Texture Request

[ndix UR 218]

Thanks to everyone for the feedback and suggestions.

 

First off, I'm going to work on adding appropriate noise to the surfaces. Next, I think i'll add the scan lines xander2077 suggested (just still for now).

 

Then I'll start trying to correct the model to fix the mirrored text issue (which is definitely annoying).  I knew I was opening a can of worms by introducing text ... but I just couldn't help myself. And yeah, the original texture was so tiny ... I think it was a 256x256, there was definitely no text, just a teal smear with some blue around it.

 

I am thinking that the UV inversion on the right monitor should be more approachable for me.  Basically all of the modeling activities being discussed here are things I haven't figured out how to do in blender yet  . Challenging, but that should be a good thing.  Hopefully the UV remapping stuff won't be too hard to figure out ... I'm just a little worried though because while I was working on the texture, blender was having an issue with UV mapping that I've never seen before (

 

I do really like the idea of making a separate UV island for the left/right screens, so I might try that. Part of the reason I like the idea of keeping the screens in this texture is because there is a huge amount of wasted area in it. The original texture even includes an additional screen-like bit in the lower right that seems to be unused as far as I was able to tell (in my texture it is just a flat gray spot right now).

 

Would it be possible (without adding meshes) to make a separate island for the main screen such that the main screen would not have to be two symmetrical halves?

 

If I can't figure out the UV remapping I suppose I'll just have to replace the text with something more symmetrical...

 

Once the screen issue is worked out I'll try the new meshes for button glow ... although, now that I think about it, I'm not really sure I understand why and how new meshes relate to adding glow? I'm assuming I would be adding some envmap to the new mesh textures which would make them glow ... but since there's no envmap on the whole console, I could just do it at that level and make the glowing bits of the texture semi-transparent, right?  I understand that adding meshes for some of the button and light features would make it look a lot better from different angles and whatnot, just not quite how it relates to the glowing effect.

 

Thanks again for all the helpful ideas and answers. I'll let you know how it goes.

[xander2077 80]

If there is room in the texture, like wasted space you pointed out, that you can repurpose to have new texture on it, and that will enable two different screen images, then by all means go ahead and do it.

I do that all the time when there is wasted texture space, or I crop the image to enable higher detail for masks and such. For a lot of the vanilla mask overhaul I was constantly using the method you are thinking about to enhance details on masks where the texture space was wasted, or I would move the UV island to a better placement.

To animate the texture, you simply select all the faces of the screens in question, and then separate them to a different mesh (object) each in the same mdl scene. That will enable each one to have its own texture. So the console can have one texture, and each screen can have its own texture. Then you simply point each screen at a tga with the UV selecting a portion of the texture and then there is some additional editing in the accompanying files to enable the "flip book" animation that DP was referring to. Quanon and a few other guys have done this pretty easily in their texture mods. I would contact either Q, Jorak Uln, or DP for details on how to accomplish that if you wanted to. I’m not sure if anyone has ever tried making part of the unused texture space animated or not, but if it was ever possible then one of them would know. Usually with the flip book style animated texture, the UV moves from the top left to the bottom right like reading a paragraph, in equal portions of the texture until it cycles from beginning to end (AFAIK) so it probably won’t be possible to put it on the same texture you based from the vanilla one. But separating the two screens to their own mesh in the same scene will enable each one to reference its own animated screen texture.

Or, if you prefer to just use different parts of the unused texture space for the right screen, so it doesn’t have to be totally symmetrical for now, that will be good enough compared to the original. I totally get it if you want to learn more about animated textures before trying to animate those screens.

Since you are using blender, it is really easy to redo the UV maps for each screen and put them where you want to. Just select all the faces on the model and the UVs will appear in the UV window, and then select a texture from the image menu. You will have to brows to the folder containing your new texture. It is important that all the faces get assigned the texture before proceeding further. then if you want to move just one screen or the other, you can choose only those faces on the model and then just those UVs will appear to show you where they are on the texture, and you can select them all in the UV window and move them around from there.

To move or transform the parts you want in the UV window, select all the verts in the UV window that show up from the faces selected on the mesh. Use the UV menu at the bottom, scroll up to transform, then translate, then you can drag the texture around anywhere you like. To restrict it to x or y, just press x or y before moving it and it will keep it straight on the x or y. you can rotate, resize and everything from that menu. To select you can choose to select or deselect all, or border select, (to select two mirrored UVs over each other or part of them) then select linked. There is no drop down for it but if your mouse is over the UV window and you screwed a UV up you can always undo it with the cntrl-z combination.

if you want to export the UV template, say if you moved the right screen island to another place in the texture, then you can select all the verts in the UV window for that model, then choose UV menu, scroll up to export UV, and then click that, it will open the file browser view and then give you the options for the size and format of the export. Then you can export it to where you want it so you can open it in gimp and make a new layer over your texture so the template can show you where you put the UV.

Edit: Sorry - there was an electrical storm and I had to wait for internet service to return for a while.

But here is an example of reusing or improving the texture real estate

Say I want to redo a model. In this case it is the republic soldier. I redid the helmet, and then resized the texture to add more texture space for the cramped helmet texture. Moved around the UVs and now they are mapped to the upsized texture and I can begin to recreate the texture in higher resolution. I want to end up with something in 512x so I will choose to upsize it even more and then reduce the size for better detail once I am finished polishing everything.

[ndix UR 218]

@xander2077 thank you so much for those instructions. so. helpful. just wow.

 

Thanks to your advice I had no trouble at all with the UV remapping. Blender tried to make it difficult, but I was able to persevere. I also found some weird things in the stock UV map for that model. There were 2 chunks of the model whose texture mapping were well outside the texture area. I have a screenshot ... though it is a little hard to interpret, check it here (hard to interpret because blender is showing the entire UV map shifted off to the left ... which is weird and I've never seen before, still though you can see the two regions that are way outside the texture  ).  Is that a common thing for the game designers to have done? I could tell that one of the mismapped regions was maybe at one time supposed to be pointing at the extra screen info that was lurking unused in the lower right corner of the texture.

 

This prompted me to add two "new" screens to the texture. They are the areas on the raised parts away from the main controls. I made them into touchscreens ... hopefully people will be ok with that. The one on the right has an on-screen keyboard up and some finger controls over a pipe network. The left touchscreen has an orbit control and some gradient readouts over a data rendering of space debris.

 

I also broke out the right secondary screen and flipped its UV vertices. So no more mirrored (or repeated) text, and all 4 of the 'extra' monitors are now separate within the texture.

 

Here's how it looks now:

 

 

I also tested the recompiled model in-game, and it's working.

 

I've also applied noise and added a static scanline overlay to all the screens.

 

The only thing it's missing now are potential new meshes for glowing (maybe animated) lights and/or maybe animated screens.

 

Whew, I need a little break though. Any and all feedback welcome.

[DarthParametric 3,767]

The reason you need a separate mesh for glowing objects is that Odyssey's implementation of emissive is done in the trimesh. The whole mesh has to glow, so any bits you want to glow have to be split off into their own trimeshes. They can share a texture.

 

Animated textures are flipbooks. In other words, the texture space is made up into an array of frames, which the game plays in sequence at your defined rate (specified via TXI). Here's an example I found from a quick Google search:

 

 

You can see here in this 512x512 texture that it is an array of 16 frames. If you convert this into a 128x128 GIF, you get the following animation:

 

 

It should become immediately apparent why you want to confine animated sections to their own separate texture that only comprises the absolutely necessary elements. Like a monitor screen in this instance. You do not want to be trying to turn 2K textures into flipbooks.

[xander2077 80]

That really looks great! I like what you did with the new monitor textures. If you look at the example of the flip book animation from DPs post, then you can kind of figure out what it would take to animate the screens. But if you do one then you will probably want to do them all lol. You can pretty much do it any way you want. Scrolling text, or text typing out and clearing, moving scan lines overlaid on that. The sky is the limit. The central one would be more difficult since it is mirrored so I would probably leave that alone. But this looks tons better than the original vanilla texture. Great job!

 

Yes, sometimes the original devs offset the texture UV mapping. usually in the aurora game tools or other game tools, the texture is tiled in the UV map tool, so whoever originally set the UV layout in the vanilla model was able to see where they were placing the texture because there were duplicates of it all around the middle one, instead of just one that shows in the blender interface. I am not sure if there is a setting to show it tiled in blender or not. But you don’t really need that. If you wanted to you can just select all the island groups in the first group to the left and then choose to translate it right but press x first and then line it up with the texture as it appears. Same for the screen that is offset further left. Once you move the UVs you can save the new UV layout and it will be corrected on export. If the viewport for the UV showed the texture in tiles, then you could also choose to select all the UV vertices and move it up on the y axis and still be able to line it up on the texture, but usually the best way to do it is to put it directly over the texture instead of offset.

 

To explain here is a picture of a tool I use for Morrowind called nifskope, and it has a UV editor for that game model. This tool is set up much like the Aurora game tools the original devs had where the texture is tiled all around the middle so you can offset the texture if you want, but sometimes it is and sometimes it is not. But the offset is easy to fix. And it might be better for the engine to render if it is centered over the texture in blender and then exported with the corrections. It will also allow you to see if any of the UVs need tweaking to line up better, or eliminate stretching. But it appears there are none of those problems on this model.

 

One last thing, the two panels that are blank on the top left and right of each blue screen, maybe adding some sliders there will round the texture out a bit more. I would also probably make those octagonal buttons red instead of pink, but that’s just me. As a side note those could be animated as well to pulse slowly if you were to get all fancy.

[Sith Holocron 2,452]

Any and all feedback welcome.

I have a few things I could suggest.

 

As regards to animations, there are two spots I think - more so than the buttons - that would benefit from animation.

 

 

If there blue sphere rotated and the color sliders moved, that would be interesting.

 

And the second animation suggestion . . .

 

 

Having the orange - yellow - orange section move from one to the other.  If it looped going in both directions, it could even resemble the Knight Rider car or a Cylon. Like this . . .

 

 

 

 

The last thing I'd say is perhaps have the metal portions match the structural quality of its surroundings. Compared to the background and other computers, the console looks brand new. Perhaps aging it up might not be a bad plan?

[ndix UR 218]

i figured out how to get blender to tile the texture image in the UV editor. Just click 'Repeat' on the 'Display' panel under 'Coordinates:'. That would have really helped me 2 days ago  .

 

I actually understand the animation flipbook stuff pretty well, I've made animated EH screens and Telos billboards for my personal game by editing people's excellent existing stuff and figuring out what they did in the TXIs while I was there.

 

Yeah, if I go down the animation path I will have to go crazy with it, probably all 4 of the extra monitors (agree w/ you on the 'not the main one' thing), pulsing the pink light, and different sets of lights illuminating on the 'orangered-yellow-orangered' light bar. I think I could probably live with that.

 

In terms of the pink color on the light ... I think I might agree with you that it might look better red. Maybe a red somewhere between the red on the 'main control panel' and the orangered in the light bar. I chose pink because that's what the the original texture seemed to maybe have.

 

Right now I'm trying to figure out how to change the pink light into an actually light-emitting separate mesh. I'm guessing that involves setting selfillumcolor in the ascii version of the model before recompiling ... the only other question mark is how to actually apply a material in blender ... I would probably end up cheating and just export to ascii, set bitmap, and then reimport.  doesn't sound too optimal ...

 

Also I am going to add some sliders to the side super plain panels as you suggested. Looking hard at the low resolution model, I feel like the original intent might have been that the raised areas on the panel (which I made into touchscreens) were going to be holo-emitters ... there's a kind of blurry linear effect on the side panels in the original that is making me think that.  I have no idea how one would even begin to implement something like that, which is maybe what Obsidian concluded too.  oh well, I'll leave that for the next person...

 

Edit:

 

@SH just saw your post. We are totally on the same page w/ the light bar animation, and I agree with you on the other one too.

 

In terms of matching the surroundings/aging it up a bit ... the only surroundings I found are M478 ... is that what we're talking about?  I agree with you that they kind of stood out a bit more than I would like when I was looking at them in game.

Edited May 26, 2016 by ndix UR

[Malkior 472]

I like how clean you got the screen and how seamless the overall texture looks.

 

As far as "aging/dirtying up the texture a bit, perhaps you could add some gradual colors to the edges to either hint at the metal being worn, or just to add some variety to the color scheme. Adding some speckling of darker greys or a soft transition into another lighter color could also give more depth to it as well

 

(Image added to hopefully show what I mean as far as realistically distressing the metal; the bright scratches on the surface are optional )

 

EDIT

 

Going to add another thing really quick: If you're using Photoshop, there is a great plugin for textures in the filters menu called " texturizer". If you use, say, the sandstone texture in it, and then run filter-distort-glass, you can get a very nice metallic grain.

[xander2077 80]

I like how clean you got the screen and how seamless the overall texture looks.

 

As far as "aging/dirtying up the texture a bit, perhaps you could add some gradual colors to the edges to either hint at the metal being worn, or just to add some variety to the color scheme. Adding some speckling of darker greys or a soft transition into another lighter color could also give more depth to it as well

 

 (Image added to hopefully show what I mean as far as realistically distressing the metal; the bright scratches on the surface are optional )

 

One of the methods I like to use is making a new layer, and then going over it thoroughly with a grunge brush, just one pass, no need to overdo it, then using the "make seamless" or "resynthesize" plugins in gimp to even it all out. then I turn the opacity down until the dirt looks a lot more subtle and even. If I don't want dirt in a spot, like a screen, I fuzzy select around that detail layer (yes the screen has its own layer or should) and then invert the selection, move to the dirt layer, and then clear that spot only so it does not interfere with the screen. Dirtying the screen would be done another way entirely, since most people using consoles brush the dirt or dust off the screen so it won’t have the same patina. This works good on placeables and some other models, probably not so well on wall panels unless you redo the UVs on all walls in the module and make completely new textures for those. on the edges a subtle and semitransparent brush stroke of scratches in both light and dark colors that match the base color can help a bit as well. If there is transparency on the layer that has the raised portions (bevel and shadows) and all the lights are in layers above the base background color layer, you can underlay something like what Malkior showed above the base layer but below the other details... as long as the worn details on that new underlayer are the correct scale and it is seamless to begin with. the size of the brushed metal marks is important. it has to look correct to scale or it won’t pull off correctly. One way to try is to make sure the dirty brushed metal texture is larger than the actual texture, paste it into this new underlayer, then scale it down until the tiny scratch and dirt details look right on the model. Starting with larger image and finer details is usually the best way to go for under layers like the above metal texture.

[redrob41 86]

This looks like really good work so far, and I'm glad that you're getting some good advice from everyone. Keep it up

 

One thing that I would keep in mind when doing animations, is that if all the panels and blinky lights are mapped to the same flipbook tga and controlled by the same .txi commands, then they are all going to loop at the same rate. This could end up looking weird, so I'd suggest that you try to do different things with each panel. For one of the Aurabesh panels, you could have it scroll infinitely top to bottom while the other one types out text, then clears the screen. I wouldn't animate your Right hand touch keypad too much, since no one is touching it, it should look almost static.

And the second animation suggestion . . .

 

 

Having the orange - yellow - orange section move from one to the other.  If it looped going in both directions, it could even resemble the Knight Rider car or a Cylon. Like this . . .

I actually wouldn't do this because it would be too obvious when the loop starts over. Instead, I'd make each frame have different, random buttons light up, and sometimes one light wouldn't change from one frame to the next. That way when the animation loops, it will be harder to see. I would also try to have the left and right versions of this start on different frames (for example, if you use 9 frames, left starts on frame 1 of 9 while right starts on 4 of 9). Kind of like this:

 

Right now I'm trying to figure out how to change the pink light into an actually light-emitting separate mesh. I'm guessing that involves setting selfillumcolor in the ascii version of the model before recompiling ... the only other question mark is how to actually apply a material in blender ... I would probably end up cheating and just export to ascii, set bitmap, and then reimport.  doesn't sound too optimal ...

I'm guessing that you can open up one of the droids (like T3) and look at the main circular "voice box lens" mesh and see how that's made into a glowing light. I don't know how to apply materials in blender (nor in 3DS max for that matter), so I usually end up exporting it, and text editing the ascii file like you say.

 

Then we will all be like this:

[xander2077 80]

That has got to be one of Shatner's best roles... lol

 

Anyway, yes you can make two cylinders, and then for materials any standard material will do, just go to the material button in properties, and add a new one. To get them to glow or animate I think that has to do with a txi file. To add a little flavor to it, instead of making both cylinders the same, you can have one look like a microscope lens, and the other one be like a big red button that flashes on and off. Or whatever color fits the best. Then you can just eliminate the pink button. An unused portion of the texture can be used to add details for the cylinders that don’t flash. The cylinder cap is all that needs to animate and glow, and it can be split to a separate object by selecting all faces and scrolling up mesh to vertices, then separate by selection.

[DarthParametric 3,767]

Glow/emissive is defined in the trimesh semantics. In the ASCII MDL, use selfillumcolor to set the colour of the glow. For example:

selfillumcolor 0.862745 0.0 0.729412

is equivalent to a glow of RGB 220,0,186 (pinkish-purple).

 

Typically though the way you do it is control colour entirely via the texture, and set the selfillumcolor to a greyscale value that just controls intensity. So somewhere between a 0.5 0.5 0.5 for a mid-grey to 1.0 1.0 1.0 for pure white.

[xander2077 80]

Glow/emissive is defined in the trimesh semantics. In the ASCII MDL, use selfillumcolor to set the colour of the glow. For example:

selfillumcolor 0.862745 0.0 0.729412

is equivalent to a glow of RGB 220,0,186 (pinkish-purple).

 

Typically though the way you do it is control colour entirely via the texture, and set the selfillumcolor to a greyscale value that just controls intensity. So somewhere between a 0.5 0.5 0.5 for a mid-grey to 1.0 1.0 1.0 for pure white.

 

 

 

so this is hex editing? i assume white would be the brightest.

[DarthParametric 3,767]

No. It's in the ASCII MDL. Just edit it in a text editor.

 

In Max/GMax you can just edit it in the Aurora Trimesh modifier before exporting, but I gather there is no equivalent for Blender users.

[ndix UR 218]

OK. i think it might still need some refinement, but all the heavy lifting is done.

 

i've kept my animation limited to the left touchscreen, the two lightbar panels, the two large light buttons, and the two secondary blue monitors.  They are all being animated from a single 3x2 TGA flipbook w/ 350x350px 'frames'.  I added 0.9 neutral self illumination on the light buttons, and .2 neutral self illumination on the lightbars and screens.  I added a bit of geometry for the light buttons so that they are now slightly raised.

 

The neutral illumination thing is great because I'm not 100% sold on the buttons, I changed one to red and one to orange.

 

One thing that I would keep in mind when doing animations, is that if all the panels and blinky lights are mapped to the same flipbook tga and controlled by the same .txi commands, then they are all going to loop at the same rate.

 

I am definitely feeling that a bit, as some things kind of want to be at 6 fps while others are a lot better at 3 or less. currently everything is running at 3 fps.  I did as much as I could to break up/stagger the repeats, which I feel like is working pretty alright.

 

At least for me it is testing pretty well ... immersive without being fun house eye-grabbing.  The lightbar animations are really the ones I am least sure about at this point ... I might need to revisit those to be more like the thing redrob41 posted ...

 

I've given it a round of aging, but it might not be quite enough yet ... especially on the back side.

 

@Malkior thanks for the notes on metal texturing ... I haven't been able to get good looking scratches really, but adding some speckling and other things has been helpful.

 

So yeah ... not exactly sure how to proceed from here ... I've got a 7z I could PM to anyone interested in testing ... or should I just post it as a beta or something?

 

Thanks again for everyone's help & comments.

[Sith Holocron 2,452]

You could post it as a beta.  Alternatively, you could make a YouTube video to show it off?

[ndix UR 218]

I spent awhile trying to do a screen capture ... buut ... all the screen capture utils either crashed or dropped the game to 0 FPS, so that's a no-go.

 

I'm going to try to finish it this week, so I'm attaching a beta version for comment.

 

Console2Kb1.7z

 

The things I'm already planning on working on and could probably benefit the most from specific comments: the light bar blinking patterns, the large glowing buttons, and the metal textures.

 

The light bar blinking patterns ... I find the one on the right more successful, albeit much simpler. The only kind of issue is that it is mainly an on/off blinking, which I also kind of did for the large button on the right (but in opposing phase, maybe I should actually make those blink together? like they are actually indicating the same thing?)

 

The metal textures aren't terrible now but I think they can be improved by emulating some of the game's other consoles a bit more, so that's my plan.

 

The large glowing buttons are pretty low-detail in the texture, so I don't want to do too much to them, mainly wondering what colors I should be using there ...

[xander2077 80]

just a quick question. Did this get converted with mdlops 0.7? if so then that may be why i cant look at it in blender. I need to reinstall K2 so there is no way i can test it out.

[Sith Holocron 2,452]

Working on getting some video for you so everyone can see. I will update this post when it's ready.

 

[DarthParametric 3,767]

I spent awhile trying to do a screen capture ... buut ... all the screen capture utils either crashed or dropped the game to 0 FPS, so that's a no-go.

You shouldn't need an external app. The game can cap screenshots itself. Just add EnableScreenShot=1 under [Game Options] in swkotor2.ini, then use the PrtScrn button in-game. It should dump TGAs in the game directory.

 

I'd suggest swapping the texture on the back of the lower section, with the rectangular grille looking bits, to the front side. It looks better IMO.

[Kexikus 994]

Looking pretty good

 

The only improvements I can think of is to add more weathering to the console and maybe a higher framerate for the animations. Otherwise it looks great.

[DarthParametric 3,767]

I was going to offer a better globe animation, like this:

 

 

but it doesn't really work with an even number of frames.

 

My 2c regarding the overall look of it is that I'm not super big on the giant Duplo button look. I guess that was kind of a necessity a decade ago dealing with tiny 256x256 textures and low poly counts to run on a console with less horsepower than a pocket calculator, but I don't see any need to be limited by that for mods today. Even if you want to go with a retro 70s vibe to keep it in the OT style, I'd still prefer to see a proper keyboard/keypad along with a more realistic array of switches and dials. Something along the lines of this kind of thing:

 

http://image.shutterstock.com/z/stock-photo-thermo-electric-power-station-console-14977411.jpg

 

http://www.smartinsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Ishikawa-diagram-marketing.png

 

http://www.projectfellowship.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Fukushima-Daiichi-Nuclear-Power-Plant-Disaster-Reactor-Room.jpg

 

http://www.mapps.l-3com.com/photo_gallery/pg_Fermi02.jpg

[ndix UR 218]

You shouldn't need an external app. The game can cap screenshots itself. Just add EnableScreenShot=1 under [Game Options] in swkotor2.ini, then use the PrtScrn button in-game. It should dump TGAs in the game directory.

 

I'd suggest swapping the texture on the back of the lower section, with the rectangular grille looking bits, to the front side. It looks better IMO.

 

 

Thanks for the details on how to capture stills, which I had not gotten working yet either, but I was actually talking about video capture there like SithHolocron did, to get the animation motion stuffs.

 

I agree with you that the area underneath the control panel is one of the most 'unresolved' parts of the whole thing. I have taken a few steps to try and fix it, but they haven't really worked yet. I'll try some more things.

 

Yeah my globe animation was kind of a nasty hack, it looks surprisingly good in motion considering how weak it is.

 

When I embarked on this adventure I was mostly just trying to really stick to what was being implied in the original texture, kind of a basic upscale. It has kind of gone beyond that now, and I think I can find time to improve some of the bits. There's some good inspiration in those 70s-esque industrial panel images you posted. I assume it is mostly the controls in the center 'main control panel' part that you are thinking of?

 

@Kexikus, thx I am going to work on roughing it up a bit more.

[DarthParametric 3,767]

When I embarked on this adventure I was mostly just trying to really stick to what was being implied in the original texture, kind of a basic upscale.

Yeah, and you did a great job on that. It probably doesn't warrant too much more attention to be honest, given what a minor element in the game it is. You'd be better off spending your time on something more prominent.

 

I assume it is mostly the controls in the center 'main control panel' part that you are thinking of?

Most particularly the big panels with giant cylinders in them on either side, but also the large red blocks on on the center console.

[Sith Holocron 2,452]

Is it just me or does anyone else see a hat in this portion of the texture?