Kexikus

Hi, I had a look at those files today and from what I saw they looked really great. Hopefully someone will use them in the future to make a bigger Coruscant expansion for either game. However, I was hoping to find the full Jedi temple model shown in the preview image. Unfortunately that one doesn't seem to be included. Is there a way to get this model?

Thanks for the reply guys. Upon checking the skybox again after a good night of sleep I agree with you. The static smoke doesn't work. However, I found a way to get animated smoke instead: Particles Below you can see a video demonstration with the vanilla particle smoke in the foreground and both the old static smoke on the skybox in the background and the new animated background smoke. I'll tweak the particle settings some more and remove the static smoke of course but I think this is already going in a very nice direction. You can also see the changed fog color that blends much better with the skybox now (Look for that round building in the middle of the screen and compare it to the screenshot in my last post.)

Thanks, that's exactly what I was going for but I wasn't quite sure whether it fit the lore. What do you guys think of this background smoke? It's not animated of course, unlike the ingame foreground smoke and I'm not quite sure whether I like it.

It's getting somewhere: The background buildings are partially from the game, partially self modeled after game models and partially from SWTOR. There's still some models and details like smoke from the chimneys missing but the overall look is pretty much what I want already. I'll also add some 2d backdrop buildings to bridge the gap and blend between the ingame terrain and the skybox. Otherwise the difference is just too obvious especially in the Central Zone. Now, I don't know alot about the lore of M4-78 so if this industrial and dirty look is somehow completely wrong, please let me know ASAP and I'll try to design something new. I will make them a little softer but not as much as in your image. I personally prefer them with hard edges and that way they match the ingame godrays better as well.

I just cannot stop myself from tweaking stuff. So while preparing skyboxes for and doing the final renders, I reworked K1 Korribans colors. Not because the old ones were bad but they strayed quite a bit from vanilla, making a seamless blend much harder. So I tuned them closer to vanilla and thus got a way better blend and overall look. Here's what it looks like now (final high quality renders and correct colors): And the old version with low quality test renders:

Thanks for the kind words everyone! Right now I would say: Not at all. I'm pretty sure that I could learn how to make such textures but at the moment I lack both the skill and the tools for it. All of those wallpapers are actually rendered in Full HD but I only ever posted lower res versions here and completely forgot that you cannot simply click it to get to the full version on imgur. In any case, I'll release them all in an archive once I'm done. But for now, here's Kashyyyk: https://imgur.com/blupSB5 Thanks for that link. Very interesting to read and it might have helped with some issues I had if I had seen that about three years ago. But I think I managed to work around that pretty well so I guess I'll stick with my current method xD

And that's a wrap! (Or at least almost) So I started the final renders in full quality. The results are amazing if I may say so myself, but check for yourself (click on the images to see them in full size): Apart from doing all the render work, there are still some small things to fix and Telos to finish. For the latter I need to decide whether to go with the lightning or not and I also want to tweak the clouds some more. And then there are the mod skyboxes I want to create. Most of those should be pretty straightforward but a few will need more work. Among those is M4-78 which is also the one I started with. Here's what it currently looks like. The sky is working pretty well already but the buildings are obviously still missing. Let me know what you think.

I don't know but my guess is forever. Some simple ones like Tatooine are probably done in about an hour but the Dxun skybox above is probably more in the range of 10+ hours per texture at least if not more than 20. That's why I'll be using a render farm instead of my computer as I would really like to be able to use it for something else than rendering over the coming months.

Dxun is done! It turned out to be more complex than expected to get both sky and terrain right. I increased the overall contrast to get a better storm sky but then the terrain did no longer blend with the ingame terrain at all and adding more fog only washed out the nice storm clouds. So in the end I went with a composite of two (kinda three actually) layers that overall give a nicer blend for everything. I'm very happy with the end result and that leaves only some model edits for the Nar Shadda swoop track and for the Taris Undercity before the vanilla part of this project is ready for rendering Probably, yeah. I wonder if it would be possible to replace them with low poly 3d models though. Could the game handle that?

Depending on what changes the two files contain it could also be possible to use TSLPatcher for that. Use TSLPatcher to create an installer by comparing one of the two to the vanilla version, then run that installer to patch the other one. But that only works if they change things in different places or only add entries and don't change them.

Also remember that the whereami armband and I assume the force power as well give you the orientation of the player character and not the orientation of the camera. So make sure to go into first person to accurately rotate your character before getting the rotation.

No. It can just distribute models (e.g. trees) on a terrain. The only software that auto-generates trees that I know of is SpeedTrees but I have never used that. I agree though. Those ugly planes should be replaced... Not sure how to go about that without adding thousands of polys to the area models.

Over the last days I created a detailed spreadsheet of all modules in both games and their skybox and backdrop textures in order to get a clearer overview of all the files needed in the final mod. While doing so I also went though all modules again, double checking that I have not missed any skybox. And to no surprise, I had missed quite a few. No new textures are necessary for those but they needed the improved skybox model I created for this project so they all got it. There's one module that still needs some fixes and that's the Nar Shadaa swoop track but apart from that the models are all done. I also found another backdrop texture that I had not known about before which is used in the Taris Undercity. So I'm currently working on updating that one as well although the vanilla one is pretty good already. Apart from that I continued working on the final skybox: Dxun Jungle Tomb. Here's what I currently have. Note however, that I'm still tweaking pretty much everything about that skybox, the general look should stay about the same however.

Haven't tried that yet as I was hoping to avoid to go through the process of saving an ascii just to recompile it afterwards in the very same tool. But using an ascii would certainly be a workaround as I can then easily change the value in a texteditor. Either way, it should work with a binary as well I think.

Found another issue with mdledit sadly. I cannot change the "affected by fog" parameter in the header of a model. When I go into the edit window of the header values, I can change it just fine but even when I save those changes, the value is not updated in the main model window. Changing other values works fine though so I think I'm doing what I'm supposed to do.

I don't think WalkSwitch is the right tool for that. But it can easily be done by importing the module into Max (or probably Blender).

I would say that even with the default Jedi robe you could get quite close to this. You couldn't have the cloak and probably not all of the leather pouches but apart from that it could work pretty well and would be something I'm also very interested in.

Here's another one: Manaan underwater The biggest change compared to V1 is that there is no longer a ceiling where my texture doesn't work at all. So you can use the free camera all you want and it will look good. I also changed the blending of the lightrays as well as their animation so they work better now. The rotation is now slower than in vanilla, there's less color banding than in V1 and the blue background has a very subtle animation as well. The latter is hard to see on the texture, harder to see ingame and probably impossible to see with Youtube compression. But it's there and makes the background less static. Please let me know what you think. If any changes are necessary I have to make them this week before my After Effects trial license expires. I also rendered some more lightning textures for Telos to test this idea with some more variation. I'm honestly undecided on whether or not I like it, so please let me know what you think.

Encountered a small bug today or at least a small issue. The "uvdirectionx" and "uvidrectiony" parameters for animated UV maps have a smallest possible value of 0.001 but there are actually vanilla models like the Manaan underwater skybox that use smaller values that are rounded when importing them into Max. The same is probably true for other parameters as well but that's where I noticed it.

As I mentioned last time, I was going to tweak the Tatooine skybox some more even though I had considered it almost done quite some time ago. The reason for that was that I had never been able to really match the skybox lighting and sand color to the ingame terrain. I had come closer with V2 than in my initial release but I wasn't really happy with it yet, so it had been on my agenda to go back and fix that. You can see that in the following image. As you can see the shadow parts of the dunes are way too dark so they don't blend with the foreground terrain at all. So I set out to fix that and now, approximately a hundred iterations later I finally arrived at a result I'm happy with. The lighting in the game is very cheaty with several different light sources creating that yellow-orange-ish light, making it impossible to replicate that with two suns and a uniform sandcolor as I had it in the skybox. I considered changing the ingame lighting for a while but that didn't turn out any good so in the end I just cheated myself. I added a third sun that lights only the ground and recolored individual parts of the sand dunes to get the correct colors in every direction. It took a lot of iterations but now I'm really happy with the result. While doing so I also realised that the skybox terrain didn't match the ingame one either. You can kinda see that on the screenshot above although it was more obvious in other places that the skybox dunes were just too small. So I widened those as well. That cause issues with the overcomplicated and unflexible way the terrain was set up. This was after all the very first terrain I ever created in Terragen and hasn't really changed much since then. So I basically rebuilt the terrain. You don't see that in the end result but it's working much better now. But I guess that's enough talk from me and you want to see some screenshots. So here you go: It's the same perspective as before but the terrain and skybox blend much better. And just for fun, here's another screenshot: That's another skybox checked off and thus almost finishing K1. Only Manaan underwater and a few fixes here and there remain.

That's the same one I have but a public link is always more useful than me sending it via PM. Thanks for finding it SH!

I think I might still have it somewhere. I'll have a look on the weekend.

IIRC you're missing the "Texture variation" from your texture name. If you look at your uti file you see that the texture variation is 1 so I think the game expects the texture to be called hermet_robe01.tga. "hermet_robe" from appearance.2da and 01 as the texture variation. Or maybe I'm just dead wrong and someone else has to chime in.

Try removing the spaces from the folder name. Maybe that's an issue although I can't recall KotOR mods having an issue with that. Also, did you extract any other mods to the same folder?