Kismet... a little intimidating?
polycounter lvl 11
All I know is kismet is used to create materials and thats about it.
All I usually do is load texturesample of diffuse, normal, and specular and just plug it in and call it done but obviously this isn't enough and its starting to bug me. Why do people make huge kismet tress? How can you even understand what you're doing when you make those huge trees? I just don't get it at all. People will have a huge tree just to make a brick texture.
Im always looking for tutorial but I really just dont get it and never get a good explanation.
How did you guys start with kismet?
All I usually do is load texturesample of diffuse, normal, and specular and just plug it in and call it done but obviously this isn't enough and its starting to bug me. Why do people make huge kismet tress? How can you even understand what you're doing when you make those huge trees? I just don't get it at all. People will have a huge tree just to make a brick texture.
Im always looking for tutorial but I really just dont get it and never get a good explanation.
How did you guys start with kismet?
Replies
now anyway, this is a topic that i guess is great for me to discuss, because ill often show a material to a friend of mine and he just gives me a look of "wtf is wrong with you." ill start with the example you gave. bricks.
it is easy to just put in a diffuse/spec/normal and call it done. but with so much that the material editor has to offer, you can make your texture so much better.
chris albeluhn made a tutorial on how to make it so your bricks NEVER look tileable.
http://www.chrisalbeluhn.com/UT3_Adding_Brick_Variation.html
now its not the largest material out there.. but its certainly more than just plugging in textures.
for the most part, think of it like this. in 3ds max.. typically you'll put in a diffuse spec and normal to see your model.. now replace the standard material with Xoliul's shader.. it has a lot of options.. not all of which are always used but they are there in your face all the time. in the udk material editor its the same.
you have the options to use.. but you dont necessarily have to.
a lot of other big material trees are used for more technical things such as meshpainting or post process effects or just general effects on a mesh. the best thing i think that you can ever get from a material is animation on something static.. a line of moving text, a pulsing, glow.. etc. all of that requires big trees.
an example of mine
in this.. everything has its part. most of which is math that is just correcting for some brightness/contrast and color, but the two areas at the bottom being plugged into opacity and distortion.. thats simply because the type of opacity i wanted COULD HAVE been done in photoshop, but i see it easier to have separate nodes so i wont have to do a trial and error of reimporting different textures. plus with adding and multiplying in UDK, you can easily give your textures an animated layering effect, which is not achievable from a flat texture.
oh yeah here is what that material was for.
this guy will always have some sort of a halo effect for his opacity, so no matter what angle you look at him, his middle is always opaque.. and looking through him distorts whatever is behind him.. from any angle. his opacity varies because it seems as though there are "clouds" moving through him.. so the interior part of the opacity fluctuates from a cloud texture.. and the distortion animates as well.
Now, is it true you can use it to increase the power of your normals or specular map?
Ive also seen it used to add moss onto rocks. But it always seems like even for the little stuff theres always a huge complicated tree
so if you think of your textures as just numbered information.. taking an AO map (mix of black and white.. or 0-1), and add 1 to it.. it will become white.. or if u multiply it by 0, it will be come black.
but now if you multiply your AO by itself, thats basically like putting 2 layers of an AO in photoshop, and multiplying them onto each other. same as adding, but with screen in PS.
it is very possible to increase power of normals too.
in photoshop you increase normals by increasing the levels of... you know what.. give me a few minutes and ill make a quick example. brb with that in a few!
Here is a basic AO map plugged into the emissive channel, for viewing purposes only, normally this would be put into the diffuse.
With this AO.. if it is plugged into a multiply node.. in both A and B slots, it is the same as duplicating the layer in photoshop, and setting it to multiply, as seen in the next 2 images.
The same goes for the ADD node. adding will act as any of the lighter blending modes in photoshop..specifically "SCREEN"
Enhancing the normals is done by bringing up the value of the red and green channel of a normal map. done by either using the level function, or overlaying a duplicate normal without the green channel over the original.
it is done the same way in UDK. we multiply the original normal by 1,1,0 (which is red green blue, respectively), that way we remove the blue channel from the texture. then we re-add the original normal. this can be done other ways but i find this one the easiest.
In PS, you would normally keep your AO on top.. multiplying it over a diffuse.. the same can be done in UDK
If you want to blend 2 textures together in Photoshop, you would not just set 1 to overlay.. you would put in a mask on one, in this case, the AO acts as a mask.
Then we re-multiply the AO so we can see the darks in the diffuse.
making a texture tileable is easy as well.. just add in a texture coordinate and punch in the values.
Its a bit of a jump but ill explain all of this.
starting with the texture coordinate.
the texture coordinate is plugged into a panner which allows the texture to move on x or y. this is plugged into the UVs of the texture, making the texture animate. that is multiplied with a 3vector..RGB. in this case, since my values are 4,2,1.. the red is coming in more than anything, and the green comes in twice as strong as blue. 1,1,1 sets all white, and 0,0,0 sets black. anything above 1,1,1 will enhance the color more, as if it were multiplied by another number/color.
My ao is inversed (CTRL+I in photoshop) and used as a mask for the orange colored rock, which is plugged into the emissive. this mask will make it so that the tops of the bricks are not emissive. anywhere i am multiplying by a constant1 vector.. its for brightness/contrast.. for a constant 3 vector.. it is for color. the Power node is just as it sounds.. raising a number to a power. in this case.. the AO is raised to .5, which causes the darks to sharpen up.
What exactly does the A and B plug mean?
think of A and B as layers. you have layer 1, A.. and layer 0, B. if you were to put 2 layers on top of each other in photoshop, and mask 1 out.. the bottom would show through. the same with the lerp node or any other node. A and B are the layers, and the node name (LERP, Multiply, Add, etc) are just the function it is doing.
if you need any material help in the future.. send me a message on skype (Oniram177), or feel free to email me (sean.marino@hotmail.com)
Nitpick: Save instructions by using a Component Mask RG (Utilities - Component Mask) instead of multiplying by 1,1,0.
And if you want this to be more flexible (although more Instructions):
Get a Component Mask for RG, add a Multiplier to it with a Scalar Param "Normalstrength" and Append the result with the Blue channel (which you can directly grab from the texture sample obviously). If you only want to allow a certain level of change to the normal map you might also Clamp the Scalar param (Good values to multiply would be 0 to 5 for example).
Edit: That said, the comparison to all the Photoshop Modes is kick ass! Great post to reference to