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Shushoni
Shushoni
Join Date 03/2006
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Erm... texture/model help please

wow, thats one shiny ship...

December 11, 2007 1:12:53 AM from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums
ok, so i've gotten my hands on code herders mesh editor. many thanks go to him for this, but i'm having a problem with my meshes.

here is a render of the model in 3ds max:





and here is the in-game shot after conversion:



the color and data maps both have full black alpha channels and the data map is all black. the bump map is...well... a bump map.

anyone have any suggestions on how to fix it?
modding
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Shushoni
Code Herder
Join Date 09/2007
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Reply #1 December 11, 2007 1:26:48 AM
from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums
I think the error is in the data map. Delete it just to see if it improve things.
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Shushoni
TFL BigBANGtheory
Join Date 02/2007
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Reply #2 December 11, 2007 7:10:34 AM
from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums
I have more or less the same issue with the B5 model I imported, I left the data map section of your Mesh importer blank it had no effect.
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Shushoni
Shushoni
Join Date 03/2006
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Reply #3 December 11, 2007 8:55:41 AM
from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums
i did the same thing as TFL and with the same result
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Shushoni
tristangoodes
Join Date 03/2007
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Reply #4 December 11, 2007 9:44:26 AM
from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums
you are missing the alpha channel on your data map, alpha adjusts the bloom. Nvidia cards by default say it's black so no glow. ATI cards say it's white so full glow.
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Shushoni
Shushoni
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Reply #5 December 11, 2007 9:46:04 AM
from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums
i have the alpha's there. i fixed the bloom, but now my ship is all my team color and very reflective. is there a certain format the .dds has to be in?
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Shushoni
Code Herder
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Reply #6 December 11, 2007 7:11:28 PM
from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums
Mmmm quick question did you use the dds generated by my program. I just realized that they didn't give very good results with some type of textures because I didn't set the output format right. Some are downright non standard. They're DXT1 if that means anything to you, the next version is going to be set to DXT5. I'll add a menu to let you pick eventualy.

Reflection: I think it's a channel of the data texture?
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Shushoni
Shushoni
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Reply #7 December 11, 2007 11:50:08 PM
from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums
i used dxt 3 textures ad didnt use the ones from the editor. they were... less than perfect. i read the tutorial to the textures thats out there and it says the specular is the alpha of the color map and the reflective is the blue channel of the data. both of them were all black. i messed around with the team color in the data channel and it had no effect on the red tint of the model.
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Shushoni
tristangoodes
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Reply #8 December 12, 2007 12:03:23 AM
from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums
Colour map(DXT5)
RGB- Colours
A- Spec

Data (DXT3with alpha)
R- team (white = team colour area)
G- SI (white = light spots)
B- Reflection (black = no reflection)
A- Bloom (black = no bloom)

Normal map
use dxt normalmap compression. set to tangent space normal map

If the model glows it means you either don't have an alpha on your data map, or your alpha is white.
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Shushoni
TFL BigBANGtheory
Join Date 02/2007
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Reply #9 December 12, 2007 11:49:43 AM
from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums
Mmmm quick question did you use the dds generated by my program.


I did yes.

I'm a bit stumpted probably more to do with my inexperience than anything else  ( 

This is what I'm doing...
1) Export mesh from 3DSmax to either .obj or .3ds, now I assume what is exported is just the mesh not the textures as well?
2) Load exported .obj or .3ds into CodeHerder Mesh Viewer, model appears as a dull grey object with no texture or lighting effects.
3) Select material0, check the data texture layer box and browse to a TGA file created from Paint Shop Pro which is black with a black alpha channel.
4) Save the mesh, which also creates a dds file with the same file name as the TGA file.
5) Rename the mesh to Frigate_TechScout.mesh and copy this to the Ships folder in SoaSE and the new dds file to the textures folder.

Game runs, ship appears and its still bloomed to the max.
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Shushoni
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Reply #10 December 12, 2007 12:55:59 PM
from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums
Well, to be fair I thought for a while that the data/bump map layers were not working. I tested the bump map and I couldn't be sure if it was working or not. I just wanted to release the first version of the editor before looking into that. I was told afterward that it worked so I didn't investigate it afterward. In retrospective I could just check with the data layer, see if the team texture work.

How about it, anyone can attest for sure that their data texture worked on a new model?
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Shushoni
TFL BigBANGtheory
Join Date 02/2007
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Reply #11 December 12, 2007 2:47:17 PM
from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums
From what I have read online you need to use DXT3 or DXT5 for 'textures with an alpha channel'. You mentioned in another thread the Mesh Editor currently uses DXT1. Is that the cause of the problem, and if so are other people creating a DXT3/5 manually themselves?
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Shushoni
tristangoodes
Join Date 03/2007
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Reply #12 December 13, 2007 11:27:48 AM
from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums
DXT 1 I believe doesn't have an alpha.

Use another program. We used the photoshop plugin from nvidia
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Shushoni
Code Herder
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Reply #13 December 13, 2007 2:32:50 PM
from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums
DXT1 has 1 bit of alpha if I remember correctly but that's beside the point, it was wrongly set to DXT1, I meant to use DXT5 or DXT3.
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Shushoni
TFL BigBANGtheory
Join Date 02/2007
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Reply #14 December 15, 2007 3:24:56 AM
from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums
Ok I am armed with the Nvidia plugin for DDS so I should be able to edit the alpha channel finally.

What I am not clear on is how textures go from the original model (which contains a material with imported textures) -> Code Herder Mesh Editor -> SoaSE game directory.

In order for the mesh to appear in game you replace an original SoaSE ship, I assume therefore the new 3 DDS textures must replace the corresponding original 3 DDS which textured the original model.

So given the model is already textured with DDS in 3DS do I 're-texture' the model with the Code Herder Mesh Editor? And where do the new textures need to end up as the renamed '3 DDS textures must replace the corresponding original 3 DDS' in the SoaSE texture drectory or something dfferent?
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Shushoni
Code Herder
Join Date 09/2007
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Reply #15 December 15, 2007 11:51:10 AM
from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums
When you make a model in max, there path to the texture is saved in the mode file. When you use my mesh editor, I use those texture names and save them in the sins .mesh file. So even if you replace an existing model, it's going to look for the name of the textures you've used in your new model. What you must do of course now is place the new .dds in the sins texture folder.
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