Guild of Writers

Wasn't sure whether to post it here or in the tutorials sections.

Anyway, a couple of weeks back I took the plunge into Age building, managed to build a basic Age and import it into Uru (yey!). However I have been having a lot of problems when it comes to texturing. I have been following the "Your First Real Age" tutorial on the wiki but have been a bit stumped with the texturing bit (I use the latests Blender version which the tutorial isn't really tailored to). I have followed it the best I could and often find that the items on my screen never look like they do on the screens depicted in the tutorial which has been difficult down to the fact that stuff was moved around in the new Blender add to the fact that I don't fully know my way around blender yet so when the tutorial doesn't really explain how to get to a certain tab option it throws me off balance a bit.

So I was wondering if anyone has the time to craft a tutorial specific to texturing an Age and items within it? Big request I know, tutorials can take a lot of time to write. Texturing has become the biggest road block in the completion of my Age and it is driving me barmy, I've experimented and got some items textured, but it is an inconsistent approach which doesn't always work.

Thanks

Tweek: take a look at Lessons 10 and 11 from Jennifer's Classroom. It's not a Wiki tutorial (yet), but it's a start.

Texturing can be a road block. I think I've seen many posts, both here and over at the MOUL forum, where people have basically said the same thing: Okay, I've finally got the hang of navigating Blender, and now 3D modeling is coming easy, but I can't texture.

or worse: I quit because I can't get the hang of texturing, and when I asked for help, I'm just pointed to the wiki, which doesn't help at all.

It's too bad that texturing our Ages is not like real life: just slap a coat of paint, or simply glue wall paper to the wall.

This is about an "manual" as you can get (other than hex editing) for applying textures to things.

Got a great stone texture for you cliff? Great! But when you apply it you either have it look tiled from far away? Or blurry when up close?
That's because unlike other "Game Editors" we have to manually tell it how to mipmap. Which is taking the same texture, and make about 3 or 4 of the same, but each one has a transparent layer in it, and made just a little more transparent. Then you have to apply each of these textures to your mountain, or ground, or whatever, set the filter size for each one just slightly less than the other, and go into the Materials and set the UV Map Input SizeX, SizeY and SizeZ higher numbers for each one (I normally use 2, 4, 8, 16, etc). That way when you link in, the texture looks right from far away, and as you get closer to your object, each texture layer goes transparent to reveal the next texture, so that by the time you get up close, it's not blurry, but looks right.
As I said, many Game Editors do this automatically, you just tell it what texture you want to use. But don't gripe, it's good to learn how to do this manually as it shows you what is really going on, and that's about how Age building is: being intimately familiar with the inner workings of Plasma...

Of course what I describe above is just one thing in texturing an Age. Then you have blends you want to do....for like your dirt and grass, stone and dirt, etc, etc.
Then if you have a complex object, trying to UV Map it just right with textures that are laid out, like a book for example.

But it's all part of the fun of learning I guess. But I do agree, the wiki really needs just a Texturing section, and that is all it talks about: what different ways there are to texture, blend, UV Map, etc, etc.

Andy your post scares me. Following the classroom lessons I've just started with texturing and there are a lot of buttons to keep track of. I have a feeling that I will have to redo the things I make now if I want to use them later because I've been using the "that seems to work"-method and it's probably not very consistent in the long run. Thankfully I've had great help from Jojon and Jennifer so far!
(And things aren't grey any more. Colours, man!)

Wow, Andy... see, in all my months of playing with Blender, looking through wikis and forums and tutorials around here and elsewhere, your post is the very first I've heard of mipmapping involving layers like that. I've only heard the word "mipmap," and had no idea what it meant. This is the sort of info that is really useful to have, and the sad thing is that by the time I'm ready to use it, I'll have forgotten it or forgotten where to find it.

Then I'll let y'all in on a little secret:

I forgot about mipmapping myself!

I had gotten so used to using Game Editors for like Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Ravenshield, etc, that are all automatic. I kept beating my head in at the tile effect I was getting, or the blurry vision when too close. It was driving me insane, when Boblishman on here kindly reminded me of having to manually mipmap.

I was like:

Of course you don't do this for everything in your Age.....only those things that you need to see detail from afar. For example, you wouldn't texture a tree, or the column of a building this way......or small rocks and boulders. Just large things like the outside of large buildings, cliffs, mountains, the ground, things like that, where you get tiling when you texture.

Actually, Trylon DOES mention doing this in his First Real Age tutorial, but the way it reads, most new people won't know why you do that........and also, some veterans like me drew a blank!

Just remember........even the people that have been doing this far longer than me learn something new all the time, both with blender and the Plugin.

Texturing is sure frightening, I followed the tutorial but it took a lot of unprintable language and unwanted results to get anything I am going to closely pay attention to lesson 10 and 11 of the Classroom, and hopefully learn enough to help my buddie finish his age in time for the RAD contest

Err, you are actually confusing the heek out of me here, Andy...

As you sort of say, mipmapping is to gradually use a more detailed copy of the texture as you approach an object. This way, you can have lots of detail showing when up close and you get automagic anti-aliasing when you recede, avoiding the "moire-effect" that was so apparent in early realtime texture-mapping implementations - this because the less detailed "mipmaps" are simply interpolated scaled down versions of the detail texture ("pre-antialiased", if you like) -- this approach also requires no extra sub-pixel processing at runtime, making it cheap in terms of CPU and GPU resources, at the expense of some extra memory usage.

For us and the pyPRP plugin, if we have the "Interpol" checked for the texture, power of two mipmaps will be created from the original texture, at time of export. Are you saying that these mipmaps are not used by Plasma, unless we somehow tells it to? If so, just HOW do we set the depth scope ranges, as you seem to imply?

Also, the bits I just covered, does not affect the tiling issue - that would require some - what-might-it-be-called? - "super-mipmap", encompassing the entire object, with all its detail textures (and if they are all the same, there'd still be tiling, unless we made it all a trick, whith the far distant view not truly being a representation of the the close up one, but-noone-notices-anyway). Here again I wonder; how do we define the scopes (other than vis-regions)? This could be of great use for mirage type effects! Tutorial/hint link? :)

(Tech level: Moderate)
Let me chime in here with a bit of info. (And I do hope you can bear to read my long post compleately before asking questions )
Andy's use of the term "MipMapping" is a bit confusing. Let me explain:

In Plasma (at least), "Mipmapping" means that of any texture there are rendered a number of smaller images.
E.g. when you have an image of 64x64 pixels, the image will be scaled down repeatedly into images of 32x32, 16x16, 8x8, 4x4, 2x2 and 1x1 pixels.
This is done to avoid superfluous calculations when the object is so far away, that there would be no difference in appearance between applying the full image or one of the smaller versions during rendering. Using one of the smaller ones, saves processing time.

The full set of an image plus it's resized smaller versions is called a "MipMap".

Of course, this allows for interesting tricks, like Andy describes.
Let's jump back to ordinary texturing, and go to the cleft, before I continue to explain.
In the cleft, the desert ground has actually two textures: One large desert texture, that is basically an aerial photograph of a desert area, mapped onto a similarly sized desert plain. The other is a texture containing the details of pebbly ground, but is transparent, except for the outlines of the pebbles.
The pebbly detail texture is mapped onto a smaller area of the floor (though tiled, so it does repeat itself), so it makes the floor much more detailed than the basic desert texture does.
The combination of these textures makes the floor look good and diverse (non-repetitive) from afar, and detailed from close-up.

Now,if you look closely, you don't see the detailed texture on the far-away view, as you would expect.
This is because the mipmap is "rigged", in the sense that it has full alpha on the mimaps that are used for far away images. Thus, when the texture layer is rendered for far-away area's, the texture image used is fully transparent, but on close-up, the texture is fully present.

PyPRP can provide a similar behaviour by using the "Filter" property, as seen in the following picture:


The value you enter into this field, is used to multiply the alpha with on every new mipmap generation.
So, say if you had filter value 0.5, and a starting image of 64x64 pixels (and full opacity),
then the opacity of the 32x32 image would be 0.5,
that of the 16x16 would be 0.25,
that of the 8x8 would be 0.125,
that of the 4x4 ould be 0.0625
and so on....

This way, a detail texture becomes more transparent, the further the object is away, showing the base texture below it better, and if becomes more opaque the closer it gets.
(You could also use values above 1.0 in the filter field. In that case you get the opposite behaviour: the texture becomes less transparent the further away you get, and more transparent as you get closer. Exactly what you would use for creating a "Mirage" Effect )

This technique is what Andy calls "mipmapping" in his posts above (and now you know how to do it in PyPRP ), and is appearently called so in FPS map making. I have no real objection to keeping the term, but it might get confusing when you talk to plugin developers, so perhaps the term "detail texturing" would be more appropriate?

(Tech level: High)
To make the detail texture like I did in that tutorial:
I took the base image, loaded it up into the Gimp, and did an "Edge Detect" on it to get an image that is white where the texture changes most, and black where it changes the least.
Then used that result as a layer mask on the base image, so that the places where the texture changes most become mostly opaque, and where it changes the least it becomes transparent, showing the underlying texture.
Ofcourse, I did tweak the layer mask a bit using contrast/brightness adjustment to get the best result.

Aah, thank's Trylon - pure gold and explained so well, even I get it. :)

I had noticed how the detail texture takes over in immediate surroundings in the desert and have actually been annoyed with my inability to replicate that, ever since my first attempt at age-botching.

Seems it might be worth revisiting the tutorials - much have indeed changed since quite some time before the PyPRP fork...

Maybe there is even some way to manually supply the mipmap levels? :7