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  On 8/31/2013 at 6:33 PM, VarsityPuppet said:

Have you considered adding "make-up" to accentuate certain features of face textures? Obviously not traditional make-up, I mean sort of in the same sense they use make up in movies so an actors face looks more vibrant.

 

A good example is Atton's face. It looks like he's wearing eyeliner and lipstick is you look hard but it doesn't look that weird in game.

 

Jana is wearing makeup, not just what I added to around the eyes but I also tried darkening areas of the skin so that at least some definition appears in-game. The way the game renders it and probably the use of specular, made it the way it is -- it's not quite that sickly color outside of the game.

 

Anyway, I decided to move on to the aliens for a reason, as what I learn with them I can then inform my technique with the human faces.

 

  On 8/31/2013 at 9:25 PM, Mandalore said:

Those Coruscant shots are excellent!

 

I lucked out with good source material that I could use; hate to think of how hard they would have been if I had to do them from scratch -- like I probably would have to do with Nar Shaddaa ;). Still, learned a lot about how to make better skyboxes...

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  On 9/1/2013 at 3:35 AM, sELFiNDUCEDcOMA said:

 

Anyway, I decided to move on to the aliens for a reason, as what I learn with them I can then inform my technique with the human faces.

 

I'd be quite interested to see what you can do to improve the Twin Suns (2 female twi'lek assassins). Never quite like how they were portrayed, I always thought they looked fake. I'm pretty sure you could make them appear less artificial and more vibrant.

 

Something that changes about as much as what you did for Luxa.

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  On 9/1/2013 at 12:14 PM, MrPhil said:

I'd be quite interested to see what you can do to improve the Twin Suns (2 female twi'lek assassins). Never quite like how they were portrayed, I always thought they looked fake. I'm pretty sure you could make them appear less artificial and more vibrant.

 

Something that changes about as much as what you did for Luxa.

 

Yeah, I'll do them eventually, but probably after the other Twi'lek female heads. Though, I won't do them exactly like Luxa ;). Luxa is willing to do whatever it takes to succeed in her life / career -- she is a sociopath. The Twin Suns aren't really motivated by money, all they are interested in is killing -- they are psychopaths.

 

Decided to get around to doing the remaining textures (flickering screens) for the damaged version of the Ebon Hawk:

 

 

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The damage Ebon Hawk textures continued..

 

 

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Nice ebon-improvements.

 

By the way, I did not ask for some "exact" replica of what you gotta be thinking. I was more thinking about the general improvement and more realistic looking textures. For example, instead of being pink just like a cartoon, the Zeltron gets a blushed upper-cleavage (which reminds me of a natural reaction of the body upon releasing pheromones, for example). That kind of small details are what matters to me. Simple recolours bore me, which is why I appreciate that kind of change all the more.

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Darth Sion (along with showing Harbinger textures). This is a WIP in that I am just focusing on the skin at the moment; but as I was also working on the Harbinger textures, I thought I'd take some screens and put them up anyway.

 

 

 

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The Sion series continued with a focus on his head... Again, this is a WIP as I am just focused on the skin in that I'm trying to make it more finely textured and less glossy via specular.

 

 

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Hey SIC, are you familiar with the Darker Peragus mod? If you could do something like that, at least for the Harbringer, that would be lovely. I feel like sh*t for not asking earlier, seeing as Peragus is way finish, but I always loved the atmosphere of that mod (plus it makes sense to me that the Harbringer would lack power to have proper lightning, after Sion's attack). Problem is I do not think the mod would be compatible with yours... Tell me what you think ;)

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  On 9/3/2013 at 5:59 PM, MrPhil said:

Hey SIC, are you familiar with the Darker Peragus mod? If you could do something like that, at least for the Harbringer, that would be lovely. I feel like sh*t for not asking earlier, seeing as Peragus is way finish, but I always loved the atmosphere of that mod (plus it makes sense to me that the Harbringer would lack power to have proper lightning, after Sion's attack). Problem is I do not think the mod would be compatible with yours... Tell me what you think ;)

 

The textures that that mod contains appear to be all lightmap texture. Currently, I haven't touched any of these, so, you should just be able to use them with mine. Not sure how it will all look though.

 

I might do my own as well, as I want it to be darker in their without having to make the textures themselves dark. But, I'm not sure, as I'm trying to get various things done so that I can then do an update for people to use. I'm kind of running out of time and want (need) to move on to other things. The rub is is that I know that if I move onto something else, I may not come back to working on the mod for a long while ;).

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That damaged Ebon Hawk is legit. I thought the stars were a little too dark before, but now put in context with the exterior of the damaged EH they work perfectly. You've really made the half-exploded planet look way more realistic. And oh gosh, the Harbinger looks loads better.

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Beyond some future tweaks, I've come to a point where I'm happy with the Harbinger textures:

 

 

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Looking good. I particularly like the removal of the blue, if only for atmospheric purposes (I never hated it myself but the ship definitely does look creepier without it around).

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Harbinger last of; these are of the fuel line leading from the Harbinger to the facility...

 

 

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Darth Sion final -- for now...

 

 

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With Sion, I made his "good" eye have a cataract. As Kreia says:

 

 

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I always found it a bit odd that Sion could not see Kreia, as it clearly seems like he has one good eye left. I have a theory that all of the triumvirate "Darths" -- perhaps even Nihilus; who at that point was just a spirit residing within his former armor and mask -- are physically blind. They all see via the force -- Sion, Kreia not to mention, Visas (Nihilus' Shadow Hand) -- which enables them to find force sensitives; something I take it Nihilus is big on.

 

The Sith Assassins you encounter on the Harbinger, have been trained by them, in particular, Sion. What they are taught are techniques based upon what Sion has learned in order to make up for being blinded by his power; his power can hold his body together as a vessel for his force-strong spirit to reside in and tether him to the world of the living, however, it is not strong enough to regenerate his flesh back into being living.

 

He is essentially a reanimated corpse, which is reinforced when you undermine his beliefs in the end so that his "faith" wavers and so does the will / force holding him together. His physical vessel, his body, crumples to the ground as his spirit finally departs the world of the living.

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Working on various textures I started and didn't complete or just didn't start because they need so much work to make look good. The ones I've completed at the moment are all to do with the signage used on Telos station along with Nar Shaddaa...

 

 

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Sign variants of textures as seen on Nar Shaddaa...

 

 

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I had to fix some of those billboard textures for my mod too. For some of the text, it looks like they shrunk it to fit, since some of the characters are very close together. That is, if the texture wasn't made at a higher res, and then downsized. I'll have to do something similar with the rest, as I've only done the TEL_BBrds texture. Technically the rest fit the mod's theme, but don't look the best. The only thing I don't know is how I'm going to 'fix' the twi'lek dancer advert. I'm really wondering what screwed those textures up, so they cannot be easily edited. Even having them in the override, unedited(at least unchanged from how they are when extracted), makes the animation display incorrectly.

 

That aside, I really like what you've done with these textures.

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I think they hand painted the letters rather than using a font -- there are at least 2 for aurebesh I know of along with a bunch of others for Star Wars. They probably didn't exist when the game was made. I have a feeling they were quickly made either as a temporary measure or last moment; as they are very low in quality compared to the original sign textures of KOTOR.

 

The textures though generally square are used on non-square surfaces; so they get stretched (or squished) making things look more pixelated than they should be.

 

The only tool I know of and use to extract textures as TGA is KOTOR Tool. Maybe it is the tool that is creating them this way, as it also has problems viewing normal (bump) maps even though it can export them out as TGA just fine. But my guess is that this is how they were created for the game by whatever tool Obsidian developed for creating their TPC image files. There may be some good reason for this, but, I really doubt it. It seems to me that they went out of their way to make modding these textures as difficult as possible, as the garbling seems to me to be completely unnecessary.

 

FYI: this can probably be tested by exporting the animated texture as a TPC, if it shows up normally in game, then I think that the game treats TGAs differently.

 

If the animated texture is based on another one, like a console. Then you better off simply using this as a base to create all the varied frames of your animation, then, you combine them into the one texture. In the case of the Twi'leks, there was no texture it was based on and it was so garbled that piecing together the original texture, or just one frame of it, would be pointless. Especially as I don't really like the texture to begin with -- it's kinda lame, like the dancing animation is kinda lame ;).

 

You're just better off creating the frames yourself, to suit your mod -- free vector / clipart can be a big help; and can be edited and exported as PNGs by Inkscape -- and then combining it into the one image. Each frame needs to have the same length of sides, and be square and cleanly divisible by 2 -- like 512X512 -- however, they actually don't need to be the same length so as to create a large square. Some texts will imply that they have to be, they are wrong ;).

 

So, you can have a texture that is 1536x512 in size that is made up of a row of 1 made up of 3 frames. Then you have to create your TXI file for it -- which you probably now is just a TXT file renamed to TXI. It should have the same filename as the texture and have something like this in it:

 

 
  Quote
 
envmaptexture CM_Baremetal
proceduretype cycle
numx 3
numy 2

fps 0.5 

 

 

This simply says that the row length (x) is made up of 3 frames and that there are 2 rows (y). You don't need the "envmaptexture CM_Baremetal" line, but as the texture it's for uses specular, it does -- left it in to show that these two don't have to be mutually exclusive. There is also no need to set how large a frame is by setting an X and Y for it, as the game is smart enough to use the above to figure it out by itself -- which makes it easier if you decide that you want to shrink the size of the texture, as you don't have to keep on updating the TXI file.

 

The "fps" part is frames-per-second, and usually you want to put in a whole number, however, you can also put n a decimal if you want frames to stay for longer than what the game considers to be a second.

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  On 9/10/2013 at 8:49 AM, sELFiNDUCEDcOMA said:

 

You're just better off creating the frames yourself, to suit your mod -- free vector / clipart can be a big help; and can be edited and exported as PNGs by Inkscape -- and then combining it into the one image. Each frame needs to have the same length of sides, and be square and cleanly divisible by 2 -- like 512X512 -- however, they actually don't need to be the same length so as to create a large square. Some texts will imply that they have to be, they are wrong ;).

 

So, you can have a texture that is 1536x512 in size that is made up of a row of 1 made up of 3 frames. Then you have to create your TXI file for it -- which you probably now is just a TXT file renamed to TXI. It should have the same filename as the texture and have something like this in it:

 

 

 

This simply says that the row length (x) is made up of 3 frames and that there are 2 rows (y). You don't need the "envmaptexture CM_Baremetal" line, but as the texture it's for uses specular, it does -- left it in to show that these two don't have to be mutually exclusive. There is also no need to set how large a frame is by setting an X and Y for it, as the game is smart enough to use the above to figure it out by itself -- which makes it easier if you decide that you want to shrink the size of the texture, as you don't have to keep on updating the TXI file.

 

The "fps" part is frames-per-second, and usually you want to put in a whole number, however, you can also put n a decimal if you want frames to stay for longer than what the game considers to be a second.

 

Yeah, most of the setup for animated textures I already know. Although I didn't know the height and width values weren't needed.

 

The funny bit, is that you can actually find the TXI information for textures that should have it(though I didn't discover this myself, although at the moment I forget who did). Clicking on the "Hex Viewer" option while a texture is selected, brings up the Byte Viewer. Then click the ANSI option, and at the bottom of the window, is the txi information the texture uses by default.

 

I did try and fix that dancer advert texture already, although unfortunately, I only have eleven frames, provided by another user here. Just copying the last only makes the animation seem to skip, and getting each frame in the exact place where the transition between the frames is seemless, isn't exactly easy. But at this point, I'm a bit more keen on replacing the thing, than trying to deal with that.

 

Although I have done animated textures before, that lightsaber blade mod I made was far easier. With this texture mod though, I did animate one of the pannel textures on Peragus, mostly just using simple fades in each frame. I also animated the Kolto tank, mostly to make the large pipe look like it was constantly pumping or filtering the kolto, although that I think I have to fix, which shouldn't be too difficult.

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  On 9/10/2013 at 6:56 AM, Rtas Vadum said:

I had to fix some of those billboard textures for my mod too. For some of the text, it looks like they shrunk it to fit, since some of the characters are very close together. That is, if the texture wasn't made at a higher res, and then downsized. I'll have to do something similar with the rest, as I've only done the TEL_BBrds texture. Technically the rest fit the mod's theme, but don't look the best. The only thing I don't know is how I'm going to 'fix' the twi'lek dancer advert. I'm really wondering what screwed those textures up, so they cannot be easily edited. Even having them in the override, unedited(at least unchanged from how they are when extracted), makes the animation display incorrectly.

 

That aside, I really like what you've done with these textures.

Have you thrown the .txi in as well? You can get the info using this.

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  On 9/10/2013 at 9:40 AM, Rtas Vadum said:

Yeah, most of the setup for animated textures I already know. Although I didn't know the height and width values weren't needed.

 

The funny bit, is that you can actually find the TXI information for textures that should have it(though I didn't discover this myself, although at the moment I forget who did). Clicking on the "Hex Viewer" option while a texture is selected, brings up the Byte Viewer. Then click the ANSI option, and at the bottom of the window, is the txi information the texture uses by default.

 

I did try and fix that dancer advert texture already, although unfortunately, I only have eleven frames, provided by another user here. Just copying the last only makes the animation seem to skip, and getting each frame in the exact place where the transition between the frames is seemless, isn't exactly easy. But at this point, I'm a bit more keen on replacing the thing, than trying to deal with that.

 

Although I have done animated textures before, that lightsaber blade mod I made was far easier. With this texture mod though, I did animate one of the pannel textures on Peragus, mostly just using simple fades in each frame. I also animated the Kolto tank, mostly to make the large pipe look like it was constantly pumping or filtering the kolto, although that I think I have to fix, which shouldn't be too difficult.

 

Yeah I figured you probably had some idea of TXI files, but, I think not everyone has a clear idea of these -- it appears that some people don't even know hot to make a basic one so as to get specular working instead of having something appear transparent if the TXI is missing  :on2long: .

 

Anyway, I'm pretty sure that you can just have the one strip of 11 frames if you wanted to do it that way. Personally, I would want to do the animations myself as that allows me to do what ever I want to do.

 

Also, you don't really need 11 frames to have an effective animation, or at least all of them in order to have a smooth animation. You could go with some key frames and then in between these have something different -- I've gone with suggestive faces. One thing you could do, is simply have 2 or 3 frames of dancer silhouettes, and then to vary these, you have additional frames with these as a base but what is different is the text you might display. You can use different styles for these, different sets of words, or simply, the same word just written in a different Star Wars font -- to indicate your trying to say the same thing to multiple segments of the public.

 

You can also play around with the background, by animating or changing that by using simple patterns that rotate or change color. Any of these technigues, even if you only end up with 6 frames, would be better than the 9 (or whatever) frames the current texture has ;).

 

Then you just play around with the fps rate, though, "fps 1" will probably be the most effective.

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