2252 replies to this topic

[Kyle Wright]

Adridos, on 20 December 2012 - 09:42 AM, said:

First thing I've done with this. Yep, a scale:

Proof that the Centurion is scaled to tall lol

[zagibu]

DevilCrayon, on 30 April 2014 - 03:01 PM, said:

Is it still just the Orion or ...?

Yeah, I'm still in the proof of concept stage, it's not worth it yet to put in the work of converting all the other mechs.

Heffay, on 30 April 2014 - 03:13 PM, said:

I'm really happy you got the camo patterns to work! I suspect a lot of websites may link to your site once you get it set up. Are you going to set up APIs so that people can access the renderer inline in their web sites?

Not sure what I'm gonna do. First I want to get things to look right. Then we'll see how far my motivation lasts .

[DevilCrayon]

Ok! Yeah, it's really quite cool! Thanks for sharing your work with us.

[zagibu]

These textures are really strange. The dif texture somehow seems to be a mask for the RGB texture, and why the hell does the spc texture have an alpha channel?

If anyone has a good looking node layout in blender, It might help me as well.

[Sparks Murphey]

zagibu, on 03 May 2014 - 03:16 AM, said:

These textures are really strange. The dif texture somehow seems to be a mask for the RGB texture, and why the hell does the spc texture have an alpha channel?

If anyone has a good looking node layout in blender, It might help me as well.

You actually got that first one around the wrong way: the RGB texture is a mask for the diffuse texture. Each channel (R, G and correlates to the mask for a paint layer you can set in the camo spec section of the mech lab.

Advanced specularity (the spc textures) often has both an alpha channel (not strictly a transparency channel, though most frequently used as one) and a set of rgb channels. In this case, the alpha determines the shininess of the material for a given point, while the rgb determines the tint of the highlight produced (In 3ds Max terms, "specular level" and "specular color" respectively). This is often useful for modelling real world objects where the specular highlights are actually bouncing off a thin layer above the perceived surface, such as lacquer, beetle carapaces, human skin, and car-style paints, where the thin layer is actually a different colour to the underlying material. The Cobra pattern in MWO is a good example of this in action (note the way the colour appears to change based on different angles) while laser lenses and cockpit glass are frequent users of the technique as well.

[zagibu]

I just don't see how the dif and rgb are blended together. If I remove the alpha channel from the dif and simply add them, it looks good for bright colors, but dark colors get washed out. If I leave the alpha channel in, the joints appear black, because they are actually transparent in the dif texture.

[Heffay]

zagibu, on 03 May 2014 - 07:09 AM, said:

I just don't see how the dif and rgb are blended together. If I remove the alpha channel from the dif and simply add them, it looks good for bright colors, but dark colors get washed out. If I leave the alpha channel in, the joints appear black, because they are actually transparent in the dif texture.

There is a mix node, which is what I'm using now, but it has the same issues of washing out colors. I want the camo pattern to be bright and true to the colors you pick for it, as opposed to a factor of another channel. I'll probably spend some time digging through the node layouts to find a better solution in the near future.

[Seijin Dinger]

So I was poking around and I still cannot seem to find the cannons to convert a Catapult into a K2
Also the Project Phoenix mechs dont seem to have a "scale" cgf file to work with

[zagibu]

The scale model is old-fashioned and not used anymore. You have to cobble the mech together using the various cga files (IIRC they can just be renamed to cgf and then used with noesis). The correct arms are the cplt_right_arm_forearm_ppc_eh1 and respective left variant cga files.
Use the importer script linked in the OP, it does a great job of importing and correctly positioning the dozens of model files for you.

Edited by zagibu, 03 May 2014 - 02:38 PM.

[Armored Yokai]

I'm having trouble with noesis because when i select the orions .cgf i get an error
with "Cannot preview .cgf" any fix for this?

[Heffay]

Armored Yokai, on 11 May 2014 - 08:52 PM, said:

I'm having trouble with noesis because when i select the orions .cgf i get an error
with "Cannot preview .cgf" any fix for this?

There's a plug-in for Noesis you need to install The original post should have a link to it.

[Armored Yokai]

i forgot to mention i have a plugin for the crysis cgfs

[Andreas80]

Heffay, on 03 May 2014 - 08:03 AM, said:

There is a mix node, which is what I'm using now, but it has the same issues of washing out colors. I want the camo pattern to be bright and true to the colors you pick for it, as opposed to a factor of another channel. I'll probably spend some time digging through the node layouts to find a better solution in the near future.

You can give my material a try

https://www.dropbox..../mwo_camo.blend

[Heffay]

Andreas80, on 18 May 2014 - 03:16 AM, said:

You can give my material a try

https://www.dropbox..../mwo_camo.blend

That looks exactly right! I didn't consider using the rgb map as a factor to figure out where to apply the colors, or make a mask of the map, invert it and use that as a factor to apply it only on the camo areas. Brilliant! Thank you SO much for this!

[Andreas80]

Heffay, on 18 May 2014 - 05:12 AM, said:

That looks exactly right! I didn't consider using the rgb map as a factor to figure out where to apply the colors, or make a mask of the map, invert it and use that as a factor to apply it only on the camo areas. Brilliant! Thank you SO much for this!

New Version (only create a group)! https://www.dropbox....mwo_camo2.blend

Maybe, if you want to use this in your mech importer, we should assign a driver to all 3 camo colors. If every mech-part has his own instance of the material you don't need to change the colors on every part separately

[Heffay]

Andreas80, on 18 May 2014 - 06:49 AM, said:

New Version (only create a group)! https://www.dropbox....mwo_camo2.blend

Maybe, if you want to use this in your mech importer, we should assign a driver to all 3 camo colors. If every mech-part has his own instance of the material you don't need to change the colors on every part separately

The way the importer works now is it just makes one material (well, one for each type: body, variant, window). It assigns the body one to all the objects getting imported, so the first thing you have to do is assign the variant and window ones to the proper parts. It's a pain, but until the Noesis plug-in can deal with Cryengine 3 material files (and .cga/.cgf as well), it's what I'm stuck with.

Since all the parts use the same material, if you change it it should get applied to all the different ones without having to reassign.

I was thinking something along the same lines with the drivers though, so that you can link a particular rig into a new file, and then pick the camo pattern (if any) and the colors to go with it. Figuring out a way to script all that would be a rather significant challenge. Ideally after you link a mech, you can just set the values to the proxy and it'll automagically apply.

I think for now though I'll just append your node group to each of the mech .blends so it can be applied a lot easier. I'm just glad you shared it, since node group sorcery is something I definitely wish I could do better!

[zagibu]

Andreas80, on 18 May 2014 - 03:16 AM, said:

You can give my material a try

https://www.dropbox..../mwo_camo.blend

Holy crap. I'll have to try and convert this to my simple WebGL world. Thanks a lot.

[Iqfish]

Didn't I tell you guys he's awesome?

[Heffay]

Iqfish, on 18 May 2014 - 08:48 AM, said:

Didn't I tell you guys he's awesome?

Yup! Sadly you've dropped to my third favorite German now, behind him and David Hasselhoff.

[zagibu]

Can someone quickly explain what the color ramp node is for in this specific setup?