Merricksdad's Middledark Tileset

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

To kick off spring break, though I have three reports to work on over break because I have jerk professors, I'm working on these crystals again. I just repaired the beta test crystal so that it has perfect shadows. What else about the beta test crystal would you like to see different, if anything?


I corrected the shadows by removing the lips I didn't see on the bottoms. This instantly cleared up the area lighting issues, and made it so strings didn't come out the back side when I used a torch near it.

 

I'm thinking to do a few clusters using the same basic shapes, with some randomly scaled options. Today I'll probably just do 20 options and show them on here before I put them up. Talk amongst yourselves '>

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

ok, these are not by any means perfect, but at least they have good shadows. The outer sheathing is only correct in the original, so the texture you are seeing is the more metallic inner crystal without any of the smoothing sheathing. This makes them sharper and brighter, instead of smooth and dull with a sharp shine when you pass them.

 

I constructed a randomizing crystal builder using the 6 crystal parts I already had inside the beta test crystal. I can use this in the future to make crystal clusters from additional shapes, as it's made to recognize any number of shapes parented by a certain named base as potential shards. They're then randomly scaled and rotated.

 

 

The one behind and to the right of my character is the original. See how it has less sharpness at a distance.


So to correct the issue of the shininess, all I have to do is fix my script to reapply the sheathing texture and extrude out the sheathing faces by 2cm so they'll completely match the original.


Again, for those who didn't take a sec to look in the crystal texture files, these are gray, not blue, or yellow. You set the crystal color by modifying the mesh ambient and diffuse colors, and also the self-illumination values on the sheathing and the base mesh cluster.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

I want to build a digital catalog of all my placeables (and I want to be able to share the program with others so they can do CEP and stuff later). I'm looking for somebody who can load NWN models into GL or DX interface and take screenshots at X number of angles, so I can make animated GIF videos for all the items. Then the catalog can be produced in HTML or other similar formats which allow inline GIF. Anybody know how to do this? Maybe I should ask the guys working on Xoreos?

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

It may be a bit closer to doing it by hand, but I should be able to do screen capture GIF's and then reduce the frames via GIF script. modifying GIF's in GIF format is not really that hard.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

ok, so to be honest, in a screen shot, there isn't much difference with the crystal sheaths on. The difference is primarily when you walk past stuff, or the dulling at a distance effect you get by putting a smoothed transparent mesh over a non-smoothed shiny mesh.


Here is the updated screenshot with the sheathes on. Note the cluster combos have changed due to the randomness. In the next picture, I will show them in another color combo just for giggles.

 

 

So now what I want to do is explore the other crystal shapes I want to put in this kit. I expect these will be used as spars and quartz. They're kinda in between the two in shape and face count, though these are primarily 6-sided tips. I want to do some cubes next, so I can portray stuff like purple/clear salts or fluorite, or some galena cubes, or combos of that, like we have in the entryway for the geology museum at my school. They've got some nice dark galena paired with some of the darkest fluorite I have ever seen, over a striated bluish yellowish white calcite spar. Fascinating color combo.

 

Edit: Here's some color alternatives. Fruity Super Nintendo Colors!

 

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

I'll put up some of the geosciences museum pics soon. After spring break some time, I'll get a bunch of pics of the stuff from elmwood mine. It's fantastic stuff.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Ssythilac]

               

Ahhh!! Great work with those crystals, MD!

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

May 1st has arrived. I've become free of school once more, however, we're possibly moving starting Friday after buying a new house on Thursday. Can't wait. But this might come with a few construction things I need to work on in real life before putting a lot of effort into games.

 

This also means that until August, I'll once again be free to work on stuff, and I'll be free of garden-based distractions this year.

 

Goals for this year:

• Finish working on this underdark tileset


• Revisit the black hills tileset and add the veggies


• Release the massive veggies pack

Anything outside of that list will be extra I guess. Gotta take it easy knowing school is going to come up again really fast.

 

I also noticed that the makers of Sword Coast Legends have bit the dust, meaning their expansion may never see the light. I was really looking forward to seeing that in action so I could also add those concepts to this tileset, but I guess I will just work forward in my own way.

 

I'm seriously thinking to return to the room-based concept for caverns. It makes it very easy, and I don't have to mess around with 90% of the tile edges when I build stuff. Almost nothing has to be exact from tile to tile, because it crosses tile boundaries. There is great benefit in that idea. I can also make 9-18 tiles in a single project and then release new rooms as just that, a new expansion room, rather than having to update tile type layouts in the 2DA.

 

The intention this year for the caverns is to add the following base types for non-room areas:

• water filled chasm


• finish walkable edge darklake tiles


• use SEN's multi-height chart to build a +2 height (not going to do +3 and +4 on this one)

Let me redefine some of the concepts I had started last year, so I can remember going forward what domains they'll be in, and probably stay in:

 

Normal Terrain:

• open giant cavern, high ceiling


• open hallway (cavern connector), also with high ceiling


• open cavern watery passage, using those water tiles I already have done (no reason to drop it)


• open pit cavern, no visible ceiling


• open pit bridges


• open water cavern, high ceiling (using darklake tiles)


• open water bridges


• mushroom forest


• path through mushroom forest


• +1 and +2 transitions for each using SEN data

Back to Room-Based Terrain:

• chasm crossings


• short ceiling caves


• long oddly shaped hallways


• river rooms and tunnels


• boss rooms


• stair rooms and chute rooms


• ramp rooms


• open pit platform rooms


• chasm ledge paths


• stream tunnels


• fungus closets

Why am I going back to rooms? As I mentioned it has a few benefits, but let me clarify that list of benefits.

 

One of the concepts I am really enjoying in the unreal 4 engine is the sheer number of room-like groups builders are creating. Instead of using plain tile-by-tile layouts, they're making stuff like OTR was importing from other games. I see this as entirely reasonable, and with smaller groups that can be moved around, such as in Dungeon Siege 1 and 2, a lot of variety can come from a few of those groups.

 

Second, using SEN's +2 options, I want a better way of making realistic looking terrain, and I think groups allows me to handle that better. The group can come complete with the needed +2 changes built right in.

 

I started sketching out a forest tileset that is also groups only, and I'm really enjoying the concept work. So much so that I think every tileset could easily be made with such larger chunks. I'm seeing a bunch of "room" shapes that can be carried to any tileset, no matter the type of biology or geology in the region, simply because of the shared walkpath options. This makes me think that I can use the same base templates (and walkmesh) across a lot of tilesets, and this can be used to quickly make a TON of base tiles for a whole library of area types. Every time a new room gets made, it can be mostly cloned over to the other tilesets and placeable-like stuff, and mass types can just be switched with a script. It isn't just that easy, of course, but it's close.


I'm probably going to read a 300 page book before I jump back in, but really, I can't wait to get started.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

I'm kinda stuck building a barn, but I can't work on that today, with my kid home sick, so I'm putting a few hours into building an extractor and convertor for unity assets. So far, I can extract sword coast textures and models, placing the models into a garbled wavefront OBJ format. All the face indices are listed as negative offset from the end of the current set. Not sure why they did that with this asset format, but I'm having to rewrite my script to take that into consideration.

 

So far, so good. I'm just having to guess on which texture goes on which groups, as there is no reference directly in the model file.

 

 

With this, as soon as I figure it all out by naming scheme, I should be able to pull everything right down to the tilesets out of the game, and use all the parts as a new complete set of placeables.


OR, what my actual goal is: make a set of individual unity assets for use in GMAX for building my own tilesets.

 

Edit:

 

Because of the sheer volume of verts and faces in the asset groups, I am having multiple crashes in GMAX while importing, however, if I turn off the "reset controllers", I can power through and at least work with the file contents in GMAX.

 

Edit:

 

Just mass converted everything extracted from the Underdark and Drow areas, and I'm not sure I have everything for tilesets. Most of the stuff I am looking at is placeables and tile options you can cycle through in the dungeon builder (also just placeables). Some of the parts are so complex that GMAX throws the warning that you've run out of script memory. Others just crash GMAX silently.  I have yet to see if MDLViewer or NWNExplorer can view them as-is, without the texture applied. Something to find out...

 

Edit:

 

Nope, totally black, and if you view the tree structure, total death.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

100-some assets well on their way to placeables... but... there is like 7000 files to parse still, and that's just the shared asset file, and the underdark passage, and drow catacombs.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

I'm looking at some of the character models, and wondering if I get all the data around, somebody else might be interested in trying to extract unity animations for use in NWN. I have no idea what I'm doing when converting those. Just like my stuff I built to extract models and convert from torchlight 2, I've just not got the patience or desire to put that much effort into such complex animations. The models do look good though, but are really high poly compared to NWN1 stuff. Still, if somebody wanted to wrap them around existing animations, it would probably not be that hard. The only problem is that the characters are in poses in the base model file, and without the animations converted, you can't easily get them to a T-pose or NWN 0-frame.

 

So, anyway, I'm just going to stick with extracting what I need right now for the cavern tilesets I'm working on. Rocks, pillars, bridges, speleothems, etc. The pile I have mass converted also has a bunch of oak trees and fancy schmancy stuff for outdoors areas. If I can determine what goes with what, I can bundle those for gmax importing for somebody else to play with.

 

Due to the complexity of some models, it might be handy to break them down into files containing only a single unity submesh (same as a single trimesh in nwmax). I may end up writing a program to do that, and then name all the files based on which file they go with. SCL already did that with tile groups. One of the 2x3 hallway S shapes uses over 30 files of parts. Granted, that is a 2x3 NWN sized tile group, which has 3 large placeable groups to modify the base models, and which also has 2-3 other alternate prefab spots on the model.


Another problem I have with the meshes is that some of them are in 1/10 scale, and some are in 10x scale. Some are also rotated 90° on the X axis, for no good reason. Somehow the engine, or the other files, tell the SCL scripts to fix that when the parts get used. Just kinda annoying, but then again, I shouldn't complain, as I didn't make all this stuff.


Tomorrow I'm back to building my barn, fence, and deck, and might not get back to this until next Monday. We'll see how it goes.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Ssythilac]

               

Hi MD!

 

Glad to see that you have return to work on this terrific project of Underdark! This looks incredibly promising.

 

Good idea to extract models from Sword Coast legends. In the last months I had some free time to play the game sporadically, and I think that It is not a bad game in any form, but neither a truly good Dnd game like the great works of the past...

 

But anyway, I think that the strong point of the game focuses in the atmosphere and construction of some áreas. Especially the Underdark, one of the best concepts in this fictional environment that I have seen in a videogame. If you could recreate that feeling in your tileset (or something similar) that could be a truly great day for NWN!

 

Keep up the great work, man! '>

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

That middledark region is my favorite, with all the giant mushrooms. I was able to find and extract all the resources they used in those maps. Still not sure I have found the maps themselves, as I can only find a few tiles, and they are named horribly. But I got all the mushrooms, rocks, skeletons, cave corals, and all the textures that go with them. I'm just putting them together now. Looking forward to making a new placeable library with them, and to making few tileset additions based on those tiles from SCL.

 

I also pulled out the draegloth skin and a few other T-pose character skins that I'd like to wrap to some existing NWN1 animations. I want to see if they are too heavy a load for NWN.

 

I've also noticed that a great portion of the detail in SCL is hidden, at least the geometry, by the fact that everything has specular bump maps applied. Still, this leaves a lot of nice medium detail texture with which to work, but also leaves room for me to dumb-down some of their tileset parts to a more NWN polycount, without much loss. I certainly can't use their tiles as is, because the poly count is far too high for GMAX to load, but, I at least have the layout and map images that I can use to base my work on.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

I also found Drizzt and Gwen models, complete with Todd Lockwood style scimitars. Interested in viewing those with the textures on.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Ssythilac]

               

Good! If you can adapt all of those placeables to work in NWN, that will be an incredible addition for all of us that works in an Underdark module adventure!

 

By the way, have you seen the Mantol-Derith enclave from the free expansión of SCL? Pretty neat, I think.

 

PD: another thing this game excelled is in the duergar buildings of Gracklstugh. They can be converted/adapted as placeables? Because of this concept (good duergar buildings) is something never seen in NWN.