How to create a shade for Oblivion in 3DSM

[Razorwing]

This tutorial describes how to create a shade effect in 3D Studio Max without using vertex colors. Using vertex colors is usually the best option, but this method can do what vertex colors can't - give shade to surfaces that are not in the nif. Like a barrel shading the ground, as in for example Bethesda's meshes\clutter\barrelhuge01.nif.

There are many ways of creating shade meshes, and if you want for instance a rectangular shade you wouldn't use a circle spline and might not use a spline at all. But hopefully you can still mine some good info from this tutorial. Download the archive attached at the bottom of this post for 3d files and the nif example.

The tutorial model would have looked like this without a shade effect. With the shade effect it looks like this:

[title]Step one.[/title]

[1st]I[/1st]'ve made a plane and a sphere. I added an editable poly modifer and deleted the bottom half of the sphere.







[title]Step two.[/title]

[1st]I[/1st] created a circle spline. I wanted a border that's around 16 points thick. Since the radius of the sphere was 32, a value 125% greater than that would give me the center point for a 16 point thick border. 32 x 1,25 = 40, i.e. the circle gets a radius of 40.







[title]Step three.[/title]

[1st]T[/1st]hen I set the circle spline to be visible in the viewport. I set it to a rectangular shape and it's dimensions to a length of 16 and a height of 0,1. I set the interpolation to 3 so that it matches the edges of the sphere. I then added the shadefade texture to it.





[title]Step four.[/title]

[1st]I[/1st] gave the circle spline an angle of 45,0 so that I could uvw map it with a cylinder map. As you can see the spline gets misaligned, and the shadefade texture leaves a lot of blankspace at the top.






[title]Step five.[/title]

[1st]S[/1st]o I need to adjust the cylindrical map and reposition the spline. For the first part I just increased the height of the uvw map and moved the gizmo upward, so that the map is still 'anchored' to the base. Because our spline is still a 3d object and we want it to be just a 2d surface, I selected the inner polyons of the bowl shape and then inverted the selection (edit > select invert) and then deleted those polygons.
[indent][/indent]Then I added another edit mesh modifer because I want to know what Z position the vertices at the bottom of the surface has, so that I can position the surface correctly. So I selected a vertice and went into Select and Move mode and copy-pasted the Z value (-5,6214985847) to a text doc.

[title]Step six.[/title]

[1st]W[/1st]ith the bowl selected I went into hierarchy mode and set the pivot of the surface to it's baseline, the value I got in the previous step. I did that with the affect pivot only button. Now when I move the surface in Select and Move mode I move it according to its baseline, making it very easy to position exactly. I moved it to a Z position of 0,2.





[title]Step seven.[/title]

[1st]N[/1st]ow I added an edit poly modifier to the surface and selected its outer border and then repositioned the border to 0,2. And presto we have a surface.







[title]Step eight.[/title]

[1st]A[/1st]s you can see the spline doesn't match the sphere's edges - there's a large gap from where the sphere ends and the border begins. No worries, we'll just contract the edges inside the sphere. For normal models that isn't a good idea because it confuses Oblivion's lighting system, but this is a different case because the border we created can not be merged with any other surface. If I had target welded the vertices to the sphere's vertices the shade would have glitched with the floor; if I had cut a hole in the floor plane and target welded it so that the shade surface was a perfect fit, you would have been able to see the nothingness under the shadefade. (Apart from that the shadefade doesn't actually have a normal map, so it's not affected by lighting conditions.)

[title]Step nine.[/title]

[1st]N[/1st]otice the white gap on the surface? The best way I can describe it is that it's an illusion. There's no point in trying to fix it because it doesn't affect anything. Likewise if you render the model in 3D Studio Max it'll look pretty ghastly, but again, it doesn't matter when it comes to the end result. I exported step nine as an example nif; I didn't do much to it in Nifskope, mostly I just added an NiAlphaProperty to the shadefade mesh.

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Note. The shade texture is a stock Oblivion texture and it's found here: textures\dungeons\misc\shadefade01.dds