MerricksDad's Weapon-A-Day

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

I'll be releasing the textures at 2048 so others can make that decision for their games.

 

This one already has a txi file on it for sampling. But I will take a look at the blending type too. Thanks.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Is this better?

 

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Lord Sullivan]

               

It good, however, the TXI option "blending punchthrough" takes care of the problem illustrated in your screenshot below. If you look at the branches right under the first two at the top, you will notice some kind of glossy, icing visual artifact on the branches.

 

ok, finally progress. Here are some images of the first large spruce I made from JUST ONE camera shot on my whiteboard.

 

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Those ones being the ones where the 2048 texture is shrunk down to the smallest values, so the most mixing is occurring. I see it now. I didn't go back and try that on the previous texture I had posted (page 7) but that had a TON of artifact in it, especially when mixed with fog and sky box. This one has no mixing with the skybox or fog, but I did notice it mixes with the gray rocks.

 

Edit:

 

Here's the original one of the low quality fir:

 

 

And here are the new ones showing no mixing with anything outside the mesh itself.

 

 

Which looks better up close, but not any better far away (just different), except with that hideous mixing with behind textures not matched to the scene palette. But it also takes the entire section with non-zero-non-one alpha and makes it opaque (or basically sets the alpha value to 1), which for many textures, wouldn't be what we would want, such as in foliage with a large transparency variety. So I gotta be careful about masks with that blend setting.

 

 

With the spruce texture I did today, the blending and related issues were not as noticeable before applying punch-through because the number of pixels spanning the range from alpha 0 to alpha 1 was only one pixel, or no pixels, spread out over 2048 pixels total. But the mixing issues on this above lower quality texture (the fir) is 5 to 10 pixels over only 256 pixels total. Huge difference that alone can make.

 

For these larger textures, the punch-through will work very nicely in clearing up that single pixel lining, thank you!

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Actually, now that I am looking it over, I can't tell if the output with punch-through is a round function or a ceiling function. Can you?

 

a1 = ceil(a0) would set all the values from 0.0# through 0.9# to 1.0, making even the slightest amount of texture print as whatever you have in your texture alpha region RGB values.

 

where

 

a1 = round(a0) would set all the values from 0.0# through 0.5 to 0.0, and values from 0.5# to 0.9# to 1.0, in which case it would clip the texture alpha region to nothing.

 

I can't tell at a distance what it is actually doing. Anybody know?

 

Edit:

 

I have to squint, but I think it is the ceiling function

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Lord Sullivan]

               

When using punchthrough, you may have to tweek your texture or its alpha. Most of the time, it just works well visualy.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Zwerkules]

               

Which looks better up close, but not any better far away (just different), except with that hideous mixing with behind textures not matched to the scene palette. But it also takes the entire section with non-zero-non-one alpha and makes it opaque (or basically sets the alpha value to 1), which for many textures, wouldn't be what we would want, such as in foliage with a large transparency variety. So I gotta be careful about masks with that blend setting.

This is why I don't like to use punchtrough. The rounding of the alpha values to 1 or 0 makes most textures with semi-transparent foliage look very bad. Making sure that the transparency hint of a transparent texture is set correctly and that it is the last in the render order helps getting rid of unwanted bluish edges most of the time. It just doesn't work well with fog and the SAMs of doors because those are animated.

However if your alpha only has values of 1 and 0 anyway, using punchthrough will look okay.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Tarot Redhand]

               

Like the forest fire skybox.

 

TR

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

That is actually a space sky box I was using for testing. If I could get the original image in a texture 10 times that wide, I would be much more happier. On one side it is blue and on the other it is red. With a crisper image, you could see easier that it has stars and nebulous clouds.

 

Edit:

So you can have some context, I run the planes in my games more like planets. They have their own separate geology and physical structures, but they are no different than planets. Some of them exist in realms with different physics, but I represent them as being in the same kind of space we have in real life, rather than how forgotten realms represents crystal spheres and astral and ethereal realms.

 

I find it works better if people want to bring spelljammer elements, as well as planescape elements, to a game I run.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Rolo Kipp]

               

<minimizing...>

 

Have you played with the downsamplemin/max on the skybox? I know that was a valid fix for a similar problem in NwN2 and I included it without even testing on Cestus' starry night skyball. 

 

The issue (from the NwN2 board) was apparently the size of the skybox texture combined with it's distance made it a prime candidate for downsampling, so it was always pixelated unless you turned downsampling off. (which undoubtedly just shifted the downsampling to other textures, since there *is* a finite texture space :-P

 

<...the maximum>

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

It does have some downsample details, but they don't seem to do anything at all. I was sad. I had made a custom skybox with a radius of 50k. It is a sphere so you can see it below the horizon in space adventures. Also, with the camera unlocked, there are no gray holes and the texure pretty much fits at the top and bottom. Not perfect, but 2 points out of 720 space isn't that bad. The problem is the image is only 1024x512, which is really unacceptable for a skybox imo.

 

I have some others I am touching up with 4096 textures. They look better, but are not yet seamless.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

This is why I don't like to use punchtrough. The rounding of the alpha values to 1 or 0 makes most textures with semi-transparent foliage look very bad. Making sure that the transparency hint of a transparent texture is set correctly and that it is the last in the render order helps getting rid of unwanted bluish edges most of the time. It just doesn't work well with fog and the SAMs of doors because those are animated.

However if your alpha only has values of 1 and 0 anyway, using punchthrough will look okay.

 

Is there a way to turn off door glow? Completely? Because what I really want to do is get a system set up where proximity makes a placed vfx activate. What I want is a glow cone, or rectangular column, or other shape, to represent a site transition. More like diablo 3. I want to be able to choose the color of the glow, depending on where the transition goes. The only other way I know of to do that is to not use doors objects.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Rolo Kipp]

               

<digging...>

 

The door SAM (the usually blue rectangle) is actually a defined anim object in the model. It is usually blue, usually rectangular and usually one frame. But it can be any color, and shape and animated any which way.

 

It can *not* however, be removed from the model in game. You'd need to make specific door model variants with transparent SAMs (I'm pretty sure you *do* need a SAM), then make placeable VFX models to proxy the SAMs.

 

It's not an impossible task, but it would require replacing models.

 

Edit: An earlier reference I made. If you don't have the TilesetConstruction.pdf, let me know and I'll try to remember where it is posted...

 

<...the crazy colors, man>

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

You know I have no problem doing that '>

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

I am starting to think that all my hopes and dreams for these foliage textures are going to be shot down by ... sunlight. Who would have thought that the infernal orb would stop me from taking pictures. Now I sound like an illithid.