6497 réponses à ce sujet

[Mrqbasic]

All these very nice things in this Tread, are AWESOME x 100
God i wish bioware had such an effort like us :/
Just wanted to say that

Cheers

[Dead_Meat357]

Updated the N7 Valkyrie again. I know I just did that but I've never been totally happy with that mod. So I started over almost from scratch and came up with this version: 



I think it's much cleaner than the old one.

N7 Valkyrie v1.2

[Dead_Meat357]

Mrqbasic wrote...

All these very nice things in this Tread, are AWESOME x 100
God i wish bioware had such an effort like us :/
Just wanted to say that

Cheers

It isn't that the effort wasn't there. They just chose to scale certain textures down even compared to ME2 in order to get more data onto the disks. The fact is that ME3 has far more full motion video than previous Mass Effect titles do. This eats up disk space like you wouldn't believe. Some objects and textures like the Geth look considerably better than they ever have. While others, Terminus Armor, Collector Armor, etc. took steps backwards to save space. The textures are actually the same, but their normal maps got castrated into a blocky, pixelated oblivion.

And of course these considerations were made for the XBOX version of the game as the PC and PS3 platforms didn't have such low storage concerns. The PC's are usually downloading via digital distribution now or physical copies can certainly have more than two disks if on DVD. Blu-Ray is even a possibility there. PS3 is all Blu-Ray so that wouldn't have been a challenge at all in terms of storage capacity. But the XBOX on the other hand has very limited space and two disks is as far as they wanted to go. Most likely for profit margins more than anything. Going to three disks would have increased the cost of each game sold and reduced profit. Packaging to handle three disks and the third disk itself. So as usual when it comes to gaming the lowest common denominator wins out.

But these textures were all most likely much higher quality in development and then scaled back sometime prior to release. BioWare made the decision that all three versions would look the same, so they used the same texture sets for all three platforms.

Update:

Did some additional work on the N7 Defender Armor. I added the helmet to it. It's a modified version of the one that Smartek did and was included in his default Shepard armor. I changed it to include a new carbon fiber pattern in my default N7 armor mod. The Defender has a new normal map. It did before, but I've improved it. Additionally I did some work on the buckles and straps on the arms. They are much better than they were. I backed off on the sharpening in the normal map. The paint doesn't have all the bump mapping on the arm now, but it won't artifact in dark areas either.



Download the N7 Defender v1.51 armor. (Male Shepard Only)

I also updated my Default N7 MaleShep armor. The stripe was appearing too dark so I made a version which was lighter.

Default MaleShep N7 Armor v1.51

I've updated the Alliance Battle Fatiques worn by Shepard early in the game and optionally worn later. This is the same mod made by InBleedingRapture, but with some changes. The original texture didn't include a normal map so I added one. It also didn't include the bloody / battle damaged texture after the initial Reaper attack. I've add a modified texture of that in with the mod as both must be in the mod in order to work properly. One thing I did was add scratches to the armor looking parts of the bloody texture. Made sense given he slides down stuff and what not in the prologue of the game. Though these are only evident in close ups.



Download

I also thought I'd offer a cleaner version of the M-76 Revenant.



M-76 Revenant v1.1 (Cleaner)

Modifié par Dead_Meat357, 19 septembre 2012 - 10:07 .

[blueyesdevil]

Edit: ignore this post

Modifié par blueyesdevil, 20 septembre 2012 - 01:23 .

[ElectronicPostingInterface]

 For personal use, I took Wadres' Rannoch, Geth Dreadnought, and Lighting textures and converted the JPG files to DDS for the purposes of optimization. All three of his posted textures I bound into one file.

If you'd like to use it yourself: 
http://filesmelt.com...tMaterials.tpf 

You may find it useful if you get crashes or really high RAM usage during that part of the game.

EDIT: I was going to ask why no one had ported the ME2 texture of Thane by Jean-Luc to ME3 and then loaded it up in game and...it actually looks pretty good default.

EDIT2: Tried it myself. Got the following: 

http://filesmelt.com...aneisDying.png 

The textures are either not compatible or I screwed something up. I'll probably try again tomorrow.

EDIT3: Got the Thane textures by Jean-Luc kinda working, but not really. The ones that have the exact same file names port fine, and the model does look better. Two of the files from Jean-Luc I figured out were for Thane's alternate appearance in 2, and only one file needed to be renamed to match ME3's new file for it: what I think is the normal map for Thane's face. I've uploaded the textures that work properly and what I think is the normal that appears to me to cause some kind of weird black lines or shading on Thane's face, and a crispy ugly black outline. I'll tinker with it more later. 

http://filesmelt.com/dl/ME3Thane1.tpf (working)
http://filesmelt.com/dl/ME3ThaneNormal1.tpf (not working)

Modifié par PKchu, 20 septembre 2012 - 06:55 .

[voodooseason]

saltisgood wrote...

I'll be covering this in my tutorial videos once I get to the normals (not for a little while), but smarteck gave me a tip that's been working great. If you download a package called: DirectX SDK
What you can do is edit the normals in photoshop, export them as *.bmp, import them into one of the programs inside the SDK called: Texture tool. Then change the "surface format" to "Signed 16-bit: V8U8". Save it as a *.dds. Load into texmod.

If what you're doing still causes a seam where 2 ends of the texture join (i.e. a line of symmetry), then I would suggest not modifying that part of the texture or fading your mod into the original.

Well, I'mma de-lurk and get overexcited for a moment, bear with me please...

*flappy hands* SALTISGOOD YOU SWEET FANCY DEVIL I COULD KISS YOU. <3 I've been trying for weeks to get rid of the awful texture seams on my femshep mods without losing all the detail, and this is the only thing that's worked! As an example, here's a before and after of the detail I gained:



...and the seams pretty much vanishing. (They weren't horrible to begin with here, but still obvious if you looked at the spot in front of her ear):



The befores involved lots of switching between Photoshop and Gimp, color correcting, editing contrast/levels/etc, testing in-game, more color correcting, and still looked, at best, like my Shep made out with a bag of flour...the afters only involved editing out the unwanted features once in Photoshop and then changing it to V8U8 in the Texture Tool. That's it. Done. I can't tell you how long I've been hunting for a solution for the normal map issues--this has made everything so much easier! You are officially my HERO*.

*(Also, seeing as you originally got the tip from smarteck, I believe some thanks are in order for him as well, so...kisses for everyone! )

[Fredy AG]

 ///

Thanks voodooseason 


And for everyone, I have finally finished the new version in Ultra High Definition of N7 Armor for FemShep. 

Changes:

- New metallic material in the chest.
- New metallic N7 logo (with red color problem fixed).
- Illumination files fixed.
- Added Relief files.
- Added tone limiters files (for customization).






































In game looks reaaaaally cool !!! 



RF > Download the new file v1.3 in first page, number 19.


Salu2. 


//////

[ElectronicPostingInterface]

That final set of comparison shots Smarteck is mindblowingly improved. Nice job man and thanks.

[Mrqbasic]

Can't wait to test femsheps Armor

[N7Calibrator]

This is perfection.

[Fredy AG]

PKchu wrote...

That final set of comparison shots Smarteck is mindblowingly improved. Nice job man and thanks.

you're welcome...we are indebted to Femshep, she deserved some love too. 


Salu2. 

//////

Modifié par smarteck, 20 septembre 2012 - 05:10 .

[Don_Esteban]

She deserves some defender armor, too ;-) and maybe Terminus armor !!!
But n7 is nice, ty.

What about the other pieces, like Rosenkov etc??

[Daryst]

voodooseason wrote...

 
The befores involved lots of switching between Photoshop and Gimp, color correcting, editing contrast/levels/etc, testing in-game, more color correcting, and still looked, at best, like my Shep made out with a bag of flour...the afters only involved editing out the unwanted features once in Photoshop and then changing it to V8U8 in the Texture Tool. That's it. Done. I can't tell you how long I've been hunting for a solution for the normal map issues--this has made everything so much easier! You are officially my HERO*.

*(Also, seeing as you originally got the tip from smarteck, I believe some thanks are in order for him as well, so...kisses for everyone! )

Did you share this shepard? Because she looks really good. would love to be able to use this as well.

[LilLino]

smarteck wrote...

PKchu wrote...

That final set of comparison shots Smarteck is mindblowingly improved. Nice job man and thanks.

you're welcome...we are indebted to Femshep, she deserved some love too. 


Salu2. 

//////

Yeah Smarteck about Femshep, have you thought about doing high-res of default Femshep face like you did with Male? 

[Fredy AG]

Iveybella wrote...

I guess I wasn't the only one having problems, for a minute I thought I lived in some alternate universe, lol. I'm so glad you got it working now voodooseason 

and I just realized I I hadn't said this in my original thankyous, Thankyou Smartek! All of you guys on this thread have done so much work for the game and with helping other modders so kisses for everyone indeed 

You're welcome, I'm very happy that what we all have shared in this thread, this being useful for all.

I repeat, thanks to all who have and those who continue to share with all of us .. at this point, the game in SP and MP looks great!


Salu2.

//////

Modifié par smarteck, 20 septembre 2012 - 09:03 .

[Fredy AG]

LilLino wrote...

Yeah Smarteck about Femshep, have you thought about doing high-res of default Femshep face like you did with Male? 

Maybe I could try, but that the problem of the junctions of the two textures .. I have not made ​​much progress on that... 

Salu2. 

//////

[McRileyW]

Is there anyway to replace textures in ME 1, 2&3? I'm getting a bit tired of using texmod every time and waiting for it to unpack tpf files, not to mention the app hasn't been updated for years.

update: I spent the whole evening on making texmod load DDS only but this method didn't work at all.

Modifié par McRileyW, 20 septembre 2012 - 02:18 .

[Dead_Meat357]

Don_Esteban wrote...

She deserves some defender armor, too ;-) and maybe Terminus armor !!!
But n7 is nice, ty.

What about the other pieces, like Rosenkov etc??

I'm working on the other pieces in sets. Right now I'm working on Kasa Fabrication pieces. But it's slow work. I'm also planning on doing the above FemShep armor with the carbon fiber pattern I use like I did with MaleShep's armor. I will eventually make Terminus armor and Defender armor for her as well. It just requires a lot of time to do all these things. Unfortunately, jobs etc. get in the way of that.

Modifié par Dead_Meat357, 20 septembre 2012 - 03:03 .

[Dead_Meat357]

McRileyW wrote...

Is there anyway to replace textures in ME 1, 2&3? I'm getting a bit tired of using texmod every time and waiting for it to unpack tpf files, not to mention the app hasn't been updated for years.

update: I spent the whole evening on making texmod load DDS only but this method didn't work at all.

Long answer:

There is the ME3 Explorer utility for doing it to the third game. People have had some success with it, but frankly it's more trouble than it's worth given the state of the thing last time I looked at it. It's a very time consuming and manual process to replace just one texture. The margin for error is high outside of the main texture as it's difficult to identify the specific textures you are going to replace. There just isn't an easy way to find what you are looking for. Even worse is the amount of times you'd have to do it.

There are probably around 100 mods at present. Each contains 3 or more textures. Do the math, you could have to use that ****ty process to replace textures 300 or more times.

As far as I know, no such tool exists for ME1 and ME2. Though ME2 is at least using the same engine. It's possible that the tool could do the same for ME2. However, the reason this is so hard is due to the .PCC files being encrypted. If the encryption is different then the ME3 explorer might be for just ME3 only.

The utility isn't really usable in it's current form.

Short answer: 

No.

[Mrqbasic]

Tested the new Femshep armor: I can just say, it was like falling of the chair and saying HOLY ****, THAT IS TOTALY MINDBLOWING
Thank you smarteck for these awesome mods (no awesome does not really hit the point ... epic will do it :-P)

cheers

[Dead_Meat357]

Mrqbasic wrote...

Tested the new Femshep armor: I can just say, it was like falling of the chair and saying HOLY ****, THAT IS TOTALY MINDBLOWING
Thank you smarteck for these awesome mods (no awesome does not really hit the point ... epic will do it :-P)

cheers

Unfortunately, the customizable armors are always going to be by far the highest quality in the game. For one thing, their standard textures are better than most. The stock textures for one piece, such as the chest is made up of as many pixels as an entire suit of non-customizable armor. Shoulders and other sections may have as little as 512 pixels, but that's still half as much as a regular non-customizable suit. So these pieces respond incredibly well to modding.

And you'd be surprised just how little of the texture in that mod is actually changed from the stock texture. What was changed was absolutely important, so don't misunderstand. The amount of work that goes into these pieces is far more tedious than some of the entire suits are because of all the layers that have to be touched. (As I'm finding with both my version of this armor, and other's like the Kasa Fabrication set.) What really kills the textures in this game is their terrible low resolution normal maps. The best example of this is on my Terminus Armor mod. The straps for the armor sections are actually virtually untouched aside from upconversion. Yet my mod has them looking 100x better than they did originally. Why? The stock normal map is only 128x128 pixels. One of the sectional armor pieces has a normal map that's typically larger than that. Yet for some reason BioWare chose to use a normal map that size for the whole damn suit of armor.

So to give you an idea, in just the texture layer alone, Shepard's mod there has 4096 for the chest, and 2048 for each section. Realistically, upconversion and retexturing of non-customizable suits results in a texture of only 4096x4096 pixels. So Shepard with that default armor uses about 12,228 pixels by 12,228 pixels if my math is right. 4096x4096 for the chest, 2048x2048 for the shoulders, arms and legs, and an additional 2048x2048 for the helmet.

The Unreal Engine 3.0 is limited to 8192 pixels per individual texture. So we couldn't take something like the N7 Defender armor to a pixel count that matches Shepard's armor pieces even if we wanted to. The Defender armor is a single 1024x1024 texture without the helmet. My version is 4096x4096. I bring this up to all the naysayers who think the textures we do are sometimes physically too large. More pixels always equals better quality, and the relationship between what your monitor displays and how many pixels are in a texture isn't the 1:1 ratio some think it is.

[ElectronicPostingInterface]

I love your informative posts Dead Meat. Helps me learn a lot about the game and how things work.

[voodooseason]

Daryst wrote...

voodooseason wrote...

 
The befores involved lots of switching between Photoshop and Gimp, color correcting, editing contrast/levels/etc, testing in-game, more color correcting, and still looked, at best, like my Shep made out with a bag of flour...the afters only involved editing out the unwanted features once in Photoshop and then changing it to V8U8 in the Texture Tool. That's it. Done. I can't tell you how long I've been hunting for a solution for the normal map issues--this has made everything so much easier! You are officially my HERO*.

*(Also, seeing as you originally got the tip from smarteck, I believe some thanks are in order for him as well, so...kisses for everyone! )

Did you share this shepard? Because she looks really good. would love to be able to use this as well.

Thanks! :happy: I haven't yet, but I'm planning on it (along with some other facemods using Jack's diff/norm, Miranda's, Ashley's, etc. This one's Dr. Eva.). I'm still tweaking the diff a bit but it's perfectly usable at this point, so I'll go ahead and throw up a link for you. 

(BTW, If you like the really dark eye makeup, you'll need to mess around in Gibbed a bit for it to look exactly like it does in the pics. I pretty much just copied the numbers for the ME2 eyeshadow colors here.)

[Dead_Meat357]

PKchu wrote...

I love your informative posts Dead Meat. Helps me learn a lot about the game and how things work.

Thanks. Not sure how many people actually read them.

voodooseason wrote...

Daryst wrote...

voodooseason wrote...


The befores involved lots of switching between Photoshop and Gimp, color correcting, editing contrast/levels/etc, testing in-game, more color correcting, and still looked, at best, like my Shep made out with a bag of flour...the afters only involved editing out the unwanted features once in Photoshop and then changing it to V8U8 in the Texture Tool. That's it. Done. I can't tell you how long I've been hunting for a solution for the normal map issues--this has made everything so much easier! You are officially my HERO*.

*(Also, seeing as you originally got the tip from smarteck, I believe some thanks are in order for him as well, so...kisses for everyone! )

Did you share this shepard? Because she looks really good. would love to be able to use this as well.

Thanks! I haven't yet, but I'm planning on it (along with some other facemods using Jack's diff/norm, Miranda's, Ashley's, etc. This one's Dr. Eva.). I'm still tweaking the diff a bit but it's perfectly usable at this point, so I'll go ahead and throw up a link for you.

(BTW, If you like the really dark eye makeup, you'll need to mess around in Gibbed a bit for it to look exactly like it does in the pics. I pretty much just copied the numbers for the ME2 eyeshadow colors here.)

If you do something good with Ashley's face, I'd be more than happy to integrate it into the next version of my Ashley mod. I'm doing a new helmet for her, normal map, etc. anyway.

Modifié par Dead_Meat357, 20 septembre 2012 - 06:53 .