RPG Keybinds

[arcones]

What do you mean by RPG-ish textures?

Not the sci-fi textures, more wood, stone, and earthy textures. Wall and roof textures as well. Textures that allow you to create a reasonably believable environment that would be present in a medieval RPG.

But the problem I'm having is with the phillipk textures (all sci-fi). It might be the specular part of the texture which is reflecting the playermodel's light.

[Tony]

We have some pretty good ones in there for that already.

We could use more though, for a wider variety of choices.

I'll see what I can rustle up for you.

I have a disc somewhere.... from my far-distant past...
which contains a whole bunch of natural textures. I can't find the thing though, it's so buried somewhere.
I used to be big into nature photography, and I would also get shots of trees and rocks and such, and make those into textures.

I had friends at the time that were in the business of providing content to some game-maker, and for Bryce and Poser users.
Man, they ate those textures up, thought it was the cat's meow. That was back in like 1999-2000...

I'll look around again for that ancient disc of goodies... and until then I'll create a few new ones to see what we can come up with.

- Tony

[arcones]

'Preciate it Tony! Look forward to seeing what you may find!

[chocolatepie33]

I must agree, they're saying on Quadropolis as well that there aren't that many good roof textures and such.

[Tony]

Oh... I'm working on some right now.

But roof textures?

Man we have some great roof textures already.
Take a closer look at some of those. They may look like bricks or pavers at first glance, but if you try them out, some of those are actually very nice roof textures. There is a really nice cedar-shake pattern, and there is a nice aged greenish one, looks mossy... and some roof tiles too.

Look close at some of those, they aren't for the floor, those are roof tiles. Remember to use /vscale .3 or some setting like that to size them down properly as well.

Either way, I'm working on some stuff.

As for the light reflection issue, that is something to do with the specular shading being to shiny or some such. I've been trying to work that out some too. Some of mine are far too shiny, not sure how to tone it down. Anybody have a good reference for the parameters that work best in this world's environment?

[Tony]

It's funny though, I've had this weird problem with the phillipk textures that Sandbox received. Apparently they reflect the character's little robo-chimp lights. And it's really annoying. Textures aren't supposed to do that.

I have not tried the textures you mention here, but...
Here is something to try, well two things...

In the XXX_art file... adjust the spec parameters.

If it says 3 3 3, make it say 1 1 1
Try that.

Next thing to try is this...
Find the image that serves up the specular map, usually suffixed with an S.... like: somefile_s.png
Or maybe somefile_spec.png
It should be grouped in there with the diffuse map and normal map for the texture...
Edit that sucker in your image software... simply load it up in Gimp or whatever you use, and use a brightness tool to make it darker.
In Gimp for example, it would be: Colors > Brightness/Contrast tool.
Lower the brightness of the image, and do it by a good amount.

It won't hurt the 3d-ness of the normal map, and it'll soften that reflection.
First though, for sure, try to just use the specmap settings in the script, like so:

Code: Select all

setshader bumpspecmapparallaxworld
setshaderparam specscale 1 1 1

Good luck man.
I'm working on some pretty cool textures, some are alright.
I think I want to make a set that can used to build a castle, and maybe a stucco-adobe house...
With like the main wall textures, and then some with window and door frames built-in... maybe some other embellishments.
Anyway, I'll post some stuff when I get it tweaked.

Have a great day man,
- Tony

[arcones]

Sounds great, thanks Tony! I'll let you know how it turns out.

[Tony]

You can try it real-time too, in Edit Mode...

/vshaderparam specscale 1 1 1

Still have to calculate light after, but it could be nice way to fine-tune on the fly.

[arcones]

What a load of osik..... So I tried out the /vshaderparam trick which didn't help unfortunately. I then decided to try and update one of my older textures with diffuse and normal maps. (It already had normal, I was adding diffuse). And.... I found my problem. Apparently when there is a normal map which connects to an output normal (in addition to the diffuse output) it creates the same glare I was experiencing with the phillipk textures. So... either the diffuse is the problem or the way the normal map output got changed is the problem.

Still searching now. I hope to find a solution soon.

EDIT: Changing the specular map did nothing either...

[Tony]

Yeah, the specular settings did nothing for me, but changing the specular image did work.

I was pulling my hair out, couldn't figure it out man... then I thought, well... the specular map image is where the signal is called from...
...and it did look pretty light colored to me... so that's what worked for straightening out my own textures that I created.

Are you using MapZone2 or Blender for this?

Sounds like you're in MapZone.

That thing is so cool. I tell ya though, I do alright manually creating images too.