3d models development

[JovankaB]

...

Amazing. I'm really amazed, it looks incredible.

[Luther Blissett]

The question is : "Can I combine this with the existing textures to get a very accurate, yet also easily adjustable* final texture which is completely compatible with our engine lighting and shadows?".

I think the answer is yes, but it might not be quick I really want to sit and work on this all day today, but I've got loads of "real work" to catch up on

*When I say easily adjustable, well - look at the higher res Vault 13 one. It's a mess, and there's no chance of repainting that into something else. The existing textures we've been using are very adjustable - so I want to combine the location, colour and some of the shading from the former onto the latter.

[Haraldx]

Questions - how would this go together with the Character window? Wouldn't it look rather silly?
If we do this with armor, how much impact would it make to the recognisability of variations of the armor?

[Luther Blissett]

If we used them as is, it would look awful in the character screen and would be very difficult to adjust anything

Note that I'm not recommending we replace the textures with this. These are effectively just reference materials for me (and anyone else who wants them). I put them on the character model as a little "interested to see how it came out like", and they looked pretty good, so thought it was worth posting a few screenies. It sort of maps the original sprites to our UV map, so you can compare / edit / adjust in a 1:1 basis when adjusting or making new textures.

In the example texture above (the V13 one), you can see where the yellow bits should be, and can see where that very strong "line" under the chest is. The equivalent area in the engine is more smoothly shaded, so it needs a little "help" with a tiny bit of painted texture there. The colours used are pretty close, so I can "colour pick" the shade of blue and use that on the proper one, rather than going back and forth and guessing. They'll still need a little tweaking afterwards, but having that framework there should make things a little quicker for some of these. Once I've done a couple, it'd be pretty easy to adjust / edit any of them in exactly the same way as we already are.


#1 is the previous texture I had, #2 is the projection mapped sprite, #3 is an "in the process of being done" (definitely not finished) adjustment to #1, based on the positions and colours of #2.

It might all make a lot more sense when I finish the "adjusted proper version" of the tribal and bluesuit, which should hopefully a) Look close enough to matching the sprites to not annoy anyone,  b) work correctly with our engine shadows and shaders (i.e. cut out as much painted-on shadow as possible) and c) Look right from all angles.

[Jotisz]

Well it gave back a nice sprite like look, and probably will look close or almost exactly like the normal sprites this sure will be a good help for the detailed textures.

[Johnnybravo]

Could you do some screenshots where this is zoomed?

From those few pictures it does not seem as if you had to do any changes at all, which is kinda weird considering what mess is the texture (yet it gives some strange feeling of being right, probably because of colors and shapes)

[Luther Blissett]

It looks pretty nasty zoomed in, as you'd expect. It also looks very weird from any angle other than the 6 proper fallout ones (which sort of makes sense, if you consider that I "threw sprites" at a model from 6 angles).

Anyway, yes - zoomed pictures :


Front and back in Wings3D - you can see how the "pixels" are diagonal and that it's a bit of a mess.


Close up of front. Not a handsome man.


These are the zoomed in in-game ones. This does have a bunch of shaders and bits on it (I think yours and Baael's lighting and pixellation things).

[edit] To try and explain what I'm trying to do, this is a screen of the earliest version of the "blended" tribal :


That's the #3 from a couple of posts ago. It's a normal, proper, easily repaintable texture, but it's been given a little extra painted shadow in a couple of places (mostly under chest), had the colour tweaked quite a lot and had the position of the strap thing based upon the sprite version (haven't done the arm-wrap around thing yet). I've not had time to do any extra work on it, so it's still as it was a couple of days ago. It needs quite a lot more work on it. Call that screenshot version 0.1, then hopefully when I've done version 1.0, we should have a) a pretty good match for the sprite and b) a pretty good normal, useful, adjustable texture with a proper "Karpov face" on it.

[Lexx]

We could always scrap the detailed / zoomed in view in the character screen interface. This would be a bit of a shame, because details get lost due to this (for personal view), but if it makes it possible to improve the graphics in the regular game, I would prefer it over anything else.

[Jotisz]

In that case this may be usable too. Well after some extra work ofcourse since I only made it to get a general layout for a detailed texture I will over paint on this one.

[Luther Blissett]

That's awesome. Is that the same sort of technique (projection painting sprite on from various angles)? If this does work for base sprites of course, we have to try and work out how to get a similar look in the new added content. I do think a lot of it is choosing the base colour from a fairly restricted palette (so a brown jacket is a recognisable "Fallout brown" etc), then using a bit of interpretation to try and get a "true" version of the garbled pixel mess.

[Lizard]

That's awesome. Is that the same sort of technique (projection painting sprite on from various angles)? If this does work for base sprites of course, we have to try and work out how to get a similar look in the new added content. I do think a lot of it is choosing the base colour from a fairly restricted palette (so a brown jacket is a recognisable "Fallout brown" etc), then using a bit of interpretation to try and get a "true" version of the garbled pixel mess.

That sounds really promising! Tried this trick with a leather helmet image. Just to ask - were the helmets from VanBuren or made by community member?

[Johnnybravo]

Allright I get it. Perspective and shading is irreversible so one can't perfectly reverse-engineer fallout sprites (or at least not without overkill approach).
BTW I think the more interesting is that the mess still have some shape and colors. You can indeed blend it and use it as background to do corrections.
But more interesting is that you could easily use it to make whole new texture. If you look at the tribal guy and the texture you got from projection, you could easily convert it to height map (though it'd be kind of mess without repainting it), and as diffuse use pretty much just solid color, or something including a bit more detail. Combined together, result would indeed be very impressive and possibly even much easier to create than manually painting skin.

[Luther Blissett]

Lizard - I'd be really interested to see how that comes out like - you'll have to somehow compensate for the "not visible" areas, but it's be interesting to see how this affects the non-original models. If you find any good tricks, make sure to let us know. I'm not sure about the origin of the graphics for those though.

Johnny - I'd be certainly interested in any thoughts / ideas / methods you have regarding this. Even if I can get something working well for Tribal and Vault Suit, it's quite time consuming, and though I imagine the 3rd and 4th ones would be much quicker, it's still going to be quite difficult to explain exactly how and what I've done - then working out how to get a similar look for our added models and textures (I'm looking at my own combat jacket and longcoat and thinking what I can do for those).

As said, it was just some little tests for me to work some stuff out, but now you start to mention these other things, it could potentially be much more interesting and useful than that. As you said, if this "pixel shape" could be formed into a reusable height map (or perhaps an overlay template for photoshop?) perhaps we'd be able to mass-produce these effectively.

Anyway, I think on the very positive side, though still quite unrefined, there's probably enough evidence to say that we can get things to look "right". Especially when you look at the work Karpov has been doing with the animations recently. The question is how to combine this with something which works well for all other aspects of the texture and models and is easy to do. I still think metal armour is going to be a very tough one, because it will have a high reliance on the specular layer for its lighting.

[LagMaster]

wow, some nice progress there mates
can't w8 to see them in game

[Johnnybravo]

If you look at those projections closely, they are for sure quite crude and distorted - and this error probably cannot be processed automatically.
But you can see how clearly it mapped shaded parts of sprites that you need for recreating lightning. Converting them straight away (some kind of photoshop script or effect will be enough), should still recreate very precious details of original model.
Converting this to normal maps that can already be used fine will basically add details from sprites on those models.
The concern is how bad is that distortion and whether there is any chance to fix anything or compensate it.

For traditional vertex shading, you could use it with lighting features that photoshop boast with (and other apps as well), but it's pretty much the same thing.

You don't have to worry about specular shading much - it can probably use some adjustments in code (like changing position variables, which are just a wild guess now).
In 90s specular was almost always done by just masking intensity against white reflection.
Masking itself takes just few brushes to exclude non-reflective surfaces and color level adjustment, it can already look great after 1-2minute of work.
They did not bother with it much back in 90s either, so no problem there.

The biggest challenge is just to make low-res models competitive with high-res ones (even though they are few pixel of 256 color sprites :d).
That is the reason why I suggest using the projection for height-mapping/normal-mapping.