New Lightsaber Blade Model

[Crazy34 67]

You give me some task I have to say ; ). No but your right I should try to fix it.

My solution is to use he 3d core plus a 3d most inner glow and then the planes around for the full glow. That should fix your problem (I hope and I have to test it, when doubleblade testing is on.)

The pictures below show the 3d progress. First the not yet animated 3d glow. THe second shows the new 3d core and glow actived. For comparison I put the original blade and texture in the picture such that you can compare them directly.

So on the to do list is left:

- animate the 3d glow

- Make up my mind about the size of the 3d core and glow

- Improve the glow planes (not shown in the pictures below)

- Texture the glow (here I really need help from you Guys. Help me DS community your are our only hope!)

- Add flicker animation to 3d core and glow

- find some good looking hilts with permission to use them to give you a reason to use the blades

If ou wish for something specific this should fix etc. please tell me and I will see how we can achieve the goals with this.

Stay safe!

Edited April 24, 2020 by Crazy34
Update List

[Jorak Uln 458]

37 minutes ago, Crazy34 said:

You give me some task I have to say ; ). No but your right I should try to fix it.

My solution is to use he 3d core plus a 3d most inner glow and then the planes around for the full glow. That should fix your problem (I hope and I have to test it, when doubleblade testing is on.)

The pictures below show the 3d progress. First the not yet animated 3d glow. THe second shows the new 3d core and glow actived. For comparison I put the original blade and texture in the picture such that you can compare them directly.

So on the to do list is left:

- animate the 3d glow

- Make up my mind about the size of the 3d core and glow.

- Improve the glow planes (not shown in the pictures below)

- Texture the glow (here I really need help from you Guys. Help me DS community your are our only hope!)

- Add flicker animation to 3d core and glow

- find some good looking hilts with permission to use them to give you a reason to use the blades

If ou wish for something specific this should fix etc. please tell me and I will see how we can achieve the goals with this.

Stay safe!

the spiky LS tip is typical for SWTOR - very cool stuff. 

 

[Crazy34 67]

After a short rewatch of Episode I-III and RO I realized that the colored blade core has a different shape from the inner white core. I correct that, as you can see in the picture below. Both 3d core are now animated. Unfortunately I cannot animate a vibration mod on the models since they would mostly contract and don't really change in thickness.

@DarthParametric Or is there a way to rescale the axis separatly in the ascii? I only encoutered scale as a single argument.

[Crazy34 67]

This thread turns more or less into a WIP. Sorry to all moderators.

I have an update for you. I think I am now more or less happy with the 3d blade core models. I made a quick lightsaber blade texture (keep in mind that I am a very bad texture creator.). I am really excited for a real artist to take on these lightsaber blades in the future. These sabers have now 3 different blade textures you can manipulate independently!

So the first to picture show the current version using my test texture. The second one is a focused version of the tipp. If you look very carefully you should be able to see the 3d glow model and the 3d core model seperate.

On the third picture you should see the difference. Dark core sabers are a thing now. Although I still didn't found the best .txi settings for it but I guess someone can help me with that? Thx to @Jorak Uln for convincing me that 3d is the way to go. Hope you enjoy.

So I have a question to you all. In the fourth and fith picture you see the motion blur trails used by the vanila game. I didn't find a way to replicate the effect for the dark core blades, since the planes use the blades texture and blending mods. The question is shall I keep them? The movies have motion blur but carried out much better. If my research was not wrong, SWTOR does not have motion blur. Pls correct me if I am wrong.

So what do you think of this?

Stay safe.

[Jorak Uln 458]

2 hours ago, Crazy34 said:

So I have a question to you all. In the fourth and fith picture you see the motion blur trails used by the vanila game. I didn't find a way to replicate the effect for the dark core blades, since the planes use the blades texture and blending mods. The question is shall I keep them? The movies have motion blur but carried out much better. If my research was not wrong, SWTOR does not have motion blur. Pls correct me if I am wrong.

Do you have a file with those black core sabers to test it out ingame? That would make it easier to see if/how much motion blur is needed. 

About SWTOR - i think they do use motion blur, at least for the special sabers (personally, i think its way too much, Kotor blur amount is much better)

 

[Crazy34 67]

Thanks for the video. This and other showed how they used the blur and I agree its over used. For the black core blades the blur seem to be white regardless. Which would make life easier for us. But I still very much islike the behavior of the blur planes. I have to think on how to replace them. Anyway In case you want to test the new 3d blades yourself I attached a new version. The textures are preliminary and at some point I need to come up with a naming convention for all the texture files.

The blue lightsaber is the one with the "black" core and the red the one with the normal white core. Tell me what you think.

Stay safe!

Test Ambient Light Lightsaber v3.rar

[DarthParametric 3,785]

TOR doesn't use blur for saber trails. It's all VFX textures.

        

[Crazy34 67]

@DarthParametric Thank you I was not aware of that. I don't see a easy approach to use the same in Kotor. Can I ask you a model question? In the model ascii for trimesh there is the property inv_count. What is it and what is it tell me? 

@Jorak Uln I attached pictures of the double blade with the new model. Would you consider it solved?

I also encountered again my nemesis enemy bug with lightsaber blades. It is shown in the third dan fouth picture. The lightsaber hilt is visible even then it is behind the blade. I guess it is a .txi problem but I have no clue on how to solve it. The hilts texture has a alpha channel which is not 255 and the standard .txi with

envmaptexture CM_Baremetal

The blades alpha chanel is 255 and the txi is

alpha blending 1.0
blending additive
decal 1

In the model ascii both have alpha set to 1.0.

Does anyone has an idea on how to fix that bug?

Thank you very much for the help and stay safe!

[DarthParametric 3,785]

35 minutes ago, Crazy34 said:

What is it

Nothing of direct importance to modders. I gather it has something to do with data structures in the model format, but @bead-v would be the one to elaborate on its mysteries.

36 minutes ago, Crazy34 said:

Does anyone has an idea on how to fix that bug?

You can't. It's an engine issue, due to the way it handles the render order of objects. It was likely a deliberate choice as the lesser of evils vs other render problems.

[Jorak Uln 458]

2 hours ago, Crazy34 said:

 

@Jorak Uln I attached pictures of the double blade with the new model. Would you consider it solved?

Yes absolutely. Great work so far with the model, its definitely much better than vanilla, i know that the planes are still a bit visible, but thats due to the engines limitation. 

Btw, i tried out your testfile, and thats what i found out: 

I noticed that you use dont use a separate set of textures for the dark purple "core" model but the normal purple Lightsaber + the purple core model. (That way both lightsabers use the same textures). I think, its better if you dont use shared textures, but give the dark core ls their own set of textures.

Now, i tried to recreate some SWTOR sabers, and so far it works great for the bright colored sabers (below just some quick takes on the sabers)

Green empeth SWTOR:

https://swtorista.com/crystals/green-empeth

front view in Kotor always seems to be brighter:

Those bright LS are covered well now. 

However, the dark colors are still not working yet - > Kotor planes seem to display dark colors transparent: 

simple dark core sabers are possible thanks to your core model, but when creating more special sabers like this one here- the red &  dark areas are displayed semi-transparent:

 

Would it be possible to somehow create that dark frame around the core (or even the whole blade being a flat plane that moves when you turn the camera)?

[bead-v 251]

4 hours ago, Crazy34 said:

In the model ascii for trimesh there is the property inv_count. What is it and what is it tell me? 

We called it the "inverted counter", it seems to be a number that is different for each mesh, but it usually starts from something like 99, 98, 97, etc... however, it doesn't seem to affect anything, even if we leave it zeroed out. The tools use an algorithm that creates this kind of sequence, but really the pattern isn't uniform across models, so the algorithm is just there for the numbers to kind of look like the vanilla ones. In case you decompile a model, the numbers will be stored as inv_count in the ascii, so that the same ones may be used if that model is recompiled.

[DarthParametric 3,785]

Btw, to dispel another misconception, KOTOR doesn't use blur for its saber trails either. The reason you need the blade planes is because they are what creates the trails - i.e. the trails are a geometry effect. Here's a wireframe to demonstrate:

This is why sabers have their own unique model type. I would guess this is some sort of vertex buffer trick or the like.

[Jorak Uln 458]

@DarthParametric:  Do you know by chance what causes the lighting bug described earlier?

(Ambient light is not always displayed on the same texture)

[DarthParametric 3,785]

Aurora (and Eclipse, as I recall) both had limits on the maximum number of dynamic lights a given map/level would support. If you are getting differences within a single level, it could either be due to the limit only applying to some specific radius of the camera, or a room-based limit. There's a reason Bioware didn't stick lights in their glow batons.

[Jorak Uln 458]

2 minutes ago, DarthParametric said:

Aurora (and Eclipse, as I recall) both had limits on the maximum number of dynamic lights a given map/level would support. If you are getting differences within a single level, it could either be due to the limit only applying to some specific radius of the camera, or a room-based limit. There's a reason Bioware didn't stick lights in their glow batons.

Actually im getting differences also at very small Levels like the Ebon Hawk where i have that glow at one spot and almost in the exact same position (like 1 step to the side) theres no light at all. Since the Hawk is such a tiny hub is it for sure the max lights limit is reached? As suggested before, could it be some issue with the lightmaps? 

[Crazy34 67]

@Jorak Uln The reason why in kotor the blades look brigther from the front, is that the trimesh planes of the saber are onesided facing in front. So from behind you don't get any effect from them.

@DarthParametric Is it possible to set faces to be double-sided in the ascii? Or do I need to add two more planes to the model with different orientations? Also do you know by chance with lightpriority value would be the best to use?

The only way I could imagine how to get the special effect for the black core TOR blade is to have a texture with a alpha mask which is white for the black part of the blade and has greyish something for the glow and black outside of the blade. With this alpha mask one could try to set the blending to normal (from additive as default) and see how this looks ingame. I tried and it looks promising but the bad texture creator I am I was not able to get satisfactory results.

For the double blade bug: In order to have not visible planes I could add a third 3d Model, which edge would mark the end of the glow. But personally I think it looks worse then the current state I posted before.

Jorak Uln our textures look really great. Your are right, then I am in the right state of mind I should set up a consitent texture system such that you can tweak overthing for each model seperately.

Big THANKS to DarthParametric for you help aswell as to @bead-v. I hope my lack of knowledge is not to annoying.

[DarthParametric 3,785]

I have never messed around with dynamic lights, so I can't really offer any insights. The closest equivalent I can think of would be something like the War Droid, which uses a light during its death animation (but is otherwise off). It has the values:

  radius 5.0
  multiplier 2.0
  color 0.0 0.0 0.0
  lightpriority 1
  ndynamictype 1
  ambientonly 0
  affectdynamic 0
  shadow 0
  flare 0
  fadinglight 0
  flareradius 0.0
  texturenames 0
  flaresizes 0
  flarepositions 0
  flarecolorshifts 0

 

[JCarter426 1,215]

On 4/20/2020 at 3:29 PM, Crazy34 said:

Does anyone have a documentation what these options are suppost to controll?:

LightPriority:  5
Ambient Only:   0
Dynamic Type:   1
Affect Dynamic: 0
Shadow:         0
Flare:          0
Fading Light:   0

There is some documentation here.

• Light Priority: Only 3 light objects can affect a given mesh at any time. This number determines the priority for rendering lights. Lower number = higher priority.
• Ambient Only: If this is set to 1, the light will only affect static objects such as areas and not dynamic objects such as creatures.
• Dynamic Type: 1 for animated lights. 0 for non-animated lights.
• Shadow: Determines whether the light will cast shadows when occluded by dynamic objects.
• Flare: Determines whether the light has a lens flare, which is a texture that's rendered in front of the light whenever you look at it.
• Fading Light: 1 if the light should fade in and out as an object approaches/moves away from the light. If 0, the light will just blink on or off like it was hit by a switch.

I would say your best bet is to copy the settings from a similar light source such as blaster bolts or T3's welding arm. Apart from that, I would try setting the priority and fading light values to 1, and flare to 0 as I don't see a use for it here.

 

[Crazy34 67]

@JCarter426 Thank you very much. With the documentation at hand it makes life so much easier. Also thank you for the explanation I will try these settings in the next version. I am currently trying to fix the brightness. I also need to full symmetrize the planes at some point.

[Crazy34 67]

The planes are now fully symmetric (yeah!) but I am fighting a bug with the lightsaber planes. I made a picture of it. For a reason I could not identify yet their is an artefact of the lightsaber planes peaking out of the blade itself.

@DarthParametric I would kindly ask you how you got the the wireframe mod ingame, so I can track this bug easier. And maybe by chance do you have an idee how to fix it.

Thank you very much!

[DarthParametric 3,785]

Not a mod, just a function of GLIntercept.

[JCarter426 1,215]

I've dug up some more links I've consulted in the past that I couldn't find the other day:

FYI Tile Lighting

About lighting in NWN

[Crazy34 67]

@JCarter426 Thank you very much. I have looked over them and also read a little bit more in the forum. For future projects,  it will be very useful.

@bead-v Does Mdledit has the feature that you can compile a folder full of ascii files to mdl with a batch or script?

A general question. Does someone know how the game determine the render order of textures?

@Jorak Uln Can I ask you to post the txi. file you used for the black core sabers here. I am struggling to get the effect right.

Stay safe!

[Crazy34 67]

Hi everyone. Sorry to the mods for the double posting and I hope the screenshots are not to much.

So before we start a short update:

Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational batch station.

So yeah I learned batch a little which helped producing the progress. In order to give an overview:

• All saber hilts are updated by hilts from @Kaidon Jorn SLM 2.0 mod (I love it!) All credits for the hilt models and textures and icons go fully to him!
• Update for Kaidon Jorn's: Revan's Tor Saber 1.1 to use the new blades
• Ambient light for lightsabers
• 3d models for blade core and inner glow
• symmetric lightsaber blade planes with a modifed version of @Sithspecter crossguard saber UV layout. (in principle compatible with his unstable textures)
• black core sabers are possible
• homogeneous brightness of the blade (no more brighter blades when viewed from the front)
• all sabers are fully upgradeable (added black core crystal) (Cross guard are updateable but don't have a unique crystal yet.)

Now to the to do:

• Need permission from Sithspecter to use th UVs. I only modified them but he created them so I need his permission. I hope you are all right man!
• Need Icons for the crossguard saber
• Test: Someone to test the .uti with the english version of the game (I am only owning the german version)
• Test the K1 version at some point in the future
• Hope that some talented texture artist is willing to update my blade textures with good ones
• Possible update with a full set of unstable saber blades if Sithspecter gives the permission to also use his beautiful animated textures.

Known Bugs:

• The tip of the blade has a spike which comes from a deformation of the lightsaber planes. This is also present in the original model. I was not able to find a fix sorry.
• The lightsaber hilts will peak through the blades. (See some posts before. DarthParametric sad it is not possible to fix it.)

[Kaidon Jorn 196]

So wait,..these are new blade models?? Or textures? 

Or,...wait what is this?!?

Man, I've been working on blade textures for 2 weeks since I was able to get Photoshop CS6.

Cause let's face it, my saber blades sucked.

Been diligently reducing opacity in the glows and reducing the sizes to try to get it down to barely anything. Like how I'm picturing The Mandalorian's Ahsoka blades to look like.

-All beam and little glow.