Hi,
I am a texture artist and 3D graphic artist by trade, and currently am contracted to produce 3rd party payware scenery for Microsoft Flight Simulator X.

Unreal is one of the games that really blew me away all those years ago and i have only just found the old disk after it had been gathering dust in the roof for the last 12 years.

Anyway, i just reinstalled it and thought about looking for some HD texture mods and came across your efforts. Which i have to say really improve the visual quality of the game without changing the mood, which is a great result for me as i love the original feel and atmosphere of the game.

I do notice however that there are a large number of default resolution textures still needing work. I read that you have not been in the best of health, and i would like to offer to help you finish these remaining textures.

All i need to know is what tools are required to unpack the native Unreal texture format and repack etc.

My time is limited as i have an ongoing contract for Flight sim scenery development, but i would be happy to help out here with textures when time allows......

(i posted this at www.unrealtexture.com but the forums there seem to be inactive)

Russ.

Oh nice. I also wonder why happend with DieHard, heard nothing from him for ages. I hope he is alright.

i think that oldunreal site is one of the last that they are active. Unreal 1 is dying...It's sad but  true.
But these guys are moving Milky Way for oldunreal forum activity reason.

[]KAOS[]Casey wrote on 08/26/10 at 17:53:06:



Yeah he just has some real life stuff going on. He'll be back with us again.

About HD skins, they are kept in UnrealShare and UnrealI packages, and they can't normally be changed without creating incompatibilities, and once changed they can only be undone by restoring a previous version of them. Hence they can't be updated without a mutator.

Like I've said, it will work, but it will break online compatibility as well as any changes done to it by things like the 227 patch.

Hi Russ,


I saw your post right away on my own forums, but illness prevented me from posting a reply. And to the others here, i im badly ill and its not going well with me at all. On top of that i lost my mother recently and that added to an already stressfull time. And i now lost both my parents in one and a half year time. I also need to point out that my illness is that bad that i cannot make any promises to help out others. Even the tinyest load of work freaks me out and i panic as i cannot comply to what is asked. So for the time being please keep all that in mind.



To get back on topic, i guess the most help that is needed, is for skins in all its forms, meaning player/monster skins, foliage skins, weapon skins etc. I pretty much asume i can create weapon skins, but player skins or any other organic stuff is hard for me.


Nowadays i have all textures supported for Extreme End since there is an unexpected demand for that which i had not anticipated. But its a good thing, it means everybody simply goes for quality But if you join the project that i ask you to do the same and work and asume the textures you make will be used for Extreme End releases.

For that you should read this (incomplete) article i wrote a while back:

How To Start

  Though incomplete, it does provide crucial information how sizes relate to eachother, and what bases you need to work from. Downside of course is, it eats tons and tons of harddrive space.

You also need the calculations from this page:

Extreme End Calculations

  A note to all that is, that the textures for Low End and High End are simply scalled down versions from the Extreme End textures.


In general i dont paint alot, meaning i rarelly create something from scratch. If i need a concrete base i am not gonna paint concrete in Photoshop, i go out and take photos from the concrete that exactly looks like the concrete i need. And i use that photo to paint highlights and shadows(dodge and burn tool) on top of that to create the actual texture(i also use a small range of Photoshop effect like shadow casting and emboss). Most textures are made from several bases, so in order to make the texture i need photos from each material the texture is made of.


On itself its a good method, because nature makes everything more random than you could paint it yourself. That is unless you are a very good painter and can accomplisch it in Photoshop. The downside is, i cant make a texture if i dont have all bases. And on occasion it actually took years to find certain bases. Which than is not really a problem because i always had hundreds and thousends of other textures i could work on in the meantime.


And to get back to the skins, there are several packages that do come as utx files like:
Female1Skins.utx
Female2Skins.utx
Male1Skins.utx
Male2Skins.utx
Male3Skins.utx
SkTrooperSkins.utx


And to stick to those for the moment, if needed i can provide the base textures for those in the form of actual leather, metal(s), fabric etc. Though i need to study them in order to see what they all are made of. And if needed i could also try if i can provide base textures from actual skin.


And since the skins are 256 x 256 pixels it means they all have to be produced in 4096 x 4096 pixels.



As for extracting the original textures, i used to use the UTPTool but than you have to edit each texturename because the program also adds the source in the texturename. So the best option is to use the UT editor to extract them oné by oné. And UT does give them the proper name as it is embedded in the package. I never tested it, but i asume 227 patch editor does the same. Vanilla UnrealEd wont give any name. So UT ed and 227Ed are the best options.


But......

You dont need to extract them at all, because i already have them extracted and ready for go. If you want i can upload them for you.


The shitt y thing is, and i talked about it briefly with Smirftsch a couple a weeks ago. We had a project in the past to deal with the UnrealShare textures. The project was abandened, but i did extract all textures and added them in a filetree containing the correct groupnames. And i never even throw anything away, but for some reason i cannot find the files back from the project.

And i can only asume they are there somewhere, but no clue where to look now. But if needed ill extract them again.
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I'm really looking forward to seeing what happens with this.

Quote:



I have about 10(well thats a fast count) entirelly different chronic conditions that interact with eachother. And in the long or short run they can be lifethreatening, and seeing how it went this year, i tried make preperations where i could in case it turns for the bad. For none of them theres any cure possible, but i do have medications, but they seemed to have stopped working, and theres no other medications available, which might mean it stops there. They are gonna do tons of examinations in the hospital but already told it might be difficult to help me.....


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No i am not gonna drop the project any time soon. Because of my health i didnt want to take any chances in case i die, so i renewed the site for another 5 years(2015) and made preperations to have the site handed over to an admin. I only need to match the domainname since that runs only till 2013 and i need to have it also claimed till at least 2015.


Also these projects(URP, UTRP, SGC) have become my lives work and its one of the things that keep me alive for the unknown limited time i may have. Its just a pitty i lack the money to throw the entire project(photos, original textures etc.) online. That would help other people that make textures like Creavion and Hourances or any other that makes textures for the Unreal series games.


But yeah, my illnesses makes it very hard to finish the stuff i am working on but at the same time its a very, very welcome distraction to work on them. Plus its cool to see the textures ingame as i am not just the one that makes them, but also a player that enjoys them. And it has happened too often that i never saw lots of textures ingame, and its cool if a server rotates to a map that uses the ones i never saw myself and have a good look at it , and getting killed while staring around 


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Lol, that needs a bit of explanation. I have been working for years to redo all the textures, and there are texture package that i hated to do(DecayedS being a good example) and others that i would love to do an die for, and those are:
Skaarj because of the awsome cool textures with millions of detail.
- Queen because of the biomechanical stuff inthere which would be a monster challenge to work on.
- NaliCast and Mine because of the awsome cool use of mixing metal with wood.
- Starship because of the crazy weirdo stuff they used.

Skaarj, Queen, Mine and NaliCast simply would break my heart to not do those. And i never worked on those too much because i am super picky and wanted to have the base textures simply perfect before i worked on those. At the moment i do have alot of bases for those but not all, and i am working on those. But for personal reasons i simply cannot give those out of my hands. Starship i am willing to give up if needed, but those other 4 prob will hurt me too much.


All other packages are fine with me. And the package that offers one of the biggest chalenges is probably Ancient. I never worked on that package, and when looking at that package there are a bunch of relative simple textures but also super detailed textures that are alot of work to accomplish. Effectivelly it might be one of the most difficult packages to work on while some parts are the oposite and plain simple.

Most packages do not have usable S3TC by Epic made examples, but Ancient does. It perfectly shows how some of the surfaces should look like and the use of color is crazy cool You have to get yourself lots of books from the Maja, Aztec, Inca and similar cultures and study them good.


Another package that needs to be redone completelly from almost scratch is SkyCity. I did almost the entire package but i mostly used the available Epic S3TC textures as base. And mainly the walls need an overhaul with actual good wall textures and not the fuzzy Epic stuff its now. Aside that, the package needs to be turned Extreme End. For the parts i made myself(good example are the grass/cobblestone textures), those are done or in progress to make them Extreme End already.


And as said Starship is available for update, and i do have most base textures but i am still debating myself if they really are quality enough.


As for CG textures, i know the site and i entirelly agree that it has tons of very interesting highly usable textures, but personally i abandoned the site long time ago. And that does have a reason. In the past i used a tiny amount of textures from that site, but decided to ditch those and redo the textures entiry from scratch with my own photos.


The main reason is that no matter what happens, no-one ever, ever, ever can put a claim or cause problems down the pipeline. The way it is now, the copyright of the current textures is by either Epic, Epic and me, or enterly by myself. And i never talked about this in public before, but as soon as patch 227 reaches a beta stage inwhere there is full support for RTNP than i am gonna contact GOG, Valve and Steam to have patch 227 and the S3TC textures included in their downloads for Unreal and UT.


And copyrightwise i simply can tell them that the packages either are a copyright from Epic for which they already own the rights, or the copyright is combined or 100000% mine. And that includes the sources(photos). If now thirdparty photos are used, than they might turn down the project because the textures are being sold together with their products being UnrealGold and UT G.O.T.Y. And the current situation is that they already own the rights to publish the packages and only need a writen concent for me that they are allowed to sell my textures(no money asked on my side)


A note, i didnt talk with Smirftsch about this yet, so for the moment i asume patch 227 is excluded in this story, but having the S3TC textures included in their download is still a good option. Heck they can even use it as argument to make new commercials and adds about it to sell additional copies. Third party photos might endanger that project...........


On top of that, and its a while ago i checked on it, but you can use them for whatever project but cannot publish them in texture packages, which is exactly what we are doing.


But to bypass that story i have a collection of 35000 photos that were only shot for Unreal and UT for the URP, UTRP and SGC project. And on a yearly base i take about 10000 additional photos, so next year this time the collection will be 45000 photos.


So what you can do is, take the textures from CG Texture and sent them to me, and either i sent the comparable ones in my collection i already have, or i try go look for it. Or of course if you got a decent 10 or 12 megapixel camera go out and try find the texture yourself And normally i process the textures directly to the 4096 x 4096 tilable format that is being used as base.


Than about creating the textures, theres alot to say about that as well. Its alot more difficult than most people think. I also make textures for my own projects like the SGC project. And making those textures is easy, you simply make the texture you want and if it looks cool, than it looks cool, so declare it finished.


This is not how that works by redoing textures. I often spent weeks and weeks staring at hundreds of textures to find out what bases they are made. And all to often base textures can be used in several packages. And in the one package it became metal and the other package it can be wood, or concrete. And that can consume weeks of thinking how to solve such issues. It means that such a base texture is difficult to produce as it needs to be metal, wood and concrete at the same time, and they need to be sound under all circumstances. Stuff like this simply doesnt happen when you make your own textures and its a complete different ballgame !!! This is reverse engineering toplevel.

And these are some examples where stuff is used as concrete while other textures its metal:

DDuct2_Large.jpg

HIPANELC_Shadow.jpg

And than you often have to look a million times to find out what material it has been made of to begin with. A good example are the crates in Deck16. Lots of people thought it was wood, but its not, its rusted metal. And in this example the blue colors in it gave it away, as that can be seen often in certain rusted metal(mostly chipped). And this is where it gets diffult again. There are hundreds of different types of rust, and only oné applies to that texture and NOT the other 999 types of rust you may find.

In this case i was lucky to find a rusted barrel containing asbestos debry illigally stored at a yard from a construction company. And i had to sweart not to report it to the police while the owner allowed me to take photos from it:

ToxBarrel

And aside the fact i am ill alot, finding the correct material is timeconsuming and can take years to find. But as i said before, mostly its not a problem as long as i can work on textures i already have the base for. But with the photo collection i have it takes less and less time to create the base as i can combine photos to create a new surface.


Than of course you have recreate the correct color and highlights, or shadows to gain the correct mood and atmosphere. Effectivelly the best test is to sample down the final texture to the size of the original texture and put the S3TC version aside the orignal. And if you dont see a real difference than it must be correct:







And the difficult part about getting the color correct. If you have a concrete wall its sometines made out of concrete and small pebbles and sand. To get the color right you start to change the overal color. But than some part might change color too much or the oné is ok, while the other parts start to get the wrong color. Because theres already so many different colors in it, its difficult to get a good overal color. Often i simply stand back a bunch of feet from the computer to compare from a distance.


Its all that you need to keep in mind.


So aside the 4 packages that i prefer to do myself, which package you wanna give a go?
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Well it helps if you pick a package as the files are rather large, because i upload the entire bunch including avaliable S3TC textures.

The Ancient package is about 467 Mb zipped up. If you want to ill upload those files.
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