29 réponses à ce sujet

[Tchos]

The important thing that I think is getting lost here is that a model's specular settings should always be set to 100% in the first place, because the texture map will control the intensity, and it can be as overt or subtle as needed.  For tilesets such as those in the OC, which use single image maps for their textures, that means you can change the feel of the entire tileset by changing a single texture, whereas if the models don't have the specular settings set up right, you need to make as many as 300 edits to even make it possible.  As I said, I can and will make both wet and dry variants.  It's a trivial task as long as the models are set correctly.  To make it dry, all I have to do is darken the specular map.

 

And of course wetness isn't the only reason to want to make a surface display some amount of specularity, since so many materials in the real world have it to some degree.  Seriously, specular maps are sometimes more important than normal maps, which are taken for granted as necessary.  You understand that normal maps can make some areas super rough and bumpy and other areas perfectly smooth.  It's not all or nothing, and it's the same way with specular maps.  This is to say that the way to make the set flexible for different situations, as you say it should be, is to have the specular settings active on the models.

[rjshae]

While you've been looking at the tile models, have you seen a reason why this set has such poor graphical performance? I'm wondering whether bevels are responsible. (I suppose I could look myself... but up until now I never saw the point.)

[Tchos]

I'm not really familiar with performance for tilesets, but I notice there are no LOD meshes.  I don't know the recommended polygon limit for tiles, but the tiles I randomly sampled and counted had 1216-1260 faces (not counting collision meshes and walkmeshes).  It could also be the fault of the Oblivion textures, if it's possible that their mipmaps aren't the same kind that NWN2 uses.  Let me know if it runs any differently with my textures when they're posted, and we'll know whether that's the case.

[rjshae]

I haven't seen any tilesets with LoD meshes; it's been something I've been meaning to test. But it may be that the builders didn't feel a need to add LoD since most tilesets are seen from relatively close.

 

The performance issue shows up when I zoom well out in the toolset.

[Tchos]

Or because there's a hard limit of how many tiles can be lined up within the viewport at any one time (32x32).  My impression is that the engine is still working to render the tiles lined up in the viewport even if other geometry is blocking the view, so LODs that reduce the number of faces would help to ease the strain, but I don't know if there's a difference between the toolset rendering window and the in-game one.