Procedural textures and S3TC Merge

[qduaty]

Hi all,

I have two questions regarding Unreal retexturing:

1. What you think people about procedural textures? Some programs like FXGen (there are many more of such) could ease preparing of sets of textures, and increase their quality. I have made this way some textures for Starship.utx (it still remains poor), so look at this preview: [url]http://francetelecom.freehost.pl/files/Unreal-Starship.Trim.sh_wt.jpg[/url]. The source file has 2.1 kB (in this case) and textures can be scaled up to an arbitrary size.

2. What about such a new tool proposal: S3TC Merge. It might take two .utx files and concatenate them. This way, there would be no need to process existing .utx's with UT2003 editor and set all display sizes for S3TC back to their correct values.

[sopa_de_letras]

That's clever!

[DieHard SCWS]

Welcome to the forums qduaty.



I asume in this case that you mean by procedural textures, textures created with the FxGen tool that uses procedural calculations to create a new texture using a lower resolution original. Though its an interesting idea, and David_OSU handed me a similar tool a while back:

http://www.hiend3d.com/hq4x.html

And i have to agree, those tools can give an impressive quallity no doubt about that. But for the URProject i still stick to recreating them in Photoshop, preferably from scratch. This way you have 100% control over the result and even the very tinyest details. In addition to that, you end up with all parts split into layers, which allows it to use those for other similar textures. The benefits are endless.


But for mappers in general, yeah it could be a great tool. If you only have a small low quallity picture, than such a tool is a fair solution to transform it into a higher quality texture while maintaining or even adding detail.




As for your second question.

We dont use any editor, the textures are created in Photoshop(mostly) and saved in dds (DXT1) format. For creating the S3TC packages we use a (non)public mergetool, and that works quite simple, just double click on it, and voila, theres the S3TC package


The mergertool does all the necessary calculations, including DrawScale settings. And even better, the size is independent from the size i create the texture. This means i have carte blanche what size i add to the package, and thereby what quality.


Apart from above, the tool has another important feature, it maintains net compatibility, which means there can be made endless updates without causing mismatches. If correct you refer to the ucc make option. Again this is a very usefull and the only way mappers can create S3TC packages themselves(since the Mergertool is non public  :-/ )


But you can only create those packages once, after release they cannot be altered anyomore without causing conflicts. Its really a oné time make tool, oné time release tool. But never the less a cool tool for mappers.
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[qduaty]

I asume in this case that you mean by procedural textures, textures created with the FxGen tool that uses procedural calculations to create a new texture using a lower resolution original.

No, what an idea!! FxGen creates textures from scratch. I look at the original and try to express its details using elementary operators. The difference is: they act globally, not locally as a brush in Photoshop. For complicated shapes, vector graphics is used. A good texture has many operators, thus many layers; they are reusable so that single project can provide many textures.

This way, a brand new (definitely non-derivative!), high quality content is created, which has small file and is size-independent.

Of course, procedural approach applies only to 'flat' textures that have their beauty from nature or production process (i.e. rocks, metals, woods, masks, inscriptions etc.); skins cannot be done this way.

Regarding my previously mentioned Starship..Trim.sh_wt, this is the dds file (256x1024): [url]http://francetelecom.freehost.pl/files/Unreal-Starship.Trim.sh_wt.dds[/url]. Can be tested with any of ISV Kran levels.