following.
The game engine wants everything in dds (DXT1 bit alpha) for video memory reasons. However as you have noticed this is a compressed format which does some compression damage to your original pure/pristine source textures. For this reason K released the source textures as bmps and pngs so users would have their original source to make changes to.
Unfortunately this really swelled the size of PC for very very little benefit (most true moders are gonna start from scratch anyway).
So in terms of the engine you want do all transparency in your dds (eg via your nvidia photoshop plugin). However make sure you set your fM material settings correctly:
Diffuse 0xFF FF FF FF
Ambient 0xFF FF FF FF
Specular 0xFF 00 00 00
Emissive 0xFF 00 00 00
Shininess 1
Transparency 0%
This way it will be consistent with all the new model lighting and work in different lighting conditions.
As a special note lets assume that you were building a House which had lights on in the window at night. Then you would define a window material as
Diffuse 0xFF FF FF FF
Ambient 0xFF FF FF FF
Specular 0xFF 00 00 00
Emissive 0xFF 7F 7F 40
Shininess 1
Transparency 0%
This would give a slight yellow glow to the window at night!
Likewise lets assume you wanted to do a factory fresh tank which was shiny from the factory then
Diffuse 0xFF FF FF FF
Ambient 0xFF FF FF FF
Specular 0xFF FF FF FF
Emissive 0xFF 00 00 00
Shininess 32
Transparency 0%
This will give the tank strong highlights on its textures! (or you could do this for a window or bino glass, etc)
Howvever as no stock model (or mod model) has yet done any of that, and there were lots of emissive and specular errors in the code, my fix up program basically defaulted all the materials to the very first set of numbers so at least everything was reasonable and consistent and worked in different lighting conditions. However a good texture/material designer can do better for the future I think.
Regards
S.
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