Main Menu Experiments

[DarthParametric 3,782]

With the release of ndix UR's KotOR High Resolution Menus, I figured a K1 main menu model edit was in order. Nothing fancy so far, just a replication of the widescreen adjustment I released for TSL, stretching the background and adding in an extra VFX node (although I did replace the logo image with a less washed out one).

 

 

The image quality of the background is terrible, even at its native res. It's full of artefacts and colour banding. I'm wondering whether a better approach might be to replace it with an actual physical model.

[l2daorch 19]

I do love the idea from the op. I think something related to events would be best (as that is the approach of the original ui as well). So it would display Nihilus aboard the ravager after the visas cutscene etc.

You could certainly add more events to that though as the game doesn't have that many different main menus. Like showing talia and vaklu in the onderon throne room during the second onderon visit.

 

As for K1: With the new high res menu mod I do believe that a lot of ui graphics have to be replaced. Not just for the main menu but also item icons etc.

[DarthParametric 3,782]

Played around with a physical mesh replacement background. I tried adding it to the menu model with some dynamic lighting, but that was kind of crap:

 

 

I was thinking about trying baked lighting, but it's probably just better to do it completely pre-rendered and keep it as an image. Needs various adjustments, but more in the vein of this kind of thing:

 

[VarsityPuppet 1,085]

Yeah pre-rendered looks much better

[Sithspecter 909]

Wow, looks great!

[L0ki194 82]

Looks fantastic, the only thing I'd want to see tweaked is the brightness on the metal areas so that it's a bit brighter.

[DarthParametric 3,782]

I tried out the pre-rendered approach. After looking at the vanilla model (I replaced the original background plane with my own), I realised they used self-illum to brighten it up. I did that as well but I still need to fiddle with the balance of it, as I had compensated for the previous darkness by changing the lighting of the render, so now everything is probably a bit too uniformly bright. I can play with that later though. For the moment I am still messing around with different materials.

 

 

 

I'm not really keen on the look of the horizontal blue stripes/surrounds, might need to fiddle with those a bit.

[Kexikus 995]

The blue part is indeed a little wonky but everything else looks great! I prefer the first version as that cleaner appearance is more fitting for K1 IMO.

[DarthParametric 3,782]

Made some adjustments to the lighting and the horizontal bars/surrounds. Also switched the exported texture from DXT5 compression to uncompressed, as there were some nasty compression artefacts (probably not really noticeable in a compressed video).

 

 

I think it needs to be shifted a squidge to the right. And it could possibly stand to be narrowed up a touch as well to tighten in around the buttons, although it probably needs to be tested on other aspect ratios/resolutions first to see how it mates with ndix UR's GUI files for non-1080/16:9 resolutions.

[darthbdaman 71]

I think it could go a bit to the right as well. I think the sides might be a bit dark. You can't see the metal at all (that might just be the video though). There shouldn't be total blackness on the menu