Paatru Race - Progress Thread

[Koniption]

New update for 4-11-2011. Only a little progress made, due to the nice weather around here..... =)

KP

[Ibsen's Ghost]

Good stuff....looking pretty sleek now. :yes:

[Koniption]

New update for 4-12-2011. Pics in OP.

KP

[Ibsen's Ghost]

I'd like to bet that was pretty tricky....is the texture resolution working okay, do you think? It can sometimes have unpredictable results in-game.

[Koniption]

Originally posted by Ibsen's Ghost
I'd like to bet that was pretty tricky....is the texture resolution working okay, do you think? It can sometimes have unpredictable results in-game.

What do you mean?

KP

[Ibsen's Ghost]

I'm not that great with textures but you can sometimes get that glossy effect that looks a little fake on some items....plus I tried re-texturing the old TMNT mod with one of my own frogskin textures that wasn't a high resolution to begin with so it looked a bit unconvincing when I tried it out. I think it depends on the source of the texture and what you intend to do with it but some of the rocks I re-textured look quite stretched since I used textures that weren't specifically designed for them but for something smaller.

Is the best tactic the one that SG referred to when he mentioned 'baking textures'? I took that to mean that the textures kind of moulded themselves to the object so that they fit the contours.

[Koniption]

Originally posted by Ibsen's Ghost
I'm not that great with textures but you can sometimes get that glossy effect that looks a little fake on some items....plus I tried re-texturing the old TMNT mod with one of my own frogskin textures that wasn't a high resolution to begin with so it looked a bit unconvincing when I tried it out.

Do you want the Paatru top be glossy or wet looking? I can do that, I think. I think the texture resolution I'm using right now is pretty hi-res. You may even need to reduce the size of the textures, on your end, depending.

I think it depends on the source of the texture and what you intend to do with it but some of the rocks I re-textured look quite stretched since I used textures that weren't specifically designed for them but for something smaller.

Stretching is usually caused by bad UV mapping. If sections of the UVmap have faces too bunched up together, and they aren't evenly and well-spaced, you can get stretching. For those rocks you mentioned, try doing the following, and see what works best:

Go into Nifskope, and go to the NITriStrip that as stretched texture. Rightclick on it and go to "texture" -> "Edit UV"....richclick on the pop-up window and choose "Select All". Rightclick again and go to "Scale and Translate Selected".

Uncheck the "Uniform Scaling" box. Then first make the "X" field a "2.000"...see how that affects the texture on the model in the render window.

Next, make the "X" a ".5000", to go back to org. UV size, then make the "Y" a "2.000"....see how that affects the texture in the render window. One change or the other should make the texture look "more" like what you want.

Once you get it so that the texture is "evened" out both up down and left right on the model, next see if the texture looks too "fine/small". If so, go back into the UV edit window, choose "Select All" again, and "Scaled and Translate Selected". This time, make sure the "Uniform Scaling" box is checked. Then reduce the 'X" field, to something less than 1.000, such as .5000. Doing this will enlarge the "grain" or "size of the tiling on the mesh's texture. Do the opposite if the texture looks too blocky, chunky, or basically too big (make the "X" field a number larger than 1.000...).

Is the best tactic the one that SG referred to when he mentioned 'baking textures'? I took that to mean that the textures kind of moulded themselves to the object so that they fit the contours.

I've yet to learn to bake textures in Blender. I think a good use of baking textures is when you start out with a hi-poly model. Like if you had a human model, you even model out the veins and facial creases, etc. You then have things like lamps and cameras in 3D modeling programs. The creases and veins will gets shadows on them in a certain direction, based on where the "lamp" or "sunlight" is placed in respect to the model's position. If the "sun" is above the human, the veins/creases will develop shadow underneath themselves, just like light actually behaves. Once you have the proper lighting, you can position a camera to face it so that that it is in view of the veins and the shadowing on them. You can then "render" the texture, with that shadowing built into it, then export that texture with the shadows. Same goes for normal maps in a way, where you want really good, well-defined, and precise bumps and creases to show up in game. You make that hi-poly model, bake a normal map that picks up on those creases and veins, then you apply that normal map to a low-poly version of the model. This makes even low poly models have veins and creases really stand out in the game, where otherwise, the low poly model would not have visible veins and creases since they were "decimated" or welded together in the hi-poly model, to reduce the face count of the model.

So I think texture baking moulds the little details to the model's contours, on one hand, but UVmapping is still needed to "further" mould the textures to the model, on the other hand.

Koniption

[Koniption]

Small new update for 4-20-2011.

KP

[Ibsen's Ghost]

Getting there... :yes:

[Koniption]

New substantial progress on the Paatru development, posted in OP, for 4-21-2011.

Koniption