77 réponses à ce sujet

[MerricksDad]

I'm calling it done on the ash zombies. I am also not fully happy with the blood ice lance, but I think I am done with that too. I can't get the illumination to do what I want it to on player weapons. I can get it to do anything I tell it on non-player stuff, attached weapons, or even placeables. All I wanted was to have shiny and non-shiny parts on the same weapon model part. Even tried emitting models, but they always stay pointed north. I hate emitting models...

 

Anyway, here are the three (not four) ash zombies I will be sending in shortly. From left to right we have:

 

1. Fully burnt ash zombie. No flame emitters, just little cinder specks. Eyes are txi animated molten metal.
2. Mostly burnt ash zombie. Localized flame emitters with low output and long length. Same eyes.
3. High heat ash zombie. Following flame emitters with high output and short length and negative mass. Same eyes. Also the body illumination is animated. This one is substantially heavier on the engine.

 

 

Edit: Earlybird Link

[The Amethyst Dragon]

First working animesh. Interior surface of a giant air bubble within the Elemental Plane of Water.

 

It's a 1000 meter radius sphere with two layers: an outer shell and an animesh interior shell that's partially transparent (so the outer one shows through). The water on the interior appears to flow down the surface of the bubble.

 

This is non-static, so there is the limitation of it fading from sight when a PC moves more than 40 meters (4 tiles) from the center point of the placeable. Can't have a static placeable running an animesh.

 

 

[ia.Pepper]

I have a question for you, TAD, would that possibly work better as a skybox? Like, I highly doubt you need both a skybox and that ginormous bubble at the same time. So, would it work? Is there any particular reason you went for a placeable instead?

[The Amethyst Dragon]

It might work as a skybox. I don't know if skyboxes can handle transparency, animesh, and partial self-illumination (the inner layer is at 80 or 90% so it picks up a hint of area lighting)...I haven't tried. My initial version of this used shininess instead of transparency (and was a little smaller) and needed lots of back and forth testing (via override and plc_a01 naming), so I just started with a placeable. I'll see if I can get time today to try it out as a skybox.

[MerricksDad]

I was going to try my hand at some animated skyboxes, so if you can pull it off with animesh, I think my later plans will be super easy. But to know if animesh can work with skyboxes would open up a lot more!

[The Amethyst Dragon]

Tested. As a skybox, neither the transparency nor the animesh function.

[Fester Pot]

Clouds?

FP!

[MerricksDad]

That looks like a placeable too, FP. Do you know which one it might be?

[ia.Pepper]

Ahhh, how troublesome. Was thinking of doing some skyboxes myself sometime, but it sounds like they might be rather pesky to deal with.

[The Amethyst Dragon]

Ahhh, how troublesome. Was thinking of doing some skyboxes myself sometime, but it sounds like they might be rather pesky to deal with.

Skyboxes really aren't that pesky to deal with.

 

1) You need a big hollow box (though I like spheres better for newer ones)4

2) Flip the normals. (Wait, what?) Turn it inside out. I'm not sure of the normal procedure for this, my method is relatively quick and discovered by accident (mirror the thing and reset x form), I'm sure there's a better way.

3) Save it like a placeable. The thing will automatically end up self-illuminated in-game.

4) Add your model to skyboxes.2da, in all four time columns if it won't change (and set cyclical to 0 instead of 1 in that case)

5) Add your new 2da and model to your top hak. Use in the toolset.

 

Skyboxes get centered at location 0, 0, 0 of the area (rather than the area's center point), so make them big. I recommend making them very high, if not spherical, just because many people now play with unlocked camera angles. With spheres though, you need to be careful about stretching closer toward the zenith (top point).

 

 

 

Fester Pot:

 

I saw that when the video was first put out years ago. Not sure if it's a placeable or animated skybox (I haven't tested yet if you can animation part or all of a skybox). A working file was never released to the public.

 

Either way, the clouds are all circling around the PC or area. Looks fine from one side, but turn around and the other nearby clouds are moving in the opposite direction? Weirds me out.

 

Now, if someone were to get it to work inside a GIANT torus with non-repeating clouds (so all clouds on all sides appear at a long distance and move in the same direction), and slowed down the cloud movement a lot, then it would be much more believable.

[The Amethyst Dragon]

Just a reminder for folks that might want some quick ideas of something to make, here's the post I made back on the first page. If someone wants to tackle the halfling colony on the plane of water, send me a PM to let me know and I'll send you a copy of the bubble interior placeable to surround the place.

[ia.Pepper]

 Yeah, getting a simple skybox to work isn't pesky. Getting the skyboxes I want to do working, might be though! I like grandiose things a little too much.

 

 Also, how I tend to flip normals for my models is simply hit 'Edit Mesh', select all the polygons I want flipped, and hit 'Flip' in the side-bar. I don't like using the mirror function, especially since I am never working with something that would work perfectly with that method, except maybe in  the case of a skybox.

 

 I sort of wanted to make something for this challenge, but I may need a new computer before I tackle certain projects further. This one is barely alive, so I am needing to hold off on things. Also, with all the projects I need to finish, CCCs are really bad for my attention span.   So perhaps it's best I missed this one anyway.

[Killmonger]

AD

 

Thanks for the crib notes about skyboxes.

 

Also:

 

Would an animesh "Klein Bottle" create the effect that you mean?

Like a back drop on rollers, but in 3d.....

 

I believe placeable clouds could work like the sailing ships project models (Ty otr, oss !)

Translucent "puffs" (emitters?) moving along/around a spline (?)

 

imho 

[Pstemarie]

As far as flipping the normals, select all the faces you want to "flip".  Near the section of the rollout where you assign smoothing, you'll see a tick box that allows you to flip normals. Tick that box and the normals will be flipped.

[MerricksDad]

Hop in my animated water textures package and get texture tx_wateranim04.tga. This is a flowing water texture, and also uses an alpha channel. Now try to apply it to the skybox and see if it flows. (Don't forget the txi)

 

As for shape, maybe another shape you might use with flowing textures (if they work) is a pill cylinder. You might be able to do a star field simulation using the cylinder, making it seem like the planet you were on was moving in a certain direction through space, at high velocity. A world with a purpose.

 

For a very wide and planar world (rather than sphere), you might also try this shape of skybox:

 

 

It has less wrapping/stretching issues than a sphere, and you can simulate a really far away horizon on a near-completely flat world, like say the Fugue, or an Air world. By having no surround faces, you can supply just the ground and sky textures to each saucer. There are no mountains in the distance.

 

Trying to open up the skybox options to non-earth worlds.

 

Edit: Sorry I forgot to say what that shape is. I took a cylinder with 36 faces around, and three sections high, and then I took the top corners and the bottom corners and welded them to the middle vertices. So it is a 36 face per half, double saucer shape.

 

Edit Again:

 

Using the shape above, fit to just under 84000 wide and long, with 4 tiles of texture wide and long (in the uvw mapping), using planar mapping on the Z-axis, this is what you get: a very fast flowing cloud system, like as if the planet's atmosphere was being blown away.

 

 

So yeah, animated textures using txi do work on skyboxes just fine. Granted, on my machine, it does cause a slight quantity of lag.

 

Also, I noticed if you go out past 100000 cm from your standing point, the skybox is clipped away, so don't do that. Make your skybox 40-80 meters wide.

 

I also misspoke when I said that the animwater04 had transparency. It does not. I cloned it from Torchlight 2 without the transparency layer. In my water mods, I use only the alpha setting on the mesh the texture is applied to. So I don't know yet if I can force transparency in skyboxes. If we can, then I can clone those two layer skyboxes they used in Quake and Doom.

 

Final Edit:

 

Mesh alpha does not work.

Mesh diffuse and ambient do not work.

Texture alpha does not work.

TXI blending additive does not work.

Assuming no blending at all is done on skyboxes, ever.

Haven't tried bumpreplacementtexture command yet. It may kickstart the blending process. But I find in the case of character weapons, it does not, so it probably wont.

[Tarot Redhand]

Almost as many edits as a newspaper! 

 

TR

[The Amethyst Dragon]

The following is a set of two placeables designed to be used together, a column of falling water and water splashing at the bottom. I kept them separate though, just in case a builder would want falling water going down a hole or something without splashes, or to use just the splashing for something.

 

When activated, the column of water drops from above (taking several seconds to first reach ground level). When deactivated, it takes several seconds for the really high column of water to finish falling. The splashes share the same animation times, so a builder could use a script to turn them both on and off at the same time. These work great when a sound object (I used the large waterfall sound) is placed at the same location and just turned on and off with the placeables.

 

Of course, one could just leave the things activated the entire time. The default animation is the same as the "activated" one.

 

The water column is 50 meters tall, so it can fall from off-camera or through ceilings or whatever.

 

Oh, and this was my 2nd use of placeable animesh so far.

 

[Tarot Redhand]

I just realised that your first placeable would be ideal for a classic conversion. White Plume Mountain featured a room with a "burning bubble" and a crab.

 

TR

[The Amethyst Dragon]

Enough messing with water for a while. Just whipped up new tops for maces and morningstars, featuring crystal/gem-studded rocks taken right from the Elemental Plane of Earth. The crystals are slightly self-illuminated, so they'll glow a little in really dark areas.

 

Shiny!

 

 

[MerricksDad]

Very slick weapon addition there!

[Tarot Redhand]

<warning - initiating pedantic mode>

 

While those are great models I think you are confused as to what you have actually created. The ones with the spiky balls at the end of a stick are in fact morning stars. The ones with the spiky ball attached to a chain, which itself is attached to a stick is in fact a footman's flail. Incidentally a mace is not designed to cut or puncture, which is why they are an allowed weapon type for clerics (in 2e AD&D).

 

<terminating annoying pedantism>

 

TR

[The Amethyst Dragon]

<warning - initiating pedantic mode>

 

While those are great models I think you are confused as to what you have actually created. The ones with the spiky balls at the end of a stick are in fact morning stars. The ones with the spiky ball attached to a chain, which itself is attached to a stick is in fact a footman's flail. Incidentally a mace is not designed to cut or puncture, which is why they are an allowed weapon type for clerics (in 2e AD&D).

 

<terminating annoying pedantism>

 

TR

I know, I know, but we're talking NWN here, and the weapon model types are NWN mace and NWN morningstar.

[Mecheon]

The Salt Legion is still coming! The TXI's working fine on ol' Red Eye, so he and his cursed army will be around soon to torment your villages, cities, towns, countries, all that type of thing.

Having fun with TXIs on this one, which has opened doors to another semi-related project. Probably going to keep putting stuff forward to this in the future, just got to hunt down Rolo and get the go ahead to use the texture for his inferno wings on a bit of this other project, something a bit more... Stellar

(Yeah, star elemental. But that's a future thing)

Might also whip up a few semi-useful reskins if you don't mind me tormenting your elementals as well, TAD?

[Bluebomber4evr]

Enough messing with water for a while. Just whipped up new tops for maces and morningstars, featuring crystal/gem-studded rocks taken right from the Elemental Plane of Earth. The crystals are slightly self-illuminated, so they'll glow a little in really dark areas.

 

Shiny!

 

 

 

Yay, more morningstars!

[The Amethyst Dragon]

Might also whip up a few semi-useful reskins if you don't mind me tormenting your elementals as well, TAD?

Go for it.