Quanon

Allright did some more tweaking on the lightmap business. Again SS came to the rescue to get some nicer looking shadows while rendering. I'll have to send a nice box of belgian choclates to the US for my fellow modder, many thanks !!! ^^ One of the things I altered was the alpha channel of my lightmap. 3Ds Max always includes a channel. I've played around making it grey and black all over. But this doesn't seem to have any effect what so ever in the game. I'll now play around with Photoshop, altering the contrast. I did a quick dirty run and that seemed to have a effect. It's still odd, I expected the shadows to have stronger effect in the game. Oh, well. I'm more or less pleased on how it all looks right now. So here's another few shots. I've added a skybox

Time for an update. Thanks to SithSpecter I got back in the game to do some hard work on the lightmaps. Oddly enough, SithSpecters advice to do smaller lightmaps didn't work out. Did a couple of retries, just to make sure I wasn't overlooking anything. A small set back, I did another trial, using large lightmaps. And to my suprise this worked OK. Did a couple of test, to see if I got UV stretching; but no. Large lightmaps seem to work for Q but not for SS... Kotor modding at it's best, complete mistery o_O Anyhow, I'm still not 100% happy. Shadows are somehow to faint for my taste. Plus all the details get lost/ smudged out on these larger lightmaps. I'll have to go for 4096pix sizes... Hopefully the game won't crash on that. We'll see; how far I can take it. Here's how it looks so far:

I did mess around some more in PS with my Malachor skybox. Slicing off 1 or 2 pixel lines from left and/ or right. But never got it properly fixed. And got mighty frustrated with it all, to be honest x-S Oh, and sorry Kexikus for not getting back to you about Terragen. Manaan is looking mighty good though!

Nothing major to show yet. But I've spend some time to search for some new tools to help out with UV madness that's involved with making a new area. An annoying fact is that when making lightmaps is you are UV mapping twice. And I can tell you UV mapping is a more boring part of 3D, IMO, just my 2 cents The thing is once you mapped it and applied all your textures; you need a second UV map for the lightmap. Why not re-use the first UV maps? Well . . . 3Ds Max is a bit cumbersome when it comes to UV map several separate objects into 1 big UV map. Luckily helpful 3D gurus out there have scripted a few handy tools to make life easier aka being lazy and getting away with it. Anyway for all interested here a few handy links! First tool multiobjectunwrap: This little tool lets you quickly UV map lots of objects. I use it to collect all my maps of various parts of my area model. But it's a big mess! 3Ds Max has a packing tool, but this doesn't do a very good job of it, it rips apart good UV layouts and causes mistakes in the game. http://users.skynet.be/arketip/arketip_multiObjectUnwrapENG.htm Tool 2 and 3: These 2 tools help out with the packing business! No more awful seams and it takes little time! http://www.renderhjs.net/textools/ Fair warning: You still need to do some serious test runs in the game. But I feel positive that I'll get some good results. The best part is these tools are free to use. You can donate though if you want. Cheers and happy modding! Here's how it looks when doing stuff in 3Ds Max

Thanks to SithSpecter for helping out with the lightmap business. It's all about the tiny little details. So I got a part of my area in the game, using a lightmap. It looks good, but there are mistakes in the UV business. But with the tips from SS I should get better results in the future. All I did now was quick test, just to see if there was more to the crashes. Here's a peek how it looks so far:

It helps to slice your area and walkmesh into smaller models. Using the .lyt and .vis files to tell the game how to build the area out of all the little models. It does require some more tinkering with the walkmesh parts in Kaurora, so you can 'jump' from one part to another. This might help to avoid the 13Gig ram thing

No, they are windows actually. But the texture needs more work, now it's more like a place holder

Had some time left this afternoon. I plunked in the the other parts that make up my Nar Shaddaa streets. Feeling pretty happy, as just with the first part, very little faults to be found. A few minor UV mistakes and a few bits that have no texture it seems. Ofcourse it looks all to bright and a bit to clean for Nar Shaddaa. I'll be adding extra models, consisting of crates and other techy looking junk in all variant sizes and shapes. Luckely I've got already sort of back catalogue from previous attempts. But enough chatter; time for some screenshot galore!

Yahoooo! It looks like I still got the power Did another test run with my NarShaddaa street area, the first part of the area works like a charm. Only one faulty mesh. It all looks good so far. Hopefully the other parts go as smoothly as this one. Then I only need to fix up the lighting. Now it's set to be very bright, so I can spot mistakes easely. Here's a look on how things are in the game: The smaller 'indoor' part; it's a bit like at the docks of the Refugee sector. Some rooms or storage/ garages and the entrance to one of the clubs to be found in my new part of Nar Shaddaa.

I'll try to explain this in a nutshell. Areas are build up out of several models. A bit like a puzzle. I always have to devide/ slice my own made areas into smaller bits. The game uses a few files, so it knows which parts it needs to build up any given area. So to redo the UVs of the Endar Spire, you'll first need to collect all the model bits. You can find those with KotorTool. Then you'll have to import those into 3D editing program; like 3Ds Max. Means you'll have to edit a lot of smaller models, then export them out. Exporting an area model is just the same as for a lightsaber hilt or gun. Hope's this helps a bit. So here's what I've finished today. I've changed the red to be a bit darker. Solved the lighting problem. Though still need to improve the look of the shiny effect. To flat at the moment.

I think I still have a installation for a full working version of terragen on my PC.... somewhere

Thanks man! That's the thread I was talking about! I've edited my model, but something went wrong. Game crashes now, lol. I'll have to redo the export bit again. Speaking of stuff, I've dusted of that Nar Shaddaa street area. I only had last quarter to do of the whole thing. And last 2 days I've been hard at work to UVWmap that last part. I'm getting really close to start test runs in the game, Yeah baby! Some shots, can't leave a reply without some visuel goodies now.

Time to pick up where I left. Few shots from a test run I did on that last helmet. Need to fix that 'darkening' effect... Someone posted a solution to it, but I can't remember right now what that was. I'll get to it eventually

Hey, I see that Malachor gets mentioned and my textures. Note that I tried to adjust my textures to 'fit' better with cube that makes up the skies of malachor. I've also tried to replace the skybox with a new one. So that includes messing about the .Lyt and .vis files of Malachor. Sadly the game then refuses to load Malachor and crashes or just doesn't show the my new model. Since I knew that altering original models is rather difficult for areas.(lightmap issues and such) I tried to make a large placeable to function as a skybox model. Alas in the game the placeable isn't visible or doesn't get loaded for some reason. I've got the full scene in 3Ds Max where the Ebon Hawk crashlands on Malachor. I did a lot of tests but nothing really worked.