Plasma Lighting?

[andylegate]

No, what Cyan did was a lot like what you'll need to do in Blender: Assign a material to an object, and use images as your textures.

The difference is Cyan used 3DS Max 7.0 and their own plugin. When you use that, and call up the Material editor, you'll have several "Plasma" type materials that you use:



On export, each texture will get compressed (unless you tell it not to), into several different sizes and is stored in a dds format in the texture prp file for you Age.

Having all the textures "flattened" into one huge texture will not work, all though something like that is used in some cases (light maps, clothing, avatar skins), and is what we call "Skinning". The reason we don't do that is simple: how big would that one texture have to be to contain ALL the textures in a large Age? It would have to be tens of thousands of pixels by tens of thousands of pixels, if not bigger, and you won't be able to export that.

Complex models that need several different textures, we use multiple materials on it. You can assign which faces of your complex model to each material, and then apply the textures for that material.

Again, this example is from one of my Max tutorials, but you can do the same in Blender (it's just done differently):

Take a look at the KI despenser from Descent:



It's all one mesh. But different faces of it have been assigned different materials (and their textures):

[bnewton81]

I wasn't suggesting that every texture for every model in an age should be compressed into one image. Just that for each model i.e.(that ki dispenser) All i was proposing was instead of worring about specularity, shadow baking, reflectivity and stuff like that; we simply unwrap>export tga>apply all the effects you wish to appear>import back into blender>apply. You know as a single image. There is no reason that this would cause any size inflation if anything it will reduce size. This would only work on static meshes and things that do not move of course.

Still I am a wee age writer, and I submit to your vast knowledge of all things... agey? No, seriously I am astounded at how much you know Andy. Sorry if i post too often, but outside of this forum, I have no contact with anyone that even remembers myst. I have grown in skill just in the last couple weeks. I learn new tricks and methods daily. Thanks for the understanding and help guys, as always.

[andylegate]

Do you see the post count under my avatar picture? 2171.

It's that high, and I know that much because of all the questions I posted on here. And I don't know as much as some others that are on here. I just happen to like answering questions, and I know what it's like to not know.

Okay, so you were talking about "Skinning" the individual models. Like I said, you can do that, and Cyan did too with some of their stuff, but only some of it.

The reason for this is: As we said, you will be limited to the pixel size of your texture. You can end up with "smeared" looking objects (like when you zoom in to your texture too much). By using something like what I showed above, you can have each texture be larger and prevent that.

Skinning works good on small complex objects. A teapot, book, vase, up to things like furniture. When you start getting to your bigger meshes like floors, walls, ceilings, terrain, sky, etc, you will not want to skin them like that but instead use larger tilelable textures.

[bnewton81]

Thanks, I was wondering and instead of doing a whole new thread, I'll just ask ya here. I just read your tut on making transparent textures. Seems you were using an older version of blender in that tut. I couldn't find one or two of the buttons. My question is has that process gotten easier with new releases of the plugin and blender? What are the differences with newer versions? I'm useing Blender 2.49a and i believe the newest Pyprp. No need to answer if I am being too vague. Not terribly important to me yet. Do you use blender or primarily 3dsmax?

[Luna]

On the tutorial. The tab "texture face" seems to have disappeared. Instead you can select "aplha" in the "map to" panel (Material section, on the right) you can change the transparency with the "Dvar" slider in the same panel or the "alpha" slider in the material tab ( I usually just fiddle with those until it looks right, I am not sure of the difference) . Sometimes it works better if you hit the alpha button twice in the "map to" so it becomes yellow.

[andylegate]

Your questions are fine, however try to be a little less vague and tell us what buttons you can't find.

Texture Faces:

Here is Blender 2.49a. You will only see the Texture Faces tab when you have a object selected that has a material assigned to it, are in Edit Mode, and have the Edit Panel selected:



I use both Blender and Max. I use Blender to build my models, as I'm more at ease doing it there. Then I import them into Max so I can texture them, and use Cyan's Plugin to actually make it an Age.