Working on it. Just writing a script to align all the models and center them on the nearest 500cm line, adjusting center as needed so it is always centered on the aurorabase.
Edit:
Here's the mushroom pack 1 test kit
(no shadows, no pwk)
Here's the boulders and cave formations pack 1 test kit
(no shadows, no pwk)
Very cool stuff! Thank you for sharing!
FYI, looks like a texture or two may be missing or sitting in your override (ref: below).
-Dave
Interesting, I forgot the column was a different texture, but I was certain I put in detail02 for the bats. Will repack
Edit: added a replacement hak for the cave formations on the vault
Still working on the crystals. The original scale shown is far too large to be useful to me. I'm trying 50% for now to see what happens.
Also, had to spend a few hours getting the crystals to sparkle. The toolset seems to be buggy today. I've had to go into every crystal placeable and turn on then off usable, then do the same with static, or they don't sparkle.
I dig the little bats in the fixed up HAK - cool little detail. 
-Dave
I think they'll look better up higher, so I'm going to make a few placeable singles, and a 3-pack of bats. The texture has 6 single unique bats I can use. Maybe they could be slightly animated too, with just a little wiggle.
Also still playing with the flowstone texture, trying to reduce that hard line, and at the same time not give it too much transition distance. The original I had shown looked better, unless you zoomed in, then you could see under stuff too easily. I may need to slice all the stalagmites and widen the lowest ring, forcing it to transition over a longer distance in a smaller height.
First things first today, I got that stalagmite texture base fixed.
Second thing, which is actually a list:
If time permits, skip working on those damn crystals, and get directly on the pit terrain. I don't want to think about the crystals too much because I found that unless they go into the game as was shown on the previous few pages, they lighten up too much and require a bunch of special work to make them shine like other crystal stuff I have done, including redoing the texture nearly completely.
Alternately, if I do just put them in the game as was shown, they come out looking really flat and in a cave-light setting, they are pretty much worthless.
So what I want to do is reduce the contrast on the textures I showed, as well as darken them down. If I can reach the texture quality I did with the emerald and amethyst hammers, then I can just duplicate how I did those entirely and make some fantastic cave gems.
Here's another thing I was thinking about:
This would make the crystal darker and more colorful, and the outside layer would give the shiny appearance only
Another option:
so many options, but so little time.
I couldn't help myself. This crystal combo I came across is amazing.
This is two meshes. The first (underlying) mesh is 1cm face extruded from the second. It uses a texture somewhat similar to the previous crystals, but having a noticeable gradient from top to bottom (which I might work on further), and has no alpha channel. I set the opacity on the mesh to 50%, and gave the texture an envmap to use to fill part of the opacity loss, using txi. I also set the self-illumination on the underlying mesh to 50% cyan, making it glow in the dark, and altering the overall color to aqua no matter when/how viewed.
On the second mesh, I used ChiliSkinner to create a polygon map, which I screen captured. Then I used a basic line drawing tool to draw just the face edges that I wanted to highlight. After blurring the map I created an alpha layer from the brightness, making the crystal faces very shiny, and the crystal frame not at all shiny. I then gave this texture its own txi which also gives it the same custom envmap, as well as sets the blending mode to additive.
In daylight, the crystal is mostly transparent, but you can see the glassy play of faces very easily. In the dark, the top really glows, and the bottom mostly flickers. The two layers of crystal face flashing join together to make a high contrast flicker, and their respective opacities join together to prevent a totally metallic look.
If had to change anything I would reverse the positions of the meshes and make the underlying crystal face less transparent, giving it a less glassy look, where you could also show more detail in the base texture. Alternately, a third layer outside the edge map layer could be applied using no opacity or alpha layer, and also setting the blending mode to additive, basically making a light map layer. You could then move the self-glow from the main mesh to the 3rd layer, and possibly use white instead of cyan.
Can you upload the assets for an example crystal so that we can play with it? That sounds really cool and it would be interesting to see that method picked up by other CC artists.
Sure!
Here's the placeables.2da line
1009 "MD:Crystal-B 001" **** pmd20_00506 **** **** **** **** 17 1 0 **** dlag__ref01 0
And here is the model and textures
https://www.dropbox....Crystal.7z?dl=0
Playing around with the wireMap layer's opacity and self illumination also gives you the ability to put a black cartoon outline on your shapes. I've been looking for that exact combination for years, so I can duplicate the appearances in these:
http://www.thatvideo...8/05/prince.jpg
http://www.hardcoreg...f8c6c337806.jpg
I came up with a kit of two textures which can be used to represent any single color gem. All you do then is apply a self illumination color at about 128 luminance. If you don't want it to glow, add the same color to diffuse/ambient instead. You have a second color choice which affects only the crystal outline, which nothing but a 1cm sheathe around the entire crystal. I find that a combination of similar colors looks good, like red/magenta, but other color combos such as red/blue look good. Basically pick a partner that is only one or two major hues away on the color wheel. The outer sheath self illumination barely affects the color of the underlying crystal, but does add a tiny amount of hue change when the sheath picks up the brightest envmap regions. It isn't powerful enough to give a major two-hue crystal though, like you might see with real ruby.
You can combine three colors by using both self illumination color and diffuse/ambient on the same crystal, however, like with the second self-illumination, the color is barely noticeable. Using a base hue of yellow with a self-illumination of wine red (128 red) still gave a very dark red-orange hue. Again the second-self illumination, even when set to super bright, does not affect the overall crystal color in any really noticeable way, but the brighter the color, the brighter the outline.
If you give all three the same color, or four if you count the amb/diff on the upper layer, the crystal can be made really vibrant. For a test, I used bright cyan as the self illumination color, 256 blue as the amb/diff, and bright cyan again as the upper self illumination. It was both very vibrant (but not white) and sparkly (but not metallic)
If the opacity on both the inner and outer crystals is set to 50%, and the self-illumination on both is no higher than 128 luminance, you can easily achieve a crystal of one color which flickers in another. In that example, I find that colors even three major hues away make great combinations, such as yellow/magenta.
The above picture is a dark yellow under-crystal with a magenta over-crystal. It shines yellow and flickers in wine colors.
Just curious is all - In that picture immediately above, is the crystal supposed to have a very dark blue surround?
TR
Totally explained in the text that goes with the picture.
So Tarot, did curiosity kill the cat and replace it with a monkey? Curious George?
I am finding Geology class difficult...or not so much the math, but the teacher gave the wrong conversion data, so I just lost 3 hours of time I can't get back. Redo redo redo. Why won't the Earth cooperate with me? Do I ask too much?
I had an hour to kill this morning, after having to drive my wife's drugs and food to her at work, because her sickened head forgot to grab the important stuff before it took the body outside. I decided, even though I have no intentions of buying any new DND content, why not look at the new adventures (which are ridiculously priced at $50). Pawing through the "Out of the Abyss" I found some interesting mushroom and cave pictures I intend to use to make some more mushroom and crystal formations. It also raised some questions about 5th edition... did the world of Greyhawk entirely crash into the Forgotten Realms? Because Zuggtmoy is now messing around with Juiblex (aspect of Ghaunadaur) in the underdark and trying to get it on with the Auromycos, and there are now demonic infused myconids. While the story was interesting, I find it personally disturbing that instead of reinstating Ghaunadaur, they chose to mess around with Greyhawk god-things in the place where they already had developed deities. Hopefully they are trying to kill off or reduce the power of Zuggtmoy and reinstate Gaunadaur in the underdark with power spanning now to myconids and other fungi. I guess I'm fine with that. I'm also fine with the Auromycos being a bit more fleshed out as a god-thing, and an Elder one at that. I noticed that Gaunadaur also features prominently in the Sword Coast Legends game (very prominently). Something stirs in the darkness.
You can sometimes pick up useful D&D guide books at the local library (Dewey Decimal 793.73). For example I recently checked out the v3.5 guide book Dungeonscape, which has some interesting ideas I might use. Also, our local library system has a web page with a search tool so I can do lookups and requests from there.
It also raised some questions about 5th edition... did the world of Greyhawk entirely crash into the Forgotten Realms? Because Zuggtmoy is now messing around with Juiblex (aspect of Ghaunadaur) in the underdark and trying to get it on with the Auromycos, and there are now demonic infused myconids. While the story was interesting, I find it personally disturbing that instead of reinstating Ghaunadaur, they chose to mess around with Greyhawk god-things in the place where they already had developed deities. Hopefully they are trying to kill off or reduce the power of Zuggtmoy and reinstate Gaunadaur in the underdark with power spanning now to myconids and other fungi. I guess I'm fine with that. I'm also fine with the Auromycos being a bit more fleshed out as a god-thing, and an Elder one at that. I noticed that Gaunadaur also features prominently in the Sword Coast Legends game (very prominently). Something stirs in the darkness.
Greyhawk's been dead in WotC's eyes since 3E, most everything interesting from there migrated over to FR
FR picks stuff up from everywhere. Its an all-consuming gestalt entity of a setting.
You can sometimes pick up useful D&D guide books at the local library (Dewey Decimal 793.73). For example I recently checked out the v3.5 guide book Dungeonscape, which has some interesting ideas I might use. Also, our local library system has a web page with a search tool so I can do lookups and requests from there.
Can't get them here. Our schools and local government are more... conservative. They raised a stink initially about Harry Potter being the devil, and DND was frowned upon when I was in high school, to the point I chose to do a research paper on it in 11th grade. I even left my high school girlfriend of 2 years due to my perception that I could never open her mind to things simply not being the devil. She scolded me and her mom tried to shame me for playing every weekend with my friends. Lol, she even tricked me into a Carmen concert at the local big-box church.
Anything that gets donated along those lines is tossed (no matter the quality) into the fund raising buckets and sold for 50 cents at the end of the quarter. I grabbed quite a few DND related reading books, but already had copies of the interesting rule books that they had for offer. Places like Goodwill here throws that stuff in the trash immediately. My brother found a bag of ancient dice and 3 1st edition core books that way. The plastic dice were like fossil moon plastic from the 1969.
To get the good stuff, I have to be the first in the door, because there is always this Vincent Price looking old man from Curious/Archives bookstores in East Lansing, who hoards up stuff he knows he can make a buck on from MSU students (and me).
I prefer to do image searches which lead me to magazine excerpts, where they have rights to use the images. Most of the time, they have the full picture, sometimes even larger than what made it into the guide book, often with artist signature.
So, class tonight was fun...I pointed out 4 major errors in the weekly homework, and while the teacher was scrambling to make sense of it, he found errors on the teacher's copy, including the underlying functions you use for trig-ging the numbers out of the mohr's circle. And then while checking the formula, we found that the 20 year old class notes compilation we're expected to buy for 30 bucks is also wrong. How many students did they teach totally wrong since 1996? My opinion of institutional education has not improved at all.
Typical case of SNAFU. (and if you don't know what that stands for I won't explain it - profanity use)
TR
You can sometimes pick up useful D&D guide books at the local library (Dewey Decimal 793.73). For example I recently checked out the v3.5 guide book Dungeonscape, which has some interesting ideas I might use. Also, our local library system has a web page with a search tool so I can do lookups and requests from there.
Someone has put a huge collection of old dragon magazine pdfs (like over 200 issues) up on the internet for free. It's awesome... I can sit here and browse through the stuff for hours.
@Drewski - Link? Also what about dungeon magazine?
TR
Typical case of SNAFU. (and if you don't know what that stands for I won't explain it - profanity use)
TR
I was unaware until just now that SNAFU was code.
Someone has put a huge collection of old dragon magazine pdfs (like over 200 issues) up on the internet for free. It's awesome... I can sit here and browse through the stuff for hours.
I had the magazine discs as a christmas gift one year. But I don't know where they are.
Retour en haut
