Quanon

No worries, I will release them. I just want to do a few extra colors Meanwhile, I've been testing KotorMax and MDLedit. An updated version of NWmax and MDLops, which was the tool I used for about everything 3D related. I now have used the tool for a first serious attempt at getting a new area in the game. The experience has been great. Things work pretty good from the go. I only had to correct a few bothersome meshes; still have a few left. Looks like the rescaling I did on some of my machines got lost on the exporting or compiling. Walk-mesh creating has been a blast as well. I don't think I ever got a good result from the very first test. Camera gets blocked of as well; which used to be an annoying affair to get corrected. Often meaning things got broken beyond repair sometimes. I do still have some issues, with my Light maps. It looks like UVs got destroyed. I might have done to many 3D meshes in one go for the tools to handle. So I cheated a bit. I just turned all of my light maps in a neutral grey. Which at least made my area visible for inspection. This is an updated model for my Scrapyard mod. It's the landing bay. So far only the Ebon Hawk and Barracuda, use their proper Light maps; all the other stuff has the "cheating" lightmap applied MIND, this is sort of an alpha or beta build. I'm very aware of the faults!

Quanons Jolee Reskin View File Quanons Jolee Reskin. It has taken me some time to get the last of my reskins out of the door. But it's here! Jolee, the old Jedi hermit, crazy wisecracking cook, had been done for some time. So have a peek at the screenshots, as I've given him the same treatment as my other reskins. A nice size boost; which allowed me to put in a more texture to his skin and clothes. I've kept his classic vanilla look, so no changes to his design. Just more crisp and sharp looking details all over. Jolee comes with 3 differant icons. I've put those in a folder. When installing just rename the icon properly. You only need to remove the '02' or '03' suffix. For the other files, just copy them to the Override and done! By demand a more hairy chest version has been added! Submitter Quanon Submitted 06/24/2017 Category Skins K1R Compatible  

So if folks are wondering on how I do this portrait rendering, here follows a quick and dirty run down: The place to start is a tutorial I made some time back, as part of a lightmap tutorial. This part deals about setting up the render engine and lighting: http://www.mediafire.com/file/kw7btvf80epzcyp/Lights%26Render.pdf I'll now list a few extra tweaks I found that improved the look of the portraits, since the above mentioned tutorial deals more with lighting an area instead of a character. A first note/change: When reading the tutorial, pause at the step where you switch 'on" Global Illumination (Step 2 on the screenshot) ;-) There is a small box called Multiplier, it has a value of 1,0. You can enter 5,0 in there. Below that is Maximum Photons per sample; this is set to 500. Jack it up to 40.000. Keep following the instructions about how to setup the lights and other bits. Nothing changes there. Next use MDLops to compile your model to ASCII. Use NWmax to import. To setup a good shot of the character: 1. First, make a big box that surrounds the model. 2. Turn the box into an Editable Poly (for example, the right-click menu has "Convert To..."->"Editable Poly"). 3. Chamfer the ceiling and floor edges in the back. 4. Delete the front and sides of the box. 5. Change the selection to "Select by Element" and click on the box. 6. Then use the Flip button. Now all of the faces face inwards. 7. With all the faces still selected, scroll down to smoothing options. Click on autosmooth. Deselect the faces. Now you can open the Material editor (M-key). Change any slot from the Standard material to Arch&Design. In the options of this material, there is a drop down list. Pick 'Pearl Finish'. Apply this material to the chamfer 'box' background. Add in some lights (3 to 4 lights works best). 3 to 4 spotlights work best; only one of them casts shadows. Depending on the model, Shadowmap ( soft-edged shadows) or RayTraced Shadows ( hard crisp edges) work best for your render. Example screenshots for the spotlights: This is how my scene looks like: View of the material thingy I talked about: Getting the shot: 1. Select any viewport, just click on it. 2. Hit the P-key to change it to an Perspective 3D view. Move around the view until you get the view/shot/look of the character you want. 3. Hit Ctrl+C to create a camera, followed by Shift+F. This will set the Safe Frame. The view port now has the same size and dimensions as what your rendered image will be. If that is set at 800x600, the view will now look like that. If it is set at 1024x1024, the viewport will now be square. You can further tweak the camera, even move it around in the other viewports. You'll see the changes in the 3D viewport instantly. To get the same camera setup I used (to get a look that closely resembles the game portraits), set the camera like this: Lens: 43 - 44 ( a value in between) FOV: 45.00 These are the only options you will need to tweak a little sometimes. It depends on the pose and look of the character. Notice that in the example screenshots of my scenes, the camera is really close to the character. Example screenshots: Remember, just like the meshes, you can move the camera object and it's target with the move and rotate tool. Like this you can really capture the perfect shot. For the skins of the character I just use the Standard material (all of the character textures will be in at least one slot in the Material Editor, though a different one than the one we used earlier). I drop the skin into the Diffuse slot, as well as the Spec Color, Spec level, Glossiness, and Bump slots. Then I can play around with the specular values and the glossiness. For human skin I mostly go for Spec 55 and Gloss 35. For the Bump slot, I scale back to 15 or 5. After all of this, you can render a shot using the Render menu. Notes: You can play around with the values, it just depends on what you want. Just experiment, do lots of little test renders. Best at 512x512 for example. Quick to do and you get a good idea on how the end result looks like.

So if folks are wondering on how I do this portrait rendering, here follows a quick and dirty run down: Place to start, is a tutorial I made some time back, it was part of a lightmap tutorial. But this part deals about setting up the render engine and lighting: http://www.mediafire.com/file/kw7btvf80epzcyp/Lights%26Render.pdf I'll now list a few extra tweaks, I found that improved the look of the portraits. Since the above mentioned tutorial deals more with lighting an area instead of a character. A first note/ change, when reading the tutorial, the step where you switch 'on" Global Illumination. Step 2 on the screenshot ;-) There is a small box called Multiplier, it has a value of 1,0. You can enter 5,0 in there. Below that is Maximum Photons per sample; this is set to 500. Jack it up to 40.000. Keep following the instructions about how to setup the lights and other bits. Nothing changes there. Next use MDLops to compile your model to ASCII. Use NWmax to import. Now to get a good shot of the character, first, make a big box that surrounds the model. Turn the box into a Edit Poly. Then Chamfer the back ceiling and floor edges. Then delete front and sides. Select by Element, click on the box. Then use the Flip button. So that all faces, now, face inwards. With all the faces still select, scroll down to smooting options. Click on autosmooth. Deselect the faces. Open the Material editor ( M-key). Change any slot, from the Standard material to Arch&Design. In the options of this material, there is a drop down list. Pick 'Pearl Finish'. Apply this material to the chamfer 'box' background. Add in some lights. Three to 4 lights works best. This is how my scene looks like: View of the material thingy I talked about: Select any viewport, just click on it. Hit P-key to change it to an Perspective 3D view. Move around the view. Untill you get the shot of the character you want. Then hit Ctrl+C to create a camera. Next hit Shift+F. This will set the Safe Frame. The view port now has the same size and dimensions as what your rendered image will be. If that is set at 800x600pix, the view will now look like that. If it is set at 1024x1024 the viewport will now be square. You can further tweak the camera, even move it around in the other viewports. You'll see the changes in the 3D viewport instantly. For the skins of the character I just use the Standard material. I drop the skin into the Diffuse slot. But also into the Spec Color, Spec level; Glosiness and Bump slots. I then play around with the specular values and the glosiness. For human skin I mostly go for Spec 55 and gloss 35. Bump I scale back to 15 or 5. You can play around with the values, it just depends on what you want. Just experiment, do lots of little test renders. Best @ 512x512 for example. Quick to do and you get a good idea on how the end result looks like. This is just a very quick run down of things. I might create a more noob friendly tutorial later on.

So, I finally have something to show for this mod. Besides my areas I made years ago. I planned on creating some extra placeables to decorate and pimp older modules and the new ones. Though, it took me some time to get it all going. Thanks to Bead-V for checking my work, as I wouldn't be able to show this tiny victory! A new display, it smaller then I thought, but it's animated. I'm messing about with Genetica 4.0. It helps me to create animated things. Though it's node based, so I need further dig myself in. I'm very visual, so I really like doing things in Photoshop. But I guess combining these two might give me really nice results. The shot below is just a place holder texture. It was a very experiment in Genetica. Had some more texturing fun. I have now a wobbly dancing Juma Juice

Well, for my own reskins I made for the K1 party: I only used the old game texture for the color. (Just gave it a minor blurr; mostly use a black/ white copy to boost shadows and highlights, with a layer set on Overlay or Soft Light. Tweak Opacity or adjust it via Adjustment layers. Working none-destructive ;-) ) And as a guide for the layout or where certain folds; belt buckles.. etc, details are. I then used various other photos of "textures" from fabrics, like burlap, cotton, leather...etc and a few Photoshop filters combinations, plus playing around with layer options, to get some effects. Then endlessly tweaking contrasts/ brightness... vibrance... or Levels to get a result YOU like. For the human skin, well, the internet is full of bare human skin, I don't think I need to point out where to look The thing you need to look for when you are searching for your materials is the size of the pictures. Preferable 2000pix and up. Like that you can just use a part of the texture or re-scale it to your own liking. The bigger it is the more you can play around with it. A good scource: https://www.textures.com/ Free to use, no need to pay, but you can only download about 15 textures a day and not always the premium quality. But they have a huge selection some really great stuff to be found. Sadly Mayang textures is gone; was another good site. Still just using google sometimes gives you what you need. But as DP pointed out, the UVs for most models have really bad parts; so these can be really annoying as they can wreck details.

Taking a minor break from the portrait rendering today. As I didn't have much time to do some modding; I decided to do some color tests for Mission. As I mentioned those when I started this whole reskin the party business Just a very basic test for how strong the color should be for her skin. Eyes and eyebrows need extra work, plus each color might need some tweaks on contrast/ highlights. Clothing will remain the same for now. So far I've got a green, red and white/ ivory version in the cooker. Mind this is just for pure fun. I've got lots of things in the running, this is just something for whenever I feel like it

Well, I'm testing Mdl-edit tool by Bead-V. Also some improved 3Ds Max scripts for NWmax. Which has given me a lot of insight into the swoopbike model. I've did another test, I started to add in a list of the animations and all the "keys" it needs. 5 anims for switching gears up 5 to switch gears down About 10 anims for turning left and 10 for turning right 1 for boosting 1 for taking damage 1 for Gear 0, idle... etc... It's more then I thought Tried to stay as close as possible to the orginal setup, so the aurorabase is set to effect. I can add the list of animations, but they don't get exported. Somehow it only exports out one animation, labeled "on". It might be the type of aurorabase, the effect one, doesn't list a box of animations in its options. So I might change it to other or something. I've no idea if the game is just being picky or not. But I'll see how it goes. So far the result remained the same. The swoop track loads, but, nothing happens; no movement.

I just did a quick and dirty test on the swoop bike thing. Before I get to do some rendering for another little project with SH. I've been trying to import v_superbike.mdl into 3ds Max. That is the model used by the game as your swoopbike. But when importing Nwmax "crashes", something about the animations. Not sure what is causing it. So far the oldest version of MDlops gives the best result. As when Nwmax does the crash, I rerun the script; and then the model appears. But the animations are not okay. Only two animations remain and they are seriously wrecked. So I can't redo new animations for my own swoop bike model. As I don't know how many the old model has and how the animation are done on its timeline. I also don't know the "class" the Aurorabase belongs to: is it an item? character? or just Other? But to get a start I just made a very simple boxy model and did an export, compiling with MDlops and dropped the thing in the override. To my suprise the swoop bike track gets loaded on Manaan. But it looks wrong, the GUI is not OK, neither does my swoop bike move. The countdown works, but then nothing happens. Hitting esc just pauses the game. So it's task manager to quit It would seem the animations are important to get the swoop to work like it should. But since I can't get a good ASCII to look at in 3Ds Max, I'm sort of stuck, with experimenting blindly... If there are more techy folks here, who also understand the Binary format; do you think it's possible to tell me how the animations go? Not sure what is possible in that regard though; but any pointers would be helpfull. For the curious, this how it looked. The little grey box is my model. I've also been messing around with the camera 2DA, so perhaps that is why the GUI looks wrong? Anyhow, back to the rendering business first!

Yes, but you'll need to write up your script for all the quests and things you want the player to do. Lay it all out. So that I and you know what MUST be included in which model. And how many models you want. I won't start on anything just yet before I get more details But let's keep that for the PMs. I'm just running a lot of things at once, my own mod ideas, plus other projects with other modders.

OMG; hahaha; what is that? Zardoz commands you! Ahum, by request, Jolee with a more hairy chest, legs and arms; not Connery levels though. Not certain which fan base I'm serving here