s3tc skins

[uarchitect]

just wondering, its nice making s3tc textures and all (although slapping a highdetail texture on top isnt my idea of a quality texture)

but why not do some of the skins too like creatures, weapons etc

it would be somewhat strange to be wandering around a highly detailed environment and still seing a blurry 128 or 256 res texture on the weapon, s3tc works on meshes too

[Turboman.]

afaik high resolution textures on models dont have that much of an effect since the model LOD seems to blur textures alot to make the higher resolutions a slight waste.

a better idea would be to remodel all the models with multiple skins and s3tc textures so you can have even better detail with less quality loss, you could have seperate 1024x1024 skins for each arm, leg, head, torso, and even tail (can go up to

its better to focus first on patching up the missing textures in the environment before heading to the actual creatures and models like suggested in another thread.

although if we start working on the creatures i probably have a few things to contribute, a long time ago when i was still part of the legend of vandora team i did some extremely high poly versions of the female1 and male3 player character, the brute, skaarj and pupae (average 3000 poly's) which are probably still somewhere on my hd, unfortunately i never got to animate or texture them

[DieHard SCWS]

Making S3TC skins was one of the things i wanted to go do these days, but my problem was that i need to make a good and decent template for all the skins first. If it wasn't for that i would have started it already.

That template should also be made available for public use, so that if people want to go create their own skins, it always will be in S3TC size.


But what Turboman wrote above i didn't know, however, the template i will go make will cover that. In effect it will be a layered PSD file inwhere each layer is a bodypart, like an arm, leg, head or whatever is all inthere needed. So the template would still cover the problem mentioned above and fill in the solution


But of course Turboman uses 3dMax, which has definatelly a benefit over Photoshop that you can also import the meshes itself and draw new skins over it For those people the template is useless ......... But as said they will have a greater tool already for making them

its better to focus first on patching up the missing textures in the environment before heading to the actual creatures and models like suggested in another thread.

And theoretically i agreed with that lol, the only thing that makes my fingers itching is, that each package only helds like 6 to 9 textures, which in effect makes it fairly easelly to complete them, also if you made one skin from a certain package than you can re-use it at least 3 times to make the other three teamplayerskins...........it does make my hands very, very itchy...................
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[uarchitect]

ive always played on -1 lod, alot of other people do too, but hires skins show up perfectly fine on meshes

(texture lod in theory works the same on meshes and bsp,afaik so if texture lod prevents them from looking good on meshes, it would do so on bsp aswell )

in which case, why make s3tc textures at all right?

heheh

[BOZO]

You know that on mesh import you can set the LOD collapse speed through the various settings following the #exec commands....you could set it so no detail collapse ever occurs or delay it til a greater distance away occurs.

Of course this will slow the level rendering down a bit.

For existing meshes, you might be out of luck. I don't recall if there is a flag you can set to ignore LOD collapse during runtime...