Objects with a flat gray surface?

If you feel like you're up to the challenge of building your own Ages in Blender or 3ds Max, this is the place for you!
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dendwaler
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Re: Objects with a flat gray surface?

Post by dendwaler »

Hmm, i thought it was only the color depth , not the detail like in your text example.
I used it so often, but could not see any difference.
If i use only png or tga , wont it result in a bigger prp file , because the source is bigger?
If not, then i have no reason to use jpg.
I used a small jpg because the PyPrp was not able to export the age because of memory issues .
More memory was no option because of the 32 bit of blender 2.49

Since Sirius made the export per page function, this is not longer a problem.
So i can change it back to a lossless format at any time.
Those wonderfull Worlds are called " Ages" , because that is what it takes to build one.



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matthornb
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Re: Objects with a flat gray surface?

Post by matthornb »

This is the error I was ending up with that caused the compile to stop in its tracks:

ImportError: The _imaging C module is not installed

PNGs and JPGs wouldn't compile for me. They resulted in the above error.
The only image files that would work, were uncompressed TGAs, with mipmapping turned off.

Anyway, I've said some clueless things in this thread but despite that, thankfully, I've solved the problem on my own.

The key was to swap out _imaging.pyd in the PIL install, with a slightly newer version, while leaving the rest of the files as-is.

Now the compile is working successfully with PNGs and that means the total filesize of the texture assets has decreased to about 1/6th what it was before.
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Karkadann
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Re: Objects with a flat gray surface?

Post by Karkadann »

clueless comments, here?? ..........hmm at least im not alone

any way a good problems solving strategy I like to use when things get to weird is something written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for one of his fictional character

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matthornb
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Re: Objects with a flat gray surface?

Post by matthornb »

I've switched out all the textures with PNGs and set all the textures to compress in DXT, and I'm compiling the age right now.

If this export works I should have a better-looking version of Sevkor, but I need to clean up the collision model still, because it's very rough and doesn't quite fit the age yet.
There are objects you can walk through and walls the avatar can see through, and that kind of ruins the believability of the world.

I will also be messing some more with the texture maps and trying to get an optimal balance between detail and filesize.

Nonetheless, this is all very promising.
Tsar Hoikas
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Re: Objects with a flat gray surface?

Post by Tsar Hoikas »

dendwaler wrote:Hmm, i thought it was only the color depth , not the detail like in your text example
Color depth (the number of bits per pixel) is constant in JPEG compression. Image detail is a function of the color values, which become increasingly trashed (as in my example). It's not such a big deal if you're looking at the entire texture, but as you approach the object, it starts looking nasty.
dendwaler wrote:If i use only png or tga , wont it result in a bigger prp file , because the source is bigger?
No. PyPRP internally decompresses all images to bitmaps and recompresses them one by one. The size of bitmaps is a function of its dimensions (specifically, width x height x 4). If you decompress a 0% jpeg and a PNG to a bitmap, they will have the same file size. The latter will look infinitely better than the former, however.
dendwaler wrote: used a small jpg because the PyPrp was not able to export the age because of memory issues .
This sounds like you're using way too much geometry in your ages. The plugin isn't the most memory efficient (or fast) thing in the world, but it really shouldn't need more than 32-bits of address space.
matthornb wrote:ImportError: The _imaging C module is not installed
So PIL wasn't installed correctly :| You should uninstall it and make sure you've installed the latest version. It's not good to mix-and-match components.
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