Re-learning Age Building

[Justintime9]

Hey guys, as some of you know I'm currently attempting to work on a new version of my age Tsoidahl Prad. Working out all the bugs and just polishing it up in general. However, it's actually been a couple years since I've actually done anything with blender, so I'm sort of rusty. So this thread will basically be for questions regarding small things I've forgotten that would probably take me hours to re-learn by trial and error. First of all, where are the old age-creation tutorials located?

My first question is in regard to transparent textures. I have a quite a few in Tsoidahl Prad (decals and such). And for all of them, their transparency is visible in the 3D view. However, now that I've tried adding a new transparent texture, it's not showing up in the 3D view, and I'm not sure if it'll show up transparent after exporting.

Here's how it SHOULD look in the 3D view:



And here's how it looks when I add a new transparent texture:



So I'm assuming there's some button I'm not pushing or something, but I can't for the life of me find it.

[dendwaler]

For you the correct page to start is:

http://www.guildofwriters.org/wiki/Special:AllPages

Don't forget to set some lightemitting . 0.5 will do.
When you don't it will stay black in the 3d window.

[Justintime9]

Awesome, thanks for the link. Increasing the lightemiting didn't do anything though. (I'm assuming you mean the slider under shaders called "Emit.")

[tachzusamm]

Justin, just to mention this: Fiddling with the buttons until you see what you have in mind in your Blender viewport windows does NOT ensure that you will get this in URU Plasma finally as well.
These are (unfortunatelly) two different things. To really be sure what it will export, you will have to do just this: Export the Age (or part of it, maybe a small test-Age for such experiments), and look how it behaves in URU.

Normally these are the prerequisites which will lead to a transparent texture:
1. Make sure your image *has* an alpha channel. JPGs do not. PNGs can.
2. Check "UseAlpha" under Shading (F5), Texture buttons (F6).
3. Check "Shadeless" under Shading (F5), Material buttons.
4. In Edit Mode, under Editing (F9), Texture Face, check Alpha.

What I assume you did previously to see your texture transparent in the Blender viewport as well, is this:
a) Under Shading (F5), Material buttons, you've checked ZTransp
b) and you've set the Alpha (the "A" field besides RGB, HSV, DYN) in Material Menu to 0.000
BUT, I don't recomment to do this for leaves and such, because ZTransp does not really export well in this case.
Better DO NOT check ZTransp for leaves or other overlapping objects with transparent borders. You might use PassIndex for this though, and PreMul.

I repeat: Do not rely on what you see in Blender.

By the way, denDwaler meant the Amb slider, not Emit.

This might be of interest as well:
http://www.guildofwriters.org/wiki/Prop ... _and_grass
http://www.guildofwriters.org/wiki/PyPRP

[Justintime9]

Ah, there we go. My problem is I forgot that the buttons are different in Edit mode. And I'm aware it's not always reliable to rely on what you see in Blender, but it sure help visualizing what it'll look like.

[Justintime9]

Ok, next question. I realized just now that all this time when I've done lightmaps, there have been no shadows. So I enabled it for some lamps, and checked out some renders of how it *should* look lightmapped. It looks awesome! The only problem is, the shadows look absolutely horrendous when lightmapped. So is there a way to render good shadows in lightmaps?

As a side note, I realized that ALL THIS TIME the blue lamps in the office were not having ANY effect on the rest of the room's lighting. The lamps themselves were blocking the light. So if I put the lamps on another layer, the blue lamps look awesome. So that's a bit of a breakthrough.

[tachzusamm]

What do you mean with horrendous? Are the edges too sharp, does the shadow look to flurry, or too blurred, or bad contrast?
A screenshot would help.

In general, don't make the lightmap image too small. In Relativity, I used lightmaps of sizes up to 2048x2048, depending on the object. Large planes to walk on just need big images. Don't be afaid of large images. 1024x1024, often used in Relativity, is not a problem at all, unless you insert hundreds of images. Plasma can handle them better than generally stated. Of course, small objects (a chair, table, vase) do not need such big images. 512x512 or smaller should be enough for them.

I would recommend to download the Relativity Blender files and have a look at the Lightmap Baking text which I wrote to document the project. It explains how I did it. You can find it in the Blend file.

[Justintime9]

Hmm. I guess that makes sense. I've been making pretty small lightmap textures, so perhaps that's the problem. Here's how the shadows look for me:



I was thinking too, do lightmaps have anything to do with the object's face count? I know in vertex paint, the more faces, the easier it is to paint...

[Sirius]

Tach's explanation covers it very well, but in case you wonder about shadows antialiasing and such...
Dendwaler and Calena helped me figure out a few errors I was making when baking maps: http://forum.guildofwriters.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=6088.

[tachzusamm]

The thread Sirius posted sums valuable information very well.

As I final note, I would recommend to set up two sets of lamps; one set for lightmap baking, another set for lighting the avatar in URU.
This is useful because sometimes the lamp used for baking have to be tweaked in a way URU does not like.
Sounds like more work, but finally makes your life lot easier, because you can forget them once it is setup correctly and you don't have to care about which lamp to disable again when exporting, or to re-enable when baking.

For lamps, I normally set up them this way:
1. I create lamps for lighting my avatar and set rendering OFF for them (the image icon in the outliner) - this way they are only exported to URU but are not used for lighmap baking
2. I create additional lamps for lightmap-baking and add a property "String, page_num, 12345" to them - this way they get not exported to URU, but are used for baking.
You can find examples of this in Relativity as well.

I was thinking too, do lightmaps have anything to do with the object's face count?

No.
But you can say: The bigger the lightmap image, the easier it is to render (or paint) a good lightmap.