January 2013 Custom Content Challenge: Spells and Spellcrafting

[Legacy_henesua]

               Interesting, OTR. Thanks for explaining. I have long wondered why some of Ben Harrison's alchemy placeables "lose the glass" when placed as static.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_OldTimeRadio]

               You're welcome! 

I want to take an extra opportunity to nervously underscore that this is mostly from memory and my description may leave out some other important considerations.  Like other TXI commands that might/should go along with an envmaptexture TXI command, such as "alphamean" and/or whether the difference between static/nonstatic behavior could also (possibly) be related to model structure.  Like, maybe having the geometry attached to an a-node makes a difference in the behavior.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Rolo Kipp]

               <dropping a couple...>

...and like how sometimes the interior geometry just vanishes :-P
If I could solve *that* problem, I'd be a happy wizard!





The glass bowl is envmapped with a reduced alpha/opacity, so I get both transparency & reflection. And a dimensional light-warp that swallows the interior geometry... sometimes.

<...dirty coppers>
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_OldTimeRadio]

               IIRC, these are two different models- the homunculus and the bowl, right?  And the bowl is a placeable and the homunculus is a creature appearance, correct?   Is your homunculus set as classification "Character", re: Omnibus "Light reflecting bug"? 
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_The Amethyst Dragon]

               The jar started with four copper supports going down the sides of the jar and crossing underneath.  When that was set to static, it showed up through the transparent glass and water, but when not static the supports vanished when viewed through the jar.  I opted to remove the supports and put the jar right to the bottom, leaving only the top, since it bugged me to have the supports vanish when panning around the jar.

I tried setting the glass/water jar to static, but the eyeballs stopped moving. '>  Ah, compromise...

Looking at this more in-game, I may just get rid of the reflectiveness on the jar's lid and play around some more with what parts are static, which aren't, and what goes in which part of the combined model.  I've still got a few more days to mess around with it.

Might even make a few more jars with just colored and/or glowing liquids in them.  Hmmm...I wonder how well transparency and self-illumination play together...
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Rolo Kipp]

               <slipping...>

The Hom is type "character".  She has no shadows set.

Early on (before elaborating the geometry of the bottle) the Hom was visible from much greater angles (both radial and azimuth). It seems that the more I worked on the geomtry (the rim and lid, actually) the narrower the band of visibility for the creature inside.

She is still visible inside in the toolset, it is only in the game that she vanishes.

I also tried the suggestion of manually shifting the transparent nodes to the end of the Bottle model. The bottle now crashes the toolset/game :-P

<...backwards>
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Rolo Kipp]

               <grinning...>

The fluid texture and the runes (seen through the bottle) both have self-illum in the top pic above :-)

Edit: There's also a lightsource illuminating the face of the Hom (attached to the Hom head)...

<...brightly>
               
               

               

                     Modifié par Rolo Kipp, 29 janvier 2013 - 07:31 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_Rolo Kipp]

               <waving his hands in the air...>

Got it!
Thank you, OTR!
The trick is to make the placeable "Tile" type ;-)


Reflection and transparency and showing the things inside from all angles.

Yes! *pumps fist*

<...like he don't care>
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_The Amethyst Dragon]

               Tile type you say?  Most interesting.

* AD heads back into gmax... *
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_dusty.lane]

               This one likes the eyeballs!
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_OldTimeRadio]

               @Rolo & Amethyst Dragon - You guys might want to try Effect classification instead and see if it gets you where you need to.  Don't have a link handy but Adam Miller once reported that some number of placeables set as Tile caused problems.  Tile and Effect render slightly different ways though, so it may not visually do the same thing you're looking for.

The discussion spawned a YouTube video on the subject of placeables with envmaps, static vs non-static.  It also demonstrates how the "Reflection" column in placeables.2da will override even existing TXIs:


               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Pearls]

               submitting the other 3 spells, not submitting eruption since i cant fix it
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_The Amethyst Dragon]

               Wow.  Quite the adventure in frustration today.

I went into gmax, opened up my pretty much functional model with the animated eyeballs, changed the type to Tile, and exported.  Simple enough.  Closed up the model and dropped the exported one into my testing hak.

Wouldn't you know it, all my eyeballs looked like raisins in-game.  Reopened my model in gmax, and the export as a tile had inappropriate term messed up practically everything in the model.

Changed the model base back to Character type.  Dropped everything else but the animation dummy.  Remade the jar, the water, the copper parts, and all the eyeballs.  Exported, tested in game...same damn thing.

Erased every copy of the model I had (they were all variations on the same mess-up).  Closed down gmax and the listener completely.  Restarted from scratch.

Eventually, I re-figured out how I had gotten both the water and glass to show at the same time (water and glass both tranparent, but glass is "inside out" so it only renders on the far side), and finished the jar of eyeballs.  Then I quickly made a 2nd jar, this one with no top, filled with glowing, smoking green fluid.

These are not set as type Tile.

There is some very minor misalignment when overlapping the two parts of each jar, but it's only visible from certain angles while zoomed in very close to the jars.  I'll live with it.


               
               

               
            

[Legacy_henesua]

               

The Amethyst Dragon wrote...

Wow.  Quite the adventure in frustration today.

I went into gmax, opened up my pretty much functional model with the animated eyeballs, changed the type to Tile, and exported.  Simple enough.  Closed up the model and dropped the exported one into my testing hak.

I found during my work creating tilemagic placeables that I could change type to Tile or Character in notepad. I am unaware of any bad side effects of making the change this way, and admittedly the assets that I was working with had started out as the Tile type. Nevertheless I had experimented with both options a number of times and noticed no problems. These tests were with many placeables (not VFX as is typical with tilemagic) of the Tile type, both including the aabb node and without.

So anyway, might be worth a try. Rather than expoting from gmax you might be able to open up the MDL in notepad and change the classification.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Tarot Redhand]

               I don't know about anybody else but I think the mk 2 version looks even better than the mk 1.

TR