Author Topic: MerricksDad's Weapon-A-Day  (Read 5079 times)

Legacy_MerricksDad

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MerricksDad's Weapon-A-Day
« Reply #90 on: April 20, 2014, 11:04:47 pm »


               

ok, after playing with the 10m thicket, and building a (utter failure) concave hull builder (which makes x2 the faces as original model), all three now work in the toolset well enough. I've also ramped up performance in the NWN explorer view. The larger thicket has only a few seconds load time now.


2nmFrH7.png


 


tGipcWx.png


 


GAWxtte.png


 


ok, so the 2.5m thicket uses 5 trees, and strangely enough it looks larger than the 5m thicket because the randomness picked older trees. The 5m thicket uses 10 trees, and contains a lot of small sickly trees on one side. The large thicket uses 21 trees and are more spaced out than the previous thickets. I suggest combining them together as you would the mushroom masses for caverns.



               
               

               
            

Legacy_MerricksDad

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« Reply #91 on: April 20, 2014, 11:10:59 pm »


               

I just need to take some other crap you guys don't need out of the module and then we're ready to upload. First: Walking the dog.



               
               

               
            

Legacy_YeoldeFog

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« Reply #92 on: April 21, 2014, 12:05:31 am »


               

Beautiful! Really nice!



               
               

               
            

Legacy_3RavensMore

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« Reply #93 on: April 21, 2014, 12:07:04 am »


               

That thicket looks fabulous!  I was just out cutting thickets out of a gully today and thinking wouldn't terrain like this in NW be great?  Okay...so I wasn't really thinking that--more like how to not lose a limb to the Spinning Vorpal Teeth of Death!...aka an old chainsaw minus the guard.  Afterword though, when the SVToD had been silenced, and a glass of beer consumed (maybe even two, possibly even three, and it's conceivable the a number greater than three was involved) that truly was the topic of conversation.  Imagine my surprise when I find that you created one--the thicket that is, and not the chainsaw.


 


I'd never ask for a chainsaw.



               
               

               
            

Legacy_MerricksDad

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« Reply #94 on: April 21, 2014, 12:50:10 am »


               

ok, the file is up. I also added a 4th thicket, also 10m, but with 30 trees.


 


I also changed the area visuals so they look more like you would see in vanilla NWN. My custom colors are more realistic, but less dramatic. The trees look substantially different under normal NWN conditions.



               
               

               
            

Legacy_MerricksDad

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« Reply #95 on: April 21, 2014, 01:05:38 pm »


               

I forgot to mention that on the thickets I released yesterday, I had processed the trees with a 50% trim modifier which kept randomly selected 50% of the leaf nodes from being created. This is what makes some of the trees look healthier than others. The script, when ready, will have a ton of options you can use to manage these kinds of results. I'm currently working on pine attributes, including meristem/leader management. This will allow you to define the main trunk as the leader and will continue with the last sub-branch appended to that leader (and so on). You will be able to define special properties for that branch system, and also specify a chance for additional leaders at each branch added. I want to be able to make an accurate representation of any species, and then build species libraries for use with the script.


 


At some point, my goal is to create a helper object so you can just place the helper node in your tileset scene and then use the helper's properties from the right side, like you do with trimesh (etc.). I'd like it to be able to chop down the tree and start over whenever told to do so. Like if you don't appreciate the first tree, just click rebuild and get a new one.


 


All hypothetical at the moment, but actually it's just numbers, and it certainly won't take long now that the basics are out of the way.



               
               

               
            

Legacy_Zwerkules

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« Reply #96 on: April 21, 2014, 10:06:17 pm »


               


The thickets will be created from a combination of maple-like, poplar-like, and olive-like trees. I did not differentiate the growth on anything other than their leaf colors, so feel free to change their bark types or rotate their element parts as you need them. I left all the branch sections and leaf sections as individual unwelded elements as part of the larger model. Leaves and branch/trunk sections are separate because they use separate textures.




The models look fine the way they are, so there probably is no need to rotate any elements, but it is good to know that it is still possible.


Personally I'd change the textures before I'd use the models, because I find the colours too bright and unnatural, but that's just my taste.


How are the branches mapped? The texture looks as if it has no detail. Is that because it is streched or is it the texture itself?


               
               

               
            

Legacy_MerricksDad

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« Reply #97 on: April 21, 2014, 10:59:58 pm »


               

The textures for the branches are unfortunately made the same way I did the weapon models. I took a pre-made texture, chopped it into triangles or low count poly's and then positioned their visual stem to 0,0 on my leaf node manager (for the script). There is no 2d-point rhyme or reason beside that, so retexturing the leaves may take some time unless you specifically uvmap them from scratch to a new texture.


I personally use various different lighting and environment mapping techniques to make the texures look super bright or not as bright in-game. Having lived in mountainous regions before, the ones you see in the three pics above are as close to what we saw with the human eye without also tinting everything blue (which I always hated). I know in the eastern US they don't appear as brightly lit. They definitely look wrong with the vanilla NWN environment settings from the toolset. The image of the poplar branch is actually a real picture. The maple I think is somebody's hand-painted art, though I have no idea who. And the olive leaf is an image of a previously rendered 3d model, so it is more unnaturally glossy and middle textured.


 


If you zoom in on the texture in-game, they have quite a bit more detail, except the olive branch. The images are each 512 square I think (as tga), so there is a lot of room to play with. Definitely feel free to play with different textures, and if you care to, send me some textures to add to my tree library, which I need to basically redo because of all the stuff I lost when I switched computers.


 


I plan on taking a bunch of stuff for pine-family trees and building pre-rendered branches and then converting them to usable textures. We'll see how that goes



               
               

               
            

Legacy_MerricksDad

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« Reply #98 on: April 22, 2014, 04:49:26 pm »


               

Today's package contains the Chaos Eater sword from Darksiders. What an awesome sword.


 


cCoyUMf.png


 


Because this weapon uses color slot 5 of greatswords, but vanilla nwn only has 4 colors for appearance 1, I've also included a blank-model part 1 color 9 to fill the appearance gap.


 


I've also modified the texture on the ice spear I made last week. I hope you'll find it better fits with the axe, rod, and sword.



               
               

               
            

Legacy_rjshae

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« Reply #99 on: April 22, 2014, 06:25:35 pm »


               

It looks cool, but... gah, that thing must weigh a ton.



               
               

               
            

Legacy_MerricksDad

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« Reply #100 on: April 22, 2014, 06:31:55 pm »


               

I'm sure it is made of souls, so it probably floats a bit. And it's like 1/10 the scale of the one in Darksiders '<img'>



               
               

               
            

Legacy_MerricksDad

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« Reply #101 on: April 23, 2014, 06:09:02 pm »


               

Probably not going to make anything new today. I feel so exhausted still from being sick last weekend, I don't think I could weld two verts together.


 


I was however wondering if anybody would like a video showing how to manually make a super basic tileset from scratch. I could go through the motions and make a simple 2-3 texture rolling hills base set, over a few videos. I could walk people through the SET file layout in a text editor, and then use GMAX to create maybe like 30 tiles or something to get people started. Kinda sounds fun. I need to purchase a mic so I can make this easier on everybody.



               
               

               
            

Legacy_henesua

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« Reply #102 on: April 23, 2014, 06:35:36 pm »


               

i'd watch that video!



               
               

               
            

Legacy_MerricksDad

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« Reply #103 on: April 24, 2014, 08:59:32 pm »


               

I have a mic, I may play tomorrow '<img'>



               
               

               
            

Legacy_YeoldeFog

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« Reply #104 on: April 25, 2014, 07:45:13 am »


               

I'll only watch if you sound like Barry White! '<img'>