287 réponses à ce sujet

[MerricksDad]

Just a heads up, I may go work on something else for a few days. I am starting to itch over two other humanoid models I want to finish.

[henesua]

Dude! That was a scary Bob Ross reference.

 

Go work on those humanoids. I think this thread is warping you.

[rjshae]

[henesua]

I didn't think anyone would confuse Bob Ross with David Trampier.

[MerricksDad]

Well, that brightens my day! I just spent the last two hours attempting to make more videos of this frost spear thingy I am doing just as a tutorial, and it keeps losing the video on the way to the file. Very not happy. I can do smallish videos just fine, but anything over a minute or so and it locks up. Oh well, maybe it is not to be, yet.

 

Back to working on my new wiki.

[Rolo Kipp]

<not real comfortable...>

 

Well, I'm using the commercial version of Dxtory (currently about $35) and it behaves properly once I installed the right codecs.

 

You can see the results from a very amateur video maker on my youtube channel.

 

*shrug* Works for me on a sort-of low-end laptop.

 

<...promoting software>

[MerricksDad]

I installed CamStudio and am getting progress with it. It has nothing for editing so I am trying avidemux to play with some stuff. I still don't have any mic so there is still no sound at all. Video quality is much higher now though.

[MerricksDad]

Well, I finally got the videos to not be gray, and built a 5-video series of me making a frost spear. The videos are from 6-10 minutes each and should look a lot better than the last ones. This time I also take the process from picking out a texture, making the icy spear head, all the way through the modeling process, right up to playing it in the game.

 

As before, there are a few mistakes in the video series. The big two are that in video 4 I named the icon with a typo so it was unavailable in the toolset. I pick right up with video 5 with a properly named icon, but in game the icon is not transparent (the black). I fixed that by simply redoing the alpha channel and saving again. No biggie.

 

Anyway, the videos are larger, and will take me some time to get up. Check for them later in the same channel on youtube as before. The address is found on page 1, post #1 of this thread.

[MerricksDad]

Blarg, well dropbox has screwed up my files again so I had to redo the 7z file. The new address is this:

 

https://www.dropbox....Weapon-a-day.7z

 

Yesterday's addition was the icy spear I made for the second tutorial series. You can view the tutorial and script on the new vault at:

 

http://neverwinterva...odel-2d-texture

 

The tutorial script is still in the works, and definitely has some obvious typos. If you have questions or want something explained in a different way, just post a suggestion here or direct message me here or on the new vault.

[MerricksDad]

Weapon-a-day is currently on hold while I package individual red pines for pre-schoolers. This may take two day The kids will be shocked. These things are huge this year.

[Ssythilac]

Hi MerricksDad

 

Finally I have got some free time to work in NWN and to test your weapons in game. Very good work!! I liked very much the greatswords (the evil looked one and the blade of fire are simply great!) and the conversions of Skyrim`s weapons.

 

Thank you for your work!

[MerricksDad]

Today's package will contain three thickets. These are constructed using my WIP tree builder script for GMAX. I've scrounged up a convex hull script that I modified for use with my tree foliage. It takes the entire area of the foliage and makes a single shadow casting bubble.

 

The release versions will not have shadows cast by the trunks. I figure this is not a big deal because the thicket trees are no more than 4 years old, and it would highly likely their shadow would be super thin anyway.

 

I've previously suggested taking these thickets and building them into a zone AOE which grants cover/concealment bonuses. If the environment is dark and shadowy enough, the thicket alone might be enough to obscure a creature, or even a PVP player.

 

The thickets will be created from a combination of maple-like, poplar-like, and olive-like trees. I did not differentiate the growth on anything other than their leaf colors, so feel free to change their bark types or rotate their element parts as you need them. I left all the branch sections and leaf sections as individual unwelded elements as part of the larger model. Leaves and branch/trunk sections are separate because they use separate textures.

 

Here is an image of the dynamic shadow bubbles.

 

A thicket of 2.5 meters is enough to make neverwinter explorer very uneasy. I highly suggest not attempting to view these in the explorer.

A thicket of 5 meters is enough to anger the toolset.

 

Neither thicket affects actual gameplay in any noticeable way.

 

I am still testing the 10 meter thicket. I can assume nwexplorer will crash, and the toolset will go beyond sluggish. If it affects gameplay, I may resort to looking for a concave hull system to wrap the branch/truck model. That should reduce faces and other waste.

[Rolo Kipp]

<crashing through the thicket...>

 

I've previously suggested taking these thickets and building them into a zone AOE which grants cover/concealment bonuses. If the environment is dark and shadowy enough, the thicket alone might be enough to obscure a creature, or even a PVP player.

You might discuss this with Henesua, as his bushes in Arnheim did this and also changed footstep sounds and had movement modifiers. I *think* he was either working on or had implemented taking into effect feats for how terrain would affect all both stealth and movement.

 

Very cool work, as always, MD. :-)

 

<...in a vain attempt at concealment>

[KlatchainCoffee]

Shrubberies = favourite 'weapons' of the Knights of Ni!

[henesua]

Regarding effects of entering shrubberies and thickets and the like I did write some scripts for this. And I am not proud of them. The code is hideous, but I am too lazy to refactor it all. What I do is create a trigger around a thicket, and give it enter and exit scripts. I put them up on pastebin and linked here.
 
Enter v2_trg_en_brambl
 
Exit v2_trg_ex_brambl

[MerricksDad]

ok, after playing with the 10m thicket, and building a (utter failure) concave hull builder (which makes x2 the faces as original model), all three now work in the toolset well enough. I've also ramped up performance in the NWN explorer view. The larger thicket has only a few seconds load time now.

 

 

 

ok, so the 2.5m thicket uses 5 trees, and strangely enough it looks larger than the 5m thicket because the randomness picked older trees. The 5m thicket uses 10 trees, and contains a lot of small sickly trees on one side. The large thicket uses 21 trees and are more spaced out than the previous thickets. I suggest combining them together as you would the mushroom masses for caverns.

[MerricksDad]

I just need to take some other crap you guys don't need out of the module and then we're ready to upload. First: Walking the dog.

[YeoldeFog]

Beautiful! Really nice!

[3RavensMore]

That thicket looks fabulous!  I was just out cutting thickets out of a gully today and thinking wouldn't terrain like this in NW be great?  Okay...so I wasn't really thinking that--more like how to not lose a limb to the Spinning Vorpal Teeth of Death!...aka an old chainsaw minus the guard.  Afterword though, when the SVToD had been silenced, and a glass of beer consumed (maybe even two, possibly even three, and it's conceivable the a number greater than three was involved) that truly was the topic of conversation.  Imagine my surprise when I find that you created one--the thicket that is, and not the chainsaw.

 

I'd never ask for a chainsaw.

[MerricksDad]

ok, the file is up. I also added a 4th thicket, also 10m, but with 30 trees.

 

I also changed the area visuals so they look more like you would see in vanilla NWN. My custom colors are more realistic, but less dramatic. The trees look substantially different under normal NWN conditions.

[MerricksDad]

I forgot to mention that on the thickets I released yesterday, I had processed the trees with a 50% trim modifier which kept randomly selected 50% of the leaf nodes from being created. This is what makes some of the trees look healthier than others. The script, when ready, will have a ton of options you can use to manage these kinds of results. I'm currently working on pine attributes, including meristem/leader management. This will allow you to define the main trunk as the leader and will continue with the last sub-branch appended to that leader (and so on). You will be able to define special properties for that branch system, and also specify a chance for additional leaders at each branch added. I want to be able to make an accurate representation of any species, and then build species libraries for use with the script.

 

At some point, my goal is to create a helper object so you can just place the helper node in your tileset scene and then use the helper's properties from the right side, like you do with trimesh (etc.). I'd like it to be able to chop down the tree and start over whenever told to do so. Like if you don't appreciate the first tree, just click rebuild and get a new one.

 

All hypothetical at the moment, but actually it's just numbers, and it certainly won't take long now that the basics are out of the way.

[Zwerkules]

The thickets will be created from a combination of maple-like, poplar-like, and olive-like trees. I did not differentiate the growth on anything other than their leaf colors, so feel free to change their bark types or rotate their element parts as you need them. I left all the branch sections and leaf sections as individual unwelded elements as part of the larger model. Leaves and branch/trunk sections are separate because they use separate textures.

The models look fine the way they are, so there probably is no need to rotate any elements, but it is good to know that it is still possible.

Personally I'd change the textures before I'd use the models, because I find the colours too bright and unnatural, but that's just my taste.

How are the branches mapped? The texture looks as if it has no detail. Is that because it is streched or is it the texture itself?

[MerricksDad]

The textures for the branches are unfortunately made the same way I did the weapon models. I took a pre-made texture, chopped it into triangles or low count poly's and then positioned their visual stem to 0,0 on my leaf node manager (for the script). There is no 2d-point rhyme or reason beside that, so retexturing the leaves may take some time unless you specifically uvmap them from scratch to a new texture.

I personally use various different lighting and environment mapping techniques to make the texures look super bright or not as bright in-game. Having lived in mountainous regions before, the ones you see in the three pics above are as close to what we saw with the human eye without also tinting everything blue (which I always hated). I know in the eastern US they don't appear as brightly lit. They definitely look wrong with the vanilla NWN environment settings from the toolset. The image of the poplar branch is actually a real picture. The maple I think is somebody's hand-painted art, though I have no idea who. And the olive leaf is an image of a previously rendered 3d model, so it is more unnaturally glossy and middle textured.

 

If you zoom in on the texture in-game, they have quite a bit more detail, except the olive branch. The images are each 512 square I think (as tga), so there is a lot of room to play with. Definitely feel free to play with different textures, and if you care to, send me some textures to add to my tree library, which I need to basically redo because of all the stuff I lost when I switched computers.

 

I plan on taking a bunch of stuff for pine-family trees and building pre-rendered branches and then converting them to usable textures. We'll see how that goes

[MerricksDad]

Today's package contains the Chaos Eater sword from Darksiders. What an awesome sword.

 

 

Because this weapon uses color slot 5 of greatswords, but vanilla nwn only has 4 colors for appearance 1, I've also included a blank-model part 1 color 9 to fill the appearance gap.

 

I've also modified the texture on the ice spear I made last week. I hope you'll find it better fits with the axe, rod, and sword.

[rjshae]

It looks cool, but... gah, that thing must weigh a ton.