2252 replies to this topic

[Iqfish]

Heffay, on 18 May 2014 - 09:26 AM, said:

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

Awww...
Thank you

*must get to place 1 now*

[Andreas80]

zagibu, on 18 May 2014 - 09:51 AM, said:

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

The ColorRamp Node convert the rgbmap to a bw map. I use the bw map as a mask to determine what influence the diffuse map should have. If you slide the color stop to the right the diffuse map gains influence.

Compare these two pictures:

[Seijin Dinger]

Wow, the videos made things a lot easier for me, now I just need to find where the project phoenix mechs legs vanished to

[zagibu]

Thanks a lot for the explanation, I was able to improve my blending method considerably. I think it's good enough for the moment, so that I can start work on the variant config and parts swapping.

[Seijin Dinger]

Im also doing variant models, including my customs

[Sparks Murphey]

Koniving, on 22 May 2014 - 05:22 PM, said:

It is a global material (as in one material fits everything) or is a number of skins? I know Unreal Engine models used to have 3 to 5 'skins' or separate materials from Skin0 through Skin 4 or more, each with a different texture that made up a whole. I found several separate DDS files for each mech so I didn't know. If it's one skin it's easy. If it's several skins then I'd have to make materials that precisely match.

(Cross linked from the Repainted Concept Art thread, but I'm moving the conversation here so as not to clutter that thread)

You'll need three materials in all.

1) A "standard" material that you use on most of the 'Mech. The files for this are all {mechname}_body_{something}.dds. In particular:
- _body_ddn.dds is the normal map
- _body_dif.dds is the diffuse map
- _body_spc.dds contains the specularity data. It's RGB channels should be applied to the specularity colour, while the alpha channel controls the specularity levels. This gets the neat shimmer effect on lasers and so on when the light glances off them.

There are two other files that augment these:
- _body_rgb.dds contains the paint masking channels. Not essential, but useful for limiting colour effects to areas that should be painted and keeping them off other parts like joints.
- _body_damagemask.dds contains the diffuse texture that is painted on when damage occurs to a 'Mech. In game, the transparency mask for this texture is initially entirely black (transparent), but weapon hits paint that mask white (opaque) where they hit, allowing it to override the default diffuse texture.

Apply this to everything to start with. If you're using Heffay's importer, I believe it will do that for you.

2) A "variant" material that you'll use on interchangable parts. The files for this are all named {mechname}_variant_{something}.dds. This set of textures will have it's own versions of the _ddn, _dif, _spc, _rgb, and _damagemask files that fill the same roll as the ones for the "standard" material. This generally goes on the bits that change between variants: weapons, mainly, but sometimes structural elements too. Be warned, sometimes the weapons of the "prime" variant are actually on the _body_ maps, which is why it's generally easier to apply that to everything, then apply the _variant_ material to the bits where it looks obviously wrong.

3) A "window" material for the cockpit windows. This will only have _ddn, _dif, and _spc textures, since you can't paint it in 'Mechlab and it doesn't get damaged (textures, at least). This does on the "glass" panels of the cockpit, though not the head in general, and not the interior meshes.

Hope that helps!

[Koniving]

Sparks Murphey, on 22 May 2014 - 09:08 PM, said:

It kinda does, but it intimidates me to no end. This isn't like "old school" from year 2000 3D models where it's literally 1 character model gets 4 skins, one for a face which the material just goes to the head and hands, one for a pair of pants and shoes, one for a shirt and one for a coat if there is one for it (otherwise it's a pink texture which makes it invisible).

Like this dude.


Are all 3 of the layers for the mech itself done on everything at once? For example do I literally cover the model with 3 separate skins?

Do I have to create materials and assign them to specific parts? Do arms need something different from torso, etc?
How would I go about giving 3 separate materials to the body? Or ..

Duh. *Face palms.* Diffuse, specular.. Got it. So it should take one whole skin for the mech itself, and then separate a separate material associated with each variant to make their specifics 'appear' or disappear, right?

(Yep, can tell it's been a long time since I seriously tried to work with 3D models that I haven't done myself; and I haven't worked with textures since I was 16, I'm 28 now).

[Sparks Murphey]

Close. There'll be one material for all the variants, but to make them "disappear" you'll just have to delete the meshes associated with those parts. MWO assembles 'Mechs from their component meshes on the fly; to use your example above, it'd load the body, arms, legs and head of Mr. Reyes (the parts associated with _body_ textures) then checks to see if this is the "With Coat" variant of Mr. Reyes, and if it is, loads the mesh for the coat too (associated with _variant_textures).

[Iqfish]

With the glorious new weapon visualisazions you have to use the _variant_ textues for all the weapons.

Is it possible to transform Blender materials to another program so Koniving could use the one Andreas did? That would make everything easier and looks way better than the default mat

[Sparks Murphey]

I'm not sure. I've never had much luck importing foreign materials (this thread just got the attention of the NSA) into 3DS Max, as they generally come up missing bits at best and crash-worthy at worse. It's possible that if you could put the material on a dummy object (like a default cube), then export the cube with it's material to .fbx, that the process would bundle the material up completely for import into 3DS Max. However, it's more likely that the specific nodes Andreas is using have no direct translation in 3DS Max, so while they can be replicated, they can't be replicate autonomously. I'll have a poke around and see what I can replicate.

[Dracol]

Just had to pop in and say how impressive y'all's work has been.

[Todo Sandybanks]

Can this be done using paint.net?

[Krinkov]

One of the guys a I play with figured out how to load MWO maps into the cryengine sdk. Has this been done before? If it hasn't, I will see if I can get him to do a write up.

[Heffay]

Krinkov, on 24 May 2014 - 02:10 PM, said:

One of the guys a I play with figured out how to load MWO maps into the cryengine sdk. Has this been done before? If it hasn't, I will see if I can get him to do a write up.

Not that I know of. If he wrote up a quick guide he'd be a hero in this thread though!

[Muzakman]

awesome stuff there Heffay. I'm still figuring out how to use Blender and all that other fun stuff, so haven't been able to do much with it, but I figured that you wouldn't mind if I took the opportunity to put some polish and grease into your script, help make it more robust and user-friendly-like

Here's a Gist of your script; if you check the revision history I started with your current script and adapted from there into a Posh-let, Get-MwoBlenderMech. Side note: at one point, it had the full synopsis and everything but it might have gotten lost in the markup. If this is useful, we could create a github repos for util scripts like this:

https://gist.github....4e3303dacaad36f

Edited by Muzakman, 25 May 2014 - 08:14 PM.

[Koniving]

So morbid curiousity...

I wanted to pull out the blackjack.
There is no "Blackjack_scale.cgf" file.
I succeeded with Centurion, Hunchback, Catapult...

There isn't a _scale.cga either.
Ideas?

[Sparks Murphey]

Koniving, on 26 May 2014 - 10:37 PM, said:

So morbid curiousity...

I wanted to pull out the blackjack.
There is no "Blackjack_scale.cgf" file.
I succeeded with Centurion, Hunchback, Catapult...

There isn't a _scale.cga either.
Ideas?

To implement the dynamic weapon hardpoint geometry, PGI switched from having a single mesh (the "_scale" files you'll find with the Centurion and so forth) to multiple meshes grouped together on the fly. Upside, it's more customisable. Downside, if you're someone who isn't PGI, you'll need to load each of those files in by hand.

Heffay's script does that automatically for Blender, but I haven't seen one written for 3DS Max yet. To make matters worse, the instruction set MWO uses to assembled the parts together ({mech}.cdf in that 'Mech's base directory; it's effectively an xml file, so you can open it in Notepad or similar to read it) is both hard to read, and when you do manage to translate it, you realise all the rotations are listed in quaternions, not the standard Euler rotations that 3DS Max uses, so you'll need to get those translated too.

Importing the new models into 3DS Max now takes the better part of a day. The alternative would be to download Blender (hey, it's free) and Heffay's script, run the script to import into Blender, save as a .obj or .fbx format that 3DS Max can read, then open that in Max. Or just guess, which is what I generally do.

[Koniving]

Sparks Murphey, on 26 May 2014 - 10:55 PM, said:

To implement the dynamic weapon hardpoint geometry, PGI switched from having a single mesh (the "_scale" files you'll find with the Centurion and so forth) to multiple meshes grouped together on the fly. Upside, it's more customisable. Downside, if you're someone who isn't PGI, you'll need to load each of those files in by hand.

Mkay, so worse comes to worse I can use Blender specifically to load up the models and then export them all again as one big file.

[CrashieJ]

Koniving, on 22 May 2014 - 09:46 PM, said:

[Andreas80]

Krinkov, on 24 May 2014 - 02:10 PM, said:

One of the guys a I play with figured out how to load MWO maps into the cryengine sdk. Has this been done before? If it hasn't, I will see if I can get him to do a write up.

i would appreciate it, when you ask him for a short explanation