169 réponses à ce sujet

[andysks]

Calister, you got to stop making such nice things. There is not more space in my campaign folder and haks . Seriously though, awesome job. I love how your tiles look, and the texturing especially gives it a feeling like from another game.

[Calister68]

Thank you for your nice comment, andy

 

Talking about the "another game" feeling, I conducted recently an interesting experience. After playing a diablo 3 session, I wanted to see what nwn2 would look like with the beautiful diablo 3 hand painted textures. So I extracted some textures from the game (a painful process, I must say) and built a very simple dungeon tile. Then I modified somewhat the textures with some moss patches.

 

Here is the result.

 

I think the result is interesting, even with such a simple tile. But I'm not sure that the cartoon-style design of diablo suits the nwn2 universe well...

[PJ156]

That's an interesting look. It's very much what Jamin is talking about here:

 

 

He talks about creating textures that have a 3D effect without just the normal map. He creates textures using painted light and shade to make the textures jump out at you. The net effect is the textures goes away from photo realism to the cartoon/art style of the floor texture you used here.

 

Just as a note Jamin states that he worked on D3 so he likely as not had a hand in that floor texture

 

PJ

[rjshae]

Some of the Dragon Age: Origins interior walls used darker patches  (burned in shadows) along the creases to create a nice 3D pop. At first I thought it was overdone, but I quickly got used to it. The main drawback is that it would require a lot of custom textures, so your hak file would grow huge.

[andysks]

I found myself loving and hating the Blizzard graphics style over the years, and to be honest at the moment I don't really know if I like it. But also, I don't think that NWN2 is that much darker and serious in terms of texturing and graphics .

[Tchos]

I often use more artistic than realistic textures in my own custom models.  I prefer more art than grit, and I'm not concerned if it doesn't match with the rest of NWN2, which is generally poorly textured as far as I'm concerned.

[PJ156]

I agree, a lot of the stock textures are horrible. I often wonder why? Is there any benifit in keeping the overhead down in this manner? I guess it came out when much slower machines were the norm?

 

PJ

[kamal_]

I agree, a lot of the stock textures are horrible. I often wonder why? Is there any benifit in keeping the overhead down in this manner? I guess it came out when much slower machines were the norm?

 

PJ

In addition to potential performance issues from trying to load too much texture at the same time, there some other things than can affect things.

 

I'm not sure how big the game was at release, but there are costs if you have to print up more dvds to contain the game, so it could have been a cost issue to keep the game size down. Also I think there's a polygons->texture quality issue, where if your object geometry is really simple, really high rez super realistic textures can actually look worse than lower quality textures. It's a case of staying out of the uncanny valley as it applies to boxes, buildings, etc, not just humans. Think about how it would look with photorealistic textures in the original Doom, to me those textures would draw my eye to the low poly nature of the models. Lastly there's just a case of "texture artist did a bad job/didn't spend much time on it", that certainly can happen. While I'm sure someone's probably made 4k textures for barrels in Skyrim, I doubt pro texture artists would be interested or spend the time on doing that.

 

Mostly I bet the developer establishes a performance level they want and things go around that.

[Tchos]

I can only guess why, but it could have something to do with the fact that normal maps were new and unfamiliar at the time the game was in production, and the skills just hadn't been developed yet.  I saw similar flaws in other games released when normal mapping was new.  Also, going through the original resources I could see where some textures were replaced with others, suggesting that certain features (like tinting) hadn't been implemented yet at the time the originals were created.  And then there's the specular mapping.  I don't know when that kind of mapping started getting used in computer games, but it was not done well in NWN2.

 

As for other decisions like the size of the textures, well, that's probably just standard for the time, but I also see some that have a large waste of texture space which suggest poor UV mapping as well, which as a side effect results in blurry, blown-up textures on some objects and don't seem to be beneficial for performance.

 

Then there's design, like the standard wooden floors causing each house to have a few dozen non-functional trapdoors.

[Calister68]

A new bridge metatile :

 

scr1

scr2

 

I painted the bridge grate texture myself, starting with this to end up with this.

Not really a professional work, like the one in Pj's video, but I'm happy enough with the result.

[PJ156]

I think the painting is pretty good. I would be happy to do as well as that. The light play on the rivet heads is very clear which may look too strong in the image but it needs to be once it is in game.

 

The tile looks very cool indeed, I hope we can find some new sound effects to do it justice.. I do wonder what the bridge is spanning though, is there a channel underneath running though the walls that we cannot see in the screens?

 

On the subject of textures, some of those with the statues and catacombs are very large in size (21 MB for several of them). Did they pack that way or have I changed something by miss use at my end? It would be good If I can reduce the size somehow?

 

PJ

[Calister68]

Yes, I suppose there's a channel running under the bridge... or maybe is it just the lair of some sewer monster ? Sometimes it's better not to know...

 

Concerning the textures, some of it are indeed very large, especially in the statues pack. If I remember well, that's because there's only one single texture covering the whole statue. I suppose it's possible to reduce drastically the weight, but at the price of some details...

[rjshae]

Texture-wise it looks really nice; I like it. If the grid mesh were smaller, it would start showing distracting moiré patterns. Engineering-wise though... I suspect it may need more support underneath at the mid-section.

[rjshae]

On the subject of textures, some of those with the statues and catacombs are very large in size (21 MB for several of them). Did they pack that way or have I changed something by miss use at my end? It would be good If I can reduce the size somehow?

 

For the CSP, what I did (for some of the placeables with large texture files) was provide a lower res. texture in the base, then a higher res. texture as an optional-add-on.

[Calister68]

Texture-wise it looks really nice; I like it. If the grid mesh were smaller, it would start showing distracting moiré patterns. Engineering-wise though... I suspect it may need more support underneath at the mid-section.

 

 

Yes, that's what I was thinking while making the grate. Something like that should help the bridge not to collapse.

[PJ156]

The chains look really, really good

 

PJ

[Hellfire_RWS]

I love the chains! Can we get a tile with a chain on one side only,  and the bridge twisted and sagging on one side?

[Calister68]

It should be doable, but the bridge will be impossible to cross. I'll see that as soon as I've fixed a collision mesh problem with the 1 tile rooms.

[Calister68]

That should do the trick. And the bridge can still be crossed !

[kamal_]

That should do the trick. And the bridge can still be crossed !

The dwarf looks at the bridge and tries to decide what took a giant bite out of it.

[Calister68]

Today I ran into a intriguing problem with some of my door tiles, specifically those with stairs, like this one.

 

While testing an area, I noticed that some rooms were revealed when I climbed up the stairs, even if I didn't open the door. I first thought about a problem with the collision mesh (C3), so I modified it in different ways to try to solve the issue. But it didn't work, no matter what I tried.

 

Then I noticed that the tile was working perfectly well with all the doors, except one : the cave door you can see in the screen (the one with a small window). Examining the door closer, I noticed a small gap between the base of the door and the ground. Not really obvious, but enough to reveal the room located behind the door if the line of sight of the PC is at the same height as the gap... for example, when you climb stairs.

 

So I modified my C3 mesh by adding a small piece at the base of the door hole, in order to block this boring gap. And it worked well.

 

The cave door seems to be the only one with this design flaw, if I'm not mistaken. It's smaller than the other doors, apparently because of the wooden step you can see in the cave door tiles.

[Dann-J]

The cave door has a barred window in it, so you'd expect to be able to see through it.

[Tchos]

Yeah, and I wanted to use that one as a prison door, but since it actually blocked the line of sight, the cells were black inside.  I replaced it with the jail cell door.

[rjshae]

Yes, I thought that was just the normal behavior of the door type. It happens with the portcullis as well.

[rjshae]

The drawback to making tile sets is the sheer amount of work required. For me it was a 2-3 month effort to put everything together and fix all the little issues that creep in. By the end I'm getting thoroughly tired of seeing them. It's a big time drain, and these days I find it interesting just to add new variants to existing tile sets, or new metatiles. Not that there aren't other tile sets that would be interesting to build; it's just a big commitment in effort.

 

Anyway, this set is looking great so far. I hope you have the time to finish it for us.