papa austin: honestly that giant screenshot doesn't do you a favor, first of all, is this a specular or is your texture resolution higher then the texture you put in? there are those suepr fine lines on it here and there. Also you should definitely get rid of those ugly texture seams, you've got some grasspatches obviously floating around etc. a lot of mistakes no one would have noticed when the screenshot was smaller or the player would be moving around in your level
alright! that's what I'm talking about....that's what i needed to here thanks neox (also big fan of airborn looks great), so i was trying to get some of those seems out with a detail normal because i didn't run into those problems in diffuse so I'm pretty sure it is my normal map, grass patches should be easy to fix I'll add some more patches to fill those spots in...
@ felipefrango for my alphas i use a copy of the leaves on top and us a gaussian blur a few times to act as a buffer, i guess i could put a power node on my alpha to squeeze it in a bit so it doesn't show then.
anything else you guys see would be helpful, i have been a little to involved in this project some fresh eyes definitely help
yea, and when I said I wanted to see more I meant that dope ass harbor level, not whatever that is.
haha, i see you are liking my shitty seagull my friend....yeah i was just going to post a now semi large post of that and play Who Can Find some errors for me to fix lol
@papa austin: I agree with neox, there's no need to show your work this big. I really dig your scene, but at this resolution people start to notice flaws that would've been invisible otherwise. Also, are you using black background on your leaves diffuse texture? There are black borders around all of them, if you're using black try paiting the background with a green that matches the leaves color more or less.
Using PRE-MULTIPLIED alpha and a better filtering mode will usually solve that nicely. Using a near color is just masking the problem, not actually eliminating it.
The proper way to do what you are doing, but it gets ignored in 99% of the time. You are better off googling it for a full proper explanation. But basically it means you premulitply the color values by the alpha scalar when your file is being saved, instead of while it's being rendered. You get much better results.
I just recieved a mail with the now official certicifate that i can place an ยฎ behind Airbornยฎ (see xD) wie should change it to Airboneยฎ maybe- however, the president of the office of harmonization has the most awesome name i ever read, i had to make a tribute to this name inside Airborn, here we go, the certificate
rim effect can not be masked in source, and if i tone it down too much there's no blue tones coming in from the environment anymore (source cant do coloured spec)
rim effect can not be masked in source, and if i tone it down too much there's no blue tones coming in from the environment anymore (source cant do coloured spec)
so, it's a tradeoff that i think works
Source CAN do coloured spec, but not in the usual way. It's been a while, but if I remember right the green channel of your spec map controls the saturation of the specular highlight, which is based on the diffuse colour. It's not great and you usually have to really ramp up the brightness of the spec map to see it, but it's there.
Using PRE-MULTIPLIED alpha and a better filtering mode will usually solve that nicely. Using a near color is just masking the problem, not actually eliminating it.
Seeing as that alpha is 1-bit, not alpha blend, you are wrong. There is no blending algorithm to fix -- either a pixel of this material is rendered or a pixel of that material is rendered. His problem is he has dark edges around the leaves in the diffuse. He may be using the diffuse directly as the opacity mask by considering pure black to be the masked portion, but that is a bad practice. Standard practice is to store either a separate alpha texture or include the masking as an alpha channel in the diffuse and import it as DXT5 instead of DXT1 -- this way you can ensure there is no diffuse transition along masked portions of the material.
Source CAN do coloured spec, but not in the usual way. It's been a while, but if I remember right the green channel of your spec map controls the saturation of the specular highlight, which is based on the diffuse colour. It's not great and you usually have to really ramp up the brightness of the spec map to see it, but it's there.
You're talking about albedotint, which is, according to valve, a "work in progress feature" which is "unsupported."
I thought "unsupported" might have just meant they dont offer any help on using it, so i tried it out anyway, but it didn't seem to work.
Did you ever actually manage to get it to work?
Interesting talk about pre-multiplied alpha. Now, another noob question: this is all done in shader code, right? There isn't much difference to the images themselves other than the black background on a texture built for pre-multiplied alpha purposes, right?
Well... I'm going to texturize this "half body creature" after retopology. I made a test in toolbag and the result is awesome, I tested some softwares to bake the normals and I definitively choose Topogun The model haves 1296 tris.
And this is a previous test of how the model looks with displacement map and rendered in maya:
The displacement is a bit low contrasted but well... it's my first attempt. I hope that this summer I will improve my normal map/displacement map skills!
Alien and cartoony rocks. Hizzah. I may do the cartoony technique on my rocks in my evil genius environment instead of what I've currently got (read: shit)
Oh ya. It's bubbly in some spots because of my mesh I applied this technique to - my original ingame mesh, turbosmoothed. I definitely wouldn't do that when I go to 'officially' update my ingame rocks, I'd start with a clean and properly divided mesh then do this. I may even take it in to mud to flatten some shapes out a bit more.
It could be taken further I reckon with noise displacements etc. etc. but for more elaborate shapes to fit a cartoon approach I'd rather do that in Mud.
After my professor provided some critiques about my samurai helmet not matching proportions exactly with the reference pictures. So, I made the adjustemenst he asked, and here is a quick render of the adjusted helmet.
OzMa - can you paint or otherwise blend in some less blurry detail in the diffuse? Seems a cool character to create a mechanical lower end for. Maybe a hover ball or spiderlegs or something.
Standard practice is to store either a separate alpha texture or include the masking as an alpha channel in the diffuse and import it as DXT5 instead of DXT1 -- this way you can ensure there is no diffuse transition along masked portions of the material.
Storing the alpha in as a separate texture or not makes no difference. It creates the same result. Only difference is when the alpha data is being used in the main texture to represent something else. (the alpha value actually doesn't mean anything, it's just an extra number, and can represent anything, usually it's for transparency).
When a texel gets rendered, it's an interpolated sample((tri/bi)linear, anicotropic, etc..) from one of the texture's mipmaps. This causes the alpha values to bleed because the values of the texel are sampled from several pixels. Alpha testing is susceptible to the same problem. The working data will be promoted to the the proper depth, and there is a threshold at the api level for which texels pass or fail.
So you get extra pixels rendered around the edges.
Pre-multiplied alpha solves all that by multiplying the texture data's pixels by it's alpha value, and then a different blending mode is used when rendering out the texels. Because of this, the edges will stay nice and smooth, and CORRECT.
if it was me though, I would break off some of the detail and enlarge their UVs, such as the Tie/Collar region, the MNU logo, and the belt buckle. and then down scale the trouser UV space to make room for them. i'm sure you will make it look good either way though
cheers for the comments catstyle and sahib; lovley luchadore - wouldn't mind seeing the wires an tex :poly121:
-catstyle, i'm afraid i'm gonna have to keep it one mesh and cope with the distortion
and loss of detail, my aim is to emulate the specs of 700tris/ 256x256 form the lowpoly comp#2 (which it is spot on).
updated and edited - changed the face up case it was starting to look weird: my problem is spending too much time in pshop and making the flat
uv painting look good, and then it looks crapola when viewed on the mesh ugh...
I think it looks pretty good on the mesh achmed. You could do with giving the vest some more UV space, though, as it way more detailed than the trousers, for example.
Replies
added a bracket for holding the sight.
still need to work out how to make the bolt on grip section
alright! that's what I'm talking about....that's what i needed to here thanks neox (also big fan of airborn looks great), so i was trying to get some of those seems out with a detail normal because i didn't run into those problems in diffuse so I'm pretty sure it is my normal map, grass patches should be easy to fix I'll add some more patches to fill those spots in...
@ felipefrango for my alphas i use a copy of the leaves on top and us a gaussian blur a few times to act as a buffer, i guess i could put a power node on my alpha to squeeze it in a bit so it doesn't show then.
anything else you guys see would be helpful, i have been a little to involved in this project some fresh eyes definitely help
haha, i see you are liking my shitty seagull my friend....yeah i was just going to post a now semi large post of that and play Who Can Find some errors for me to fix lol
looks like some kind of midevil pimp....
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2009/11/06/premultiplied-alpha.aspx
and Wubbo - the cat
well its only a basemesh, but who cares ^^
i like the basemesh of Wubbo (and I want to play with it^^)
@ aggressive napkin
nice tranfer from highpoly to lowpoly :-)
rim effect can not be masked in source, and if i tone it down too much there's no blue tones coming in from the environment anymore (source cant do coloured spec)
so, it's a tradeoff that i think works
nah he is a lazy cat he will only be lying around
Source CAN do coloured spec, but not in the usual way. It's been a while, but if I remember right the green channel of your spec map controls the saturation of the specular highlight, which is based on the diffuse colour. It's not great and you usually have to really ramp up the brightness of the spec map to see it, but it's there.
Seeing as that alpha is 1-bit, not alpha blend, you are wrong. There is no blending algorithm to fix -- either a pixel of this material is rendered or a pixel of that material is rendered. His problem is he has dark edges around the leaves in the diffuse. He may be using the diffuse directly as the opacity mask by considering pure black to be the masked portion, but that is a bad practice. Standard practice is to store either a separate alpha texture or include the masking as an alpha channel in the diffuse and import it as DXT5 instead of DXT1 -- this way you can ensure there is no diffuse transition along masked portions of the material.
You're talking about albedotint, which is, according to valve, a "work in progress feature" which is "unsupported."
I thought "unsupported" might have just meant they dont offer any help on using it, so i tried it out anyway, but it didn't seem to work.
Did you ever actually manage to get it to work?
Well... I'm going to texturize this "half body creature" after retopology. I made a test in toolbag and the result is awesome, I tested some softwares to bake the normals and I definitively choose Topogun
And this is a previous test of how the model looks with displacement map and rendered in maya:
The displacement is a bit low contrasted but well... it's my first attempt. I hope that this summer I will improve my normal map/displacement map skills!
Max, displacements and noise modifiers.
Alien and cartoony rocks. Hizzah. I may do the cartoony technique on my rocks in my evil genius environment instead of what I've currently got (read: shit)
I'm definitely going to be going this route for them. Bake this to a normal map then Add a tiling normal for some higher frequency bumpage.
Any, form is good.
It could be taken further I reckon with noise displacements etc. etc. but for more elaborate shapes to fit a cartoon approach I'd rather do that in Mud.
http://vimeo.com/10887320
OzMa - can you paint or otherwise blend in some less blurry detail in the diffuse? Seems a cool character to create a mechanical lower end for. Maybe a hover ball or spiderlegs or something.
When a texel gets rendered, it's an interpolated sample((tri/bi)linear, anicotropic, etc..) from one of the texture's mipmaps. This causes the alpha values to bleed because the values of the texel are sampled from several pixels. Alpha testing is susceptible to the same problem. The working data will be promoted to the the proper depth, and there is a threshold at the api level for which texels pass or fail.
So you get extra pixels rendered around the edges.
Pre-multiplied alpha solves all that by multiplying the texture data's pixels by it's alpha value, and then a different blending mode is used when rendering out the texels. Because of this, the edges will stay nice and smooth, and CORRECT.
Dino-Emergency:
still going, needs eyebrows... (face is reminding me of liam neeson).
if it was me though, I would break off some of the detail and enlarge their UVs, such as the Tie/Collar region, the MNU logo, and the belt buckle. and then down scale the trouser UV space to make room for them. i'm sure you will make it look good either way though
YEZZZZZ OL'SKOOL
I want to see alot of asymmetry in the face so uv space isnt wasted
adam:
Sweetness!! i would definitely would like seeing you flatten some surfaces out in your cartoony rocks
Finished my lowres luchadore!!
1070triz
and something lame :P
-catstyle, i'm afraid i'm gonna have to keep it one mesh and cope with the distortion
and loss of detail, my aim is to emulate the specs of 700tris/ 256x256 form the lowpoly comp#2 (which it is spot on).
updated and edited - changed the face up case it was starting to look weird: my problem is spending too much time in pshop and making the flat
uv painting look good, and then it looks crapola when viewed on the mesh ugh...
It's (very) loosely based on the engineer from the group shot here who is, in turn, loosely based on Nikola Tesla.
So yeah.
It's sittin' pretty at 6484 tris. I'm planning on texturing it the same way the TF2 characters are.