mtl files for your textures question...

Judith on 11/1/2013 at 20:49

Quote Posted by Lady Rowena

I'm totally fascinated. Too bad that all this is Greek to me. I Wouldn't even know how to start and how to make an alpha mask...

Thanks for sharing. :)

It's easy LR, you take a diffuse texture and use selection tool to define areas that are to be transparent or opaque and fill them with a proper color from grayscale range (0-255). Black color represents full transparency and white is fully opaque. Sometimes you can just desaturate diffuse texture and work on from there, other time it's more about selection tool and tedious manual work. Anyway it's not that hard :) At least I prefer modelling and working with textures to things like scripting, writing your own shaders or materials. Any code work really, even level design is so time consuming these days.

Quote:

Before NewDark does normal bump mapping, it has to be able to do pixel shading. There is a long way, I suppose, but who knows - maybe not THAT long? It already runs under DX9...

True, I forgot about that. At least NewDark has the oportunity to get proper shaders, unfortunately TDS is based on DX 8.1...

Renzatic on 12/1/2013 at 04:56

Quote Posted by PinkDot

Great job Renzatic with discovering all the mysteries of the .mtl files. I gave it a go while back ago, but got a bit frustrated with the lack of expected results. Having some working examples is a great thing.

No prob. It's kinda fun in a frustrating, tedious step by step sorta way. :P

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There's one thing I'm wondering about - as Dromed still references textures, not materials, is it possible to have two (or more) materials using the same texture? Let's say you want another version of your window, without the moon glow effect. Can you just create a separate .mtl definition without duplicating the base texture file under a different name?

I thought about this myself, actually. Right now, I don't think it's possible, because the .mtl file has to directly reference the base texture it's being used on. If you want separate instances of WindowA with and without the moon effect, you'll have to make a copy of A, name it WindowB or something, then tie it to the new effect with another .mtl file.

...BUT (and I just thought of this...)

You might be able set it up so that WindowA is a material effect itself, with the other effects being run underneath it. Your base could be some small 256x256 texture applied inside Dromed. You'd save a bit of texture memory doing this, but...well...we don't know the costs of having a bunch of materials packed in a single scene yet. You'd have to consider which would be worse. A potential performance hit, or a few extra megs of redundant textures?

Renzatic on 12/1/2013 at 05:13

Quote Posted by Judith

True, I forgot about that. At least NewDark has the oportunity to get proper shaders, unfortunately TDS is based on DX 8.1...

The questions here though are, 1. are the guys who originally worked on the new patch still at it, or is this a one time thing, and 2. if Dark goes full on pixelshaded realtime lighting, will people use it, or will it scare the everliving hell out of everyone?

Then again, taking advantage of DX9 doesn't necessarily mean it has to use realtime lighting. It could use a setup similar to Source, where it uses normal and spec textures, but bakes radiosity in sorta like Dark does now.

edit for great powah: Just found out how to make cubemaps from the modders-notes readme packed in docs.

I'M AWN IT, SONS! :mad:

Judith on 12/1/2013 at 08:49

Quote Posted by Renzatic

I'd put my bet on radiosity/lightmapping, not dynamic lights. Apparently even modern game engines like UE 3.0 use mostly static lights. The effects like flicker or pulse are done with material effects, it still looks good.

Lady Rowena on 12/1/2013 at 17:36

Quote Posted by Judith

I know how to make a simple mask using the selection tool, I did it before. But I can't understand how to make a "shaded" mask like the one in the 2nd picture.
Maybe it's because my graphic program is too old and doesn't have this feature. I had it in bundle with a Matrox Millenium G200...:o
Or maybe I just don't understand the English terms which are used, since I have the Italian version.
But I don't want to derail this thread to a "how to use your graphic program" lesson. :) I have other programs that I neglected until now, i.e. Photoshop 6. maybe it's time to start learning and experiment with them.
Thanks for answering. :)

Renzatic on 12/1/2013 at 18:41

Quote Posted by Lady Rowena

...But I don't want to derail this thread to a "how to use your graphic program" lesson. :)

Feel free to do just that. That's what this thread is here for. :)

Basically, if you know how to make a mask, you're pretty much set. The shaded bits are only a small step beyond that. I'll give you a real quick digest version.

What I usually do is make what's going to be my future alpha mask in it's own layer. It really depends on what I want to do, but I usually start with a basic grey color. I'll put it in the swapper, start defining my masks either with the magic wand, the polygonal lasso tool, or by painting it in. Once that's done, I'll fire up the hue and saturation tool and either lighten it up or darken it using the lightness slider.

From then on out, it's all about painting or throwing in grunge maps (which you can find a ton of over at (www.cgtextures.com)). I'll add in an extra layer for each bit of grunge I want to add. I'll tweak them either by painting a little extra on them, using the blur tool, or running a gaussian blur filter to get what I want, then tweak the colors using the same hue and saturation tool I did before, and/or playing with the opacity sliders. When I'm finally happy with it, I'll collapse it down to one layer, select the whole thing, and paste it into my alpha channel.

I doubt you'll gleam too much from the quick version here, but I'm always willing to answer questions, and I'm sure Judith wouldn't have a problem answering a couple or two. If you want to know how to do something, ask away, and I'll try my best to fill you in.

Judith on 15/1/2013 at 11:13

What Renz said, and yes, I'll try to help if I can :)

As for decent freeware image tools, you could try (http://www.gimp.org/) Gimp.

EnYB0La on 11/5/2013 at 14:33

Quote Posted by Renzatic

After playing around with a number of textures and effects, I've come up with a semi decent fake-specular. I'm still kinda rough with the code itself. All I've done so far is lift what was listed in the readme file, tweaked it a bit, and added a couple bits in there for flavor.

First, some screenshots...

(https://dl.dropbox.com/u/3018396/GlowMoon.jpg) Moon Glow
(https://dl.dropbox.com/u/3018396/GlowTorch.jpg) Torch Glow

I recommend saving it and watching it WMP. Playing it in Chrome makes it look sorta washed out, and I'm guessing it'll do the same on other browsers.

This is all well and good, but it ain't worth nothing to you all if I don't show you how I did it. I'll try my best here, since I'm still rather vague on what does what when it comes to the code.

First, what I do know. Alpha masks.

You'll want to start out with your base textures. Mine looks like this (sized down to half so you all don't end up with huge ass pictures blocking everything)...

Inline Image:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/3018396/Effect_Floor.jpg

Then, I made the mask and popped it into the alpha channel

Inline Image:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/3018396/Effect_Floor_Alpha.jpg

It works exactly the way an alpha does. White is opaque, black completely transparent, various shades of grey the levels between. Specifically, white = no glow, black = GLOOOOWWW, grey = diffuse glow.

This is really just a brighter than usual inverted spec map, sorta like what you'd see in TDM. It's there to control how the environment map will display over the texture. A solid black alpha would just give you a flat glow, like it's covered in perfectly smooth glass. This makes it look like floor is scuffed up, but still reflective in places.

Next up is the weird bit. Since this isn't an actual Honest To God specular map and isn't reflecting anything, I had to make a glow so it won't display straight out fullbright across the whole thing. I can't just throw in a solid blue texture. I had to make a blobby looking thing and experiment with the shape until I was happy.

This is my environment map...

Inline Image:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/3018396/Effect_Floor_Glow.jpg

Don't make a damn bit of sense, does it? I'll try to explain this...

Imagine you have a gradient circle as your environment map. When you apply it in Thief, that circle will always be following right underneath Garrett. The effect would be that you get a glow that slowly disappears the farther away it is from him. Kinda like a reverse Fresnel. You'd only ever see the reflections directly below you when you look down. A solid white environment map would just go on forever. The black kinda marks where the effect ends. I wanted to end at a certain point, but not be perfectly even. Hence the lozenge shape.

So why am I able to see the effect in my example all the way to the end of the room? Cuz I did something in the code to fix that.

So here's the code itself...

See that bit where it says uv_mod SCALE 2 2? What that does is sets it up so that my environment map is being displayed something like this in engine...

Inline Image:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/3018396/Effect_Floor_Scale.jpg

So why didn't I just make my initial texture look like that? Well...I'm still kinda learning the ropes here. This allows me to goof around with it until I get an effect I'm happy with.

So what does the code mean in general? As far as I know (and if I'm wrong, feel more than doubly free to correct me), it goes like this...

Tells the engine to draw the texture without any regard to the underlying alpha. In other words, the alpha doesn't effect the underlying texture itself. It just uses the alpha as a mask for your various effects.

...or at least that's what I think it does. Taking it out doesn't produce any noticeable differences as far as I can tell. Maybe I just wasn't looking hard enough.

Adds a layer of pixels surrounding the edges of your alpha. Like if you have a chain link fence texture with the black part of the alpha the spaces between the links, it'll draw a padding of purple pixels around those.

Texture location. DERP!

Strenth of the overlaying alpha effect, going from 0.0 (not drawn) to 1.0 (overlaid in full without any blending whatsoever).

I actually like my effect set at 0.4. It's more subtle, and looks better in darker sections of the map. I bumped it up to 0.6 for the videos and screenshots.

Blending type. I'm a bit iffy on what does what here at the moment. Based on what little I know about programming, this isn't quite like layer effects in Photoshop, but more about the end results being sent from a source (which I think is your texture) to the destination (I think is the frame buffer). What you get are sorta like the layer effects in Photoshop, but...GAWWWW!

Breaks my damn brains is what it does. I gotta play with this more to see what does what.

The readme does a good job explaining this bit. You can use this to overlay a texture, bake on a lightmap from a different source, give it an environment effect (what I did here), or make it display a cubemap in the alpha.

...though ENVIRONMENT and PROJECTION don't seem to produce different results from my limited experimentation with them. this might be because I don't have an actual cubemap to play with yet.

See above.

Okay, this last bit. What I think it does is allows a materialed texture to have a lightmap baked onto it when you portalize your maps. Still not 100% sure on this one, either.

Next up, I'll tell you all how I did my windows in the RIGHT NOW thread. It's basically the same thing, but with one extra step and a different alpha map configuration.

Great!

gamophyte on 14/9/2014 at 05:45

The video appears to be gone. I'd like to see it if you can upload again. Thanks for the break down.

Renzatic on 14/9/2014 at 06:03

Eh. I'd have to remake the whole video, and you're not missing out on a whole bunch. I just move left and right a few times to show off the effect. If you've seen a specular texture in action (which you have if you've played any games made post 2007 or so), you have a good idea of what it looks like.