Crazy34

@Alvar007 I really like the new improvement. Great work. On the force storm. Well I guess it can be done, even if I don't know exactly how. On this site is a mod called force zeal. Its a great forcepower on its own, maybe a little op. But the lightning coming from above is the best part in my view. Their is an uncompiled nss shipping with the files but I don't understand the scripting language. So maybe and expert like you can see how the lightning is done. Just to clarify I am not asking for you to do this, just want to know what someone with the expertise thinks if its possible.

By the way force zeal is feature in this video at around 6:10

Thank you and stay safe!

@Alvar007 Great work man!!!

After seeing your new retribution force power, I ask myself if it is possible to create a new version of Force Storm similar to the version in Star Wars TOR. As a reference here a clip:

I guess the animation of the player as well as the lightning itself is the hard part, but since I have not don't animation or scripting I have no clue on how to do it. What do you think?

Keep up the great work!

@JCarter426 Thank you very much. With the documentation at hand it makes life so much easier. Also thank you for the explanation I will try these settings in the next version. I am currently trying to fix the brightness. I also need to full symmetrize the planes at some point.

@Jorak Uln The reason why in kotor the blades look brigther from the front, is that the trimesh planes of the saber are onesided facing in front. So from behind you don't get any effect from them.

@DarthParametric Is it possible to set faces to be double-sided in the ascii? Or do I need to add two more planes to the model with different orientations? Also do you know by chance with lightpriority value would be the best to use?

The only way I could imagine how to get the special effect for the black core TOR blade is to have a texture with a alpha mask which is white for the black part of the blade and has greyish something for the glow and black outside of the blade. With this alpha mask one could try to set the blending to normal (from additive as default) and see how this looks ingame. I tried and it looks promising but the bad texture creator I am I was not able to get satisfactory results.

For the double blade bug: In order to have not visible planes I could add a third 3d Model, which edge would mark the end of the glow. But personally I think it looks worse then the current state I posted before.

Jorak Uln our textures look really great. Your are right, then I am in the right state of mind I should set up a consitent texture system such that you can tweak overthing for each model seperately.

Big THANKS to DarthParametric for you help aswell as to @bead-v. I hope my lack of knowledge is not to annoying.

@DarthParametric Thank you I was not aware of that. I don't see a easy approach to use the same in Kotor. Can I ask you a model question? In the model ascii for trimesh there is the property inv_count. What is it and what is it tell me? 

@Jorak Uln I attached pictures of the double blade with the new model. Would you consider it solved?

I also encountered again my nemesis enemy bug with lightsaber blades. It is shown in the third dan fouth picture. The lightsaber hilt is visible even then it is behind the blade. I guess it is a .txi problem but I have no clue on how to solve it. The hilts texture has a alpha channel which is not 255 and the standard .txi with

envmaptexture CM_Baremetal

The blades alpha chanel is 255 and the txi is

alpha blending 1.0
blending additive
decal 1

In the model ascii both have alpha set to 1.0.

Does anyone has an idea on how to fix that bug?

Thank you very much for the help and stay safe!

Thanks for the video. This and other showed how they used the blur and I agree its over used. For the black core blades the blur seem to be white regardless. Which would make life easier for us. But I still very much islike the behavior of the blur planes. I have to think on how to replace them. Anyway In case you want to test the new 3d blades yourself I attached a new version. The textures are preliminary and at some point I need to come up with a naming convention for all the texture files.

The blue lightsaber is the one with the "black" core and the red the one with the normal white core. Tell me what you think.

Stay safe!

Test Ambient Light Lightsaber v3.rar

This thread turns more or less into a WIP. Sorry to all moderators.

I have an update for you. I think I am now more or less happy with the 3d blade core models. I made a quick lightsaber blade texture (keep in mind that I am a very bad texture creator.). I am really excited for a real artist to take on these lightsaber blades in the future. These sabers have now 3 different blade textures you can manipulate independently!

So the first to picture show the current version using my test texture. The second one is a focused version of the tipp. If you look very carefully you should be able to see the 3d glow model and the 3d core model seperate.

On the third picture you should see the difference. Dark core sabers are a thing now. Although I still didn't found the best .txi settings for it but I guess someone can help me with that? Thx to @Jorak Uln for convincing me that 3d is the way to go. Hope you enjoy.

So I have a question to you all. In the fourth and fith picture you see the motion blur trails used by the vanila game. I didn't find a way to replicate the effect for the dark core blades, since the planes use the blades texture and blending mods. The question is shall I keep them? The movies have motion blur but carried out much better. If my research was not wrong, SWTOR does not have motion blur. Pls correct me if I am wrong.

So what do you think of this?

Stay safe.

After a short rewatch of Episode I-III and RO I realized that the colored blade core has a different shape from the inner white core. I correct that, as you can see in the picture below. Both 3d core are now animated. Unfortunately I cannot animate a vibration mod on the models since they would mostly contract and don't really change in thickness.

@DarthParametric Or is there a way to rescale the axis separatly in the ascii? I only encoutered scale as a single argument.

You give me some task I have to say ; ). No but your right I should try to fix it.

My solution is to use he 3d core plus a 3d most inner glow and then the planes around for the full glow. That should fix your problem (I hope and I have to test it, when doubleblade testing is on.)

The pictures below show the 3d progress. First the not yet animated 3d glow. THe second shows the new 3d core and glow actived. For comparison I put the original blade and texture in the picture such that you can compare them directly.

So on the to do list is left:

- animate the 3d glow

- Make up my mind about the size of the 3d core and glow

- Improve the glow planes (not shown in the pictures below)

- Texture the glow (here I really need help from you Guys. Help me DS community your are our only hope!)

- Add flicker animation to 3d core and glow

- find some good looking hilts with permission to use them to give you a reason to use the blades

If ou wish for something specific this should fix etc. please tell me and I will see how we can achieve the goals with this.

Stay safe!

Here are some test pictures. On the first you see the model without the standard plane glow. On the second with lightsaber activated. I also have it animated but when you don't see the blade core at all, since it is smaller than the standard blades core texture.

@ebmar Thank you for the comment and I am glade that you liked my tuning of the parameters. Thanks for the Auroralight values. This helps if I will make it compatible with @JCarter426 mod. But at the moment I would like to change the blade itself. The reason is simple. In order to add the light to the saber I need to change the model files. So if I have to do tha anyway I can also improve the blades even beyond great texture mods like JCs.

I am experimenting with a 3d zylinder blade core (the white). But the changes are maginal compared with better blade planes uv layout. The orginial plane approch has the advantage that once they are out there, people can again do texture mods for them (I am a terrible texture painter (no artist really)). Also you can animate the core and the color glow of the blade.

With a 3d Zylinder Core it would always stay the same size and you could not animate them. Also some people like to have thin blades like rebels or the OT and others prefer the PT style. With the 3d ones you would need to change the model itself with is much more work. Mhm I don't know what to do.

What do you guys think about it? 3d or 2d? I have the 3d thing ready.

Also is there another way then planes to get the color glow and animate it?

Thanks again, good to know that we can reproduce the artifacts with different textures. As I sad I have my own spot to test this behavior so in the next days I will play around with the seetings and update you when I know more or if it helped.

So do you guess or know what the range of the settings are

LightPriority:  1 -10 ?
Ambient Only:   0 / 1 ?
Dynamic Type:   1 / 0 ?
Affect Dynamic: 0 /1 ?
Shadow:         0 / 1 this I tested, one could use the lightsaber to cast the shadow but its buggy when you are not static so this will be 0.
Flare:          0 /1 ?
Fading Light:   0 /1 ?

Thanks alot for the help!

Thanks for the reply and the screenshots. Mhm in v2 I gave the green blade 0.01 1.0 0.01 so red and blue should be present even very small. If you increase it to 0.1 it did not help I already tried after you suggest it (thanks for the tip I appreciate it.)

Can I ask you to reproduce your screen shots and try to get close to the wall but at the same panel as the first screenshot. It might not be the distance to wall but the specific part of the wall texture that change the glow. For me when i walked over a monotonic ground texture on dan for example on some spots the glow was really intense and on over it was normal. But this was on the same texture with the same distance to the ground. Only thing I can think of is the lightmap of the module itself but I have no expertise in Lightmaps at all.

Does anyone have a documentation what these options are suppost to controll?:

LightPriority:  5
Ambient Only:   0
Dynamic Type:   1
Affect Dynamic: 0
Shadow:         0
Flare:          0
Fading Light:   0

I welcome all help I can get and thank you for your patience with me.

Stay safe

@Jorak Uln I started this project to bridge time until you finish your movie texture pack which is awesome.

I tested your findings myself and I get similar results. I don't know what the problem is. At some spot on Malachor for instance I don't get ambient light at all. My guess is that it has to do with the lightmap and that the lights only amplified and colors the original light in the lightmap?  Atleast for the module area I have no clue how what works. The player models seem to be consistent.

I wonder how many different lightsabers in the same scene work and one still gets all the different colors. I attached a v2 with the lightsabers blue red green yellow. I would appreciate if anyone could test it and give me feedback on how the light interacts if multiple lightsabers are involved. As Jorak Uln pointed out we should also test it with different texture packs. Any feedback would help me alot.

Thank you very much and stay safe!

Test Ambient Light Lightsaber v2.rar

Are you happy with the light brightness and the range? I had to balance the optic in daylight spots like dantooine and onderon against the harbinger and Malachor. I played around with the color for a bit and the color you have on the test saber is r 1.0 g 0.0 b 0.0 . More saturated colors tend to look better. 

I guess next step is to try to replace the damn blade itself.

So just to prove the concept I attached picture of a two colored double bladed saber. They are in generel brighter since they have two light sources. I can only say that a lightsaber throw with ambient light looks 1000 times better. I tried to caputre it on the pictures. Updated vader picture with different values. But why just speek about it. If you want to try it out. I also attached a test version of the standard red lightsaber of Kotor II. Have fun with it and I hope for feedback and maybe help with texturing (animating) lightsaber blades in the future.

Test Ambient Light Lightsaber v1.rar

So double blade works as well. Here both blades have their own light source such that one could in principle use a two colored double blade lightsaber.

@DarthVarkor When I created the screenshoots I had the sceen from R1 in mind. Thats the reason I equiped Vaders armor. I will play around with the values, but keep in mind that the R1 corridor is tiny and therefore the lights bounds around more and seems brighter than it really is.

@Stormie97 Not really one could use the emitter gas for the glow but I did not tryed that yet. The question is does this look better (and perform as well) as a updated versions of the 2 planes with a better UV layout?

Thank you very much. Quick question would you increase the area (radius of the light) so more of the room is luminated or the brightness itself?

When I increase the area the brightness close to the lightsource is also increasd.

The first stage is complete. The lightsaber blades have ambient light now, see pictures below. I played around with the way to animate it and I ended up to change the light radius for turning the blade on and off. Works like a charm. The ambient light color is set in the controllers, color in RGB in %. Since MDLEdit (Thanks allot this makes modeling so much easier) wonderfully compiles ASCII I can create all colors in no time. I also fixed an issue with changing the module. First the light was draw, although the blade was off. This bug I could fix by setting the radius in the geometry part of 0.0 and only make it non 0.0 in the animation part of the ASCII file. As a remark I got zero hits on FPS side.

What do you think? Should I increase the radius even more? Should I increase the multiplier to make it brighter? Any suggestions?

My final goal is to release this as a modders resource such that old lightsaber mods can be updated or new can use the new blades directly. Therefore, I would personally like to have the blade model separated from the lightsaber model itself.

Hi all, hope you are all healthy and safe in this crazy times.

The lightsaber blades in Kotor really don't look that well in my opinion. The model is basicly planes with textures and the texture are taken from the top , such that you don't have full control over the final blades shape.  @Sithspecter allready has new blades in his crossguard saber mod

which I really like. Great work man!

I am planning to update the blades myself. Before I start I have some question for the real experts out here.

Do we have the shaders to change the planes into 3d zylinders? Asking since I did no follow the MdlEdit and shader news.

Could we split the blade model and the hilt model bei using hooks, like some heads are split from the body meshes? So if yes how would we do that? I guess add hooks and then compile both against a new supermodel containing the animations? I think this would really help for future lighsaber blade moding. 

I appreciate any tips you can give me.

Thank you!

Thanks for the reply.

I did some testing and your absolutly right about the indirect light. With another texture mod and vanila textures I get the same results in Kotor II as you do in Kotor I. I guess if one wants to do the rtgi serious, one would need a dedicated texture pack with new lightmaps optimised for the shader.

With the lightsaberblade I made the observation what it indeed cast light but only white light from the core, and that it is projected parallel to the blade not orthognal as you would think. So I guess for a good effect here one really needs a new lightsaberblade model.

Thanks for the pics and I am very interested in the advancement we will see in the furture for rtgi.

Hi to everyone,

I also recently played around with the resahde rtgi and from my point of view the results vary a lot in Kotor II. I used to play a highly modified Kotor II with many texture mods for the modules. The funny thing is that ray tracing needs light sources and I personally don't really understand how they are handled in game. For example, in one of the pictures

On 2/5/2020 at 1:23 PM, AndreySer said:

    Yes, those are real time lights, some pics from Ebon Hawk which kinda have similar dark environment you are describing, I made lights extra bright there to show effects.

http://www.framecompare.com/image-compare/screenshotcomparison/J20BMNNU

http://www.framecompare.com/image-compare/screenshotcomparison/DPWLPNNX

http://www.framecompare.com/image-compare/screenshotcomparison/J20BCNNU

plus old pic

http://www.framecompare.com/image-compare/screenshotcomparison/DPWLLNNX

 

we have the beautiful blue light emitted by the Ebon hawks displays. I use a texture mod on them and now they don't emit light. Can someone comment on how light emitting works in Kotor?
Second, what really bothered me in my testing was that in Kotor Lightsaber don't emit ambient light like in Jedi academy or other modern star wars games. Is there a way to change that? Assumably  with ray tracing lightsaber would look much more realistic.

Thanks for the your time and I hope some has some answers to my questions. (Hope for @Jorak Uln to finish his awesome Movie style overhaul, maybe including ray tracing option. Keep up the good work.)

PS. I would very much give the light emitting blades a try myself if someone tell me how you can achieve that.

Hi,

your right after I did the equivalent in Blender the face mesh shows up as intended. The orignal mesh was huge compared to the standard head, so fixing the scales was the fix. Thank you very much. now comes the hard part with the weighting of the mesh.

Hi DarthParametric, thank you so much for the help.

Setting Shadow to 0 solves the crash. I will ceep that in mind. So a looked at the exported model in the mdl viewer and here the face mesh is shown. In game as you can see it is not shown. I check the render flag and it is set to 1 as suggested.

Can you explain what you mean with?

7 hours ago, DarthParametric said:

At a guess, it could be that your face mesh has non-world zero pivot

Also what does the Reset XForm does? I am still using blender.

7 hours ago, DarthParametric said:

All meshes need to have a Reset XForm run on them and their stack collapsed before skinning.

Also ingame it seems that the hair and the eyes are translated closer to the neck compared to the original model.

Thanks again for the help and sorry that I not that quick picking it up.

Hey its me again with again new questions.

Can someone tell me what the hirachie is with head models and textures. So what I mean

Savegame < Module < Override

So in a savegame are changes to the mdl registered and the textures swopped?

Also do you have a good particular way to test the face animation besides from playing the game?

For creating Icons. Is there a template for the background colors?

Thanks again for the help.

Is there a limit on vertices face etc. My current model has 4850 Verts, 5150 Faces? My game runs fine in the intro so, seeing your self in the med bay, but the game crashes when it tries to start peragus. Any ideas why this is happening? (P.S. still did not weight all Verts.)