Tree's and Plants

[Smirftsch]

using these new packages its like someone opened my eyes, the textures look clear, impressive, complete new world. But aside the new bright shining beauty the old plants and trees look more and more ugly. Is there anyone out there who could rework those ? Would love to have them improved.

[Hyper]

Same for the skybox mountains. (SkyBox.utx) They are so low-res and so stretched that it looks very ugly.

[DaveW]

I'm remaking the plants from Unreal for Battle For Na Pali - perhaps Hellscrag will let me put them in Unreal. They won't be super-excessive like the S3TC textures, but they'll (hopefully) look nicer.

[DieHard SCWS]

I doubt if Hellscrag has problem with that, but if you make them from scratch, why not make them in high resolution, so they can be full S3TC ?


Just start your work in 1024 x 1024 x 1024 DPI or even better 2028 x 2048 x 2048 DPI in true color.

Its all about size combined with true color....................
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[DaveW]

I'll try - but making them high resolution will be harder

[ahaigh01]

I’ve been playing around with remaking tree5 in unreal.   I’ve made a new skin (not finalized yet) and increased the geometry of the tree leaves in the mesh.  I’m just doing this for the learning experience at this point, but maybe it can get used in a larger effort.  Here are some test renders from Max and the new and old skins.  I haven’t gotten to the point of getting a new version back into unreal yet.  It will have to be chopped up and remapped, no doubt.  There is no masking on the leaves in the max renders right now, so you will see some blacked-out areas at the top of the tree trunk, but you can get the idea.

http://www.streamload.com/kkorker/unreal/tree5/newtree5max.jpg

http://www.streamload.com/kkorker/unreal/tree5/oldtree5max.jpg

http://www.streamload.com/kkorker/unreal/tree5/tree5new2048.jpg

http://www.streamload.com/kkorker/unreal/tree5/tree5orig1024.jpg

http://www.streamload.com/kkorker/unreal/tree5/tree5orig256.jpg

...and Diehard - you should have a PM from me.

[DieHard SCWS]

Yes i found your IM


As for your question, i have to think real hard how to proceed on that in the best possible way. I need a bit of time to go think it over, this is a way more complex question than it looks at first glance. Being the main problem in this: the textures in Unreal spread over various packages relate to eachother. Which would be the explanation in a nutshell  ::)


And this is something that raised before, i love to see more people working on the project, but its very complicated organisational wise A weird question, do you have a headset ?, so we could have a meeting on TeamSpeak. That for sure would make things a hell of alot easyer to deal with.




I did have a look at the textures(they will not all open btw), they look great , they may need some extra tweaking, never the less it looks too me they will fit Unreal just fine


However i did not have the time to give an extra responce on the posts above. Because there may be an adittional problem  :-/


The tool we use now does only convert utx packages, for the skins such a thing would not be a problem, since they use actual utx packages. For all the textures put on top of all the weapons, plants etc. They seem to come from either a utx package imbedded into the engine, or somewhere else................


I have no clue how they could be added, this by definition is something that goes on Kerilk's account. So for that part i need input from others that know tons more than me about this subject.



Btw, the Masking problem is not a problem, even from the pictures you already showed here, if i open them in photoshop i could easelly add a perfect Alpha channel on them. The higher the resolution the easyer such a thing can be added, even if its added by hand  


And yeah, prefeably any texture created, 2048 x 2048 would be the best option, even if is scaled down afterwards to a tiny texture.  And i know, the those sizes do give hardriveproblems at the end (and render time in your case), but still its the best way to proceed. 2048 should be a minimum.



Apart from all above, its very, very nice work
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[Hyper]

http://www.streamload.com/kkorker/newtree5max.jpg

That's a very sweet tree that you've got there!

[ahaigh01]

Thanks for your comments guys.

Diehard:  I’m not sure why you had trouble opening the images.  Maybe try again later – sometimes there is maintenance running on the server.


Yes, I can see how organizationally it is very complicated to have many people working on texture sets.  In the short term, for the s3tc project, if you want to just name a few textures that need to be done but aren’t going to create complications – I could take a stab at them and you can let me know what you think.  Let me know - I'd like to try a few at least and see how it goes.  Sorry I don’t have a headset right now for chatting but maybe could hook something up.

First of all, I see a plant + tree (or other models) upgrade project as a related, but separate project as the s3tc project.  I would love to see all the models and skins improved as well as the 33tc textures.  But by nature, I think they would have to be developed as separate projects.

Relating to upgrading model skins:

This is my understanding of how model skins work: unrealI.u and unrealshare.u in /system contain the meshes, skins and classes/scripts for all weapons, player models, pickups and decorations, etc.  To upgrade them, I believe one would have to rebuild these packages with the new content, like you do for the s3tc .utx files.  I don’t yet know how to do this or what kind of problems it would create in the game.  If replacing the original .u files with rebuilt ones is a compatibility no-no, maybe a mutator would be able to do this.  Kind of like Oldskool for UT where you can use checkboxes to select things you want to be swapped for a different versions of the objects - which could be contained in an additional .u file in this case.

 

[ahaigh01]

I deleted this info from my previous post because some of it turned out to be incorrect:

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I don’t know if it is possible to use a s3tc texture on a mesh – as far as I know it is not, but maybe I’m wrong.  A mesh can have up to 8, 256x256, 8 bit textures mapped to it, so this makes it a challenge to have very high res skins on a model.  They would probably never be as high res looking as s3tc textures, even if you used all 8 textures per model – no tiling is supported on models either.  But they can certainly be greatly improved.  Most, if not all, Unreal1 models use 1, 128x128, or 256x256 texture and are very low polygon – hence they are very low res looking.  I believe UT’s player models use 4 textures per model for example.  A tree trunk is particularly hard to get a high res skin on, because a tree towers over your head and when you walk up to the trunk you are seeing, at best, a 256x256 texture that is stretched from your feet to way above your head, with no tiling.  Maybe it would be possible to split the trunk up so it uses like 4 textures.  But this might leave visible seams – I don’t know for sure.
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Well I just was doing some exploring and found that a lot of what I wrote above is wrong.

But sometimes it’s great to be wrong!

Some of you guys probably know all this stuff but it was new to me:

I downloaded a playerskin that was 512x512 so I started thinking – hmm – the Epic documentation says skins should be only be 256x256 although you can have up to 9 of them on a mesh.  What gives?  Well the skin worked just fine on the player model, so I tried swapping a new one on to it at that was 1024x1024 with some very high res details – It worked fine too.  Cool!  These are still 8 bit pcx by the way.  So then I tried one that was rgb color just for the hell of it, but of course that crash ued1 when I tried to import it .  This is great news to me, because plants and trees or other decorations can be easily given a new higher res skin without having to chop up the skin into 256x256 pieces as I though was the case before.  

Also some other exploring yielded this info – again many of you may already know all this stuff.

This pertains to 8 bit pcx or bmp textures and skins – not s3tc

In unreal1 I have 4 renderers working In UGold with OMP-UGOLD-V0.2 installed.


OpenGl Drv2.1.0.7

Software rendering

Glide with dgVoodoo1.40 wrapper

Direct 3d

Under Glide and Direct3d any textures higher than 256x256 are rendered in-game down to 256x256 resolution.  I knew about this under glide but figured direct3d wouldn' have this limitation.

In Opengl and software rendering textures higher than 256x256 are seen as they should be.

The UT99 playerskins are in fact split up into 4 256x256 skins, but I’m sure this was done to accommodate for the Glide and Direct3d limitation. Back in '98 and '99 it was essentially pointless to use textures higher than 256x256, let alone the performance hit it would cause. But today using larger sized 8 bit textures on meshes is probably ok to do performance wise, and they look great under opengl.

So my next question is – Can s3tc textures be used on meshes?  Anyone know the answer to this?

[DieHard SCWS]

The limitation you mentioned in your original post were already mentioned by other people, one being Turboman, so in that respect you are not the only one telling that.


This is one of those threads:

http://www.oldunreal.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1118245828


Backthan i already was wondering if that all was correct, because the S3TC textures are forced in another way onto the surface. The DrawScale is different in the S3TC textures. I always wanted to test that, but never had the time to do so. Because of your post yesterday, i was thinking , heck ill make a bit of time so we at least know if this now yes or no is possible.


Which means lol, that i basically did the same test yesterday as you did, and yes i was able to add a 1024 x 1024 S3TC texture.





Here are the screenshots i took:

The S3TC texture i used as test: 1024 x 1024 24 bit RGB
http://www.celticwarriors.net/Media/S3TC/SkinTestTexture01.jpg


The result overview:
http://www.celticwarriors.net/Media/S3TC/S3TCSkinTest01.jpg

The result closeby:
http://www.celticwarriors.net/Media/S3TC/S3TCSkinTest02.jpg


So at least this indeed works on skins, if this also aplies to weapons. plants i dunno.


But both experiments proove that Unreal is capable of more things than has been said before, both for normal and S3TC textures







Than your further testing, a couple a months ago i found out basically the same and made another thread about that, because i needed info badly.

This is the link to that thread:
http://www.oldunreal.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1139172605/0


I am very happy you did this independently from me , because uptill now i never had any conformation on this from someone else.


The only extra thing i did found out. If a player is using [glow=yellow,2,300]normal textures [/glow]and uses the OpenGL renderer and set S3TC to true, than this effects the limitation on OpenGL. In that case OpenGL alowes textures above 256 x 256 pixels just as Software rendering does  ;)


I think its pretty cool you accidentelly did the same tests, and came to the same conclusions, thereby confirming my work, and vice versa, mine colaborates your conclusions





Actually there does poppup a question to me, how good are you in making skins, if you can, or if your willing,  than theres work for you to be done


For short than the only demands are follow:
Recreate all playerskins in Unreal excact as they are as far as detail and coloration/apearence, except making it alot more detailed than they are now. And add on microlevel alot of detailled goodies to it, and the metal used on the skins, make them actual shiny metal


Aside of that, you could make extra skin packages, like lizzard skins or whatever else. Because of the clientsided function, S3TC players could pick other textures packs to change there looks in the game.


Like in my examples above, that package is still in my Unreal, so all Female1 players in Unreal apear to me like that. The variations are endless.






There is one limitation on that however !! Which in effect is the same reason the mergertool was never made, and never will be made public.

All skins are not alowed to be any less or brighter in apearence than the originals, since this could give S3TC players an advantage over normal texture players, that would be a cheat ! So thats a no go !

Color/brighness/apearence and colordepth must be [glow=yellow,2,300]exact[/glow] as the original textures.






The mergertool btw does prevent online conflicts. And this in short works as follow. The tool needs the original package as reference and base, it basically makes an exact copy so all data is kept intact, it only switches the normal textures for the S3TC textures. In effect the new file is exactly the same file, but not Thereby keeping netcompatabillity intact  8-)


Which is a nice find from Kerilk who created the tool
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[BOZO]

Just as another confirmation: I successfully replaced the skin texture on the Asbestos Suit with a higher resolution one without having to mess with DrawScale at all.

I think the UV coords as they relate to texture mapping are stored internally as a decimal fraction ranging from 0 to 1. Therefore when upping (or dropping) the size of the texture used it will display properly as long as you maintain the same scaling when you go upwards. Instead of having to remake every mesh from scratch, just use an older texture as a template and you should be able to paint your new updated texture on top for anything out there.

I'm thinking generally that a mutator running a texture replacement scheme at runtime may be the way to go for the core packages. I will see about creating a beta version to test this idea.

[ahaigh01]

Diehard: Thanks for for work with the s3tc skin on the playermodel. Very cool indeed! Do you know how to do masked textures in s3tc? If that can be done it will virtually eliminate the jaggies on leaves and hanging vines, etc. I will need figure out that function for the plants and trees or they will have to be 8 bit masked textures.

About doing new skins, sure I would like to help as much as I can. I think I could tackle some of the simpler items with no problem at this point, and they would look good. I was thinking about doing a skin for the Nali-Seed Doing a player or monster skin is something I've never tried yet, so I will have to see how good I can get. I've always thought the skins in unreal were kind of cheesy looking, so they need to be redone right and look great.

As far as the meshes go, I think that the static ones, decorations, can be easily improved. Many of them are probably fine the way they are and would just benefit from a new skin. I can help with increasing the detail on the ones that are kinda bad. I've done a fair amount of modeling in Max. Anything that's animated I wouldn't want to touch though. I'm not an animater at all, and also I suspect that trying to tamper with the animated meshes would be a huge undertaking.

I worked on another plant. Made a new skin and increased the geometry of the leaves so the are smoother. Here are some pics.

http://www.streamload.com/kkorker/unreal/plant5/newplant5render.jpg

http://www.streamload.com/kkorker/unreal/plant5/oldplant5render.jpg

BOZO: The mutator thing sounds great!

[Smirftsch]

great work can't await to see these things all "in action" - is anyone collecting all this work somewhere ? Maybe i should make some kind of upload area for the people to work with...

For the implementation you can simply send me (or lemme download somewhere) the work you did and i can build it easily into 227. For the mutator- good question, i'm not sure if a clean implementation directly wouldnt be the better idea, because although the idea sounds logical its the question if to much additional things at the moment may mess up something or could cause unforseen problems...

[DieHard SCWS]

To ahaigh:


Thats not really what i ment. let me elaborate.


Your and my test shows we can upgrade all Skins that have a seperate utx file, those are:



Default Unreal Skins:

Female1Skins.utx
Female2Skins.utx
Male1Skins.utx
Male2Skins.utx
Male3Skins.utx
SkTrooperSkins.utx


UTeam Skins:
UTeamSkins.utx


Or for that matter any other homemade skin like:
Pipskins
bigkahuna
infskins
Male1NinjaSkin
NaliPlayerFull100

Well the homemade list is endless lol, well....more less than



If you create a highresolution (RGB 24 bit) version for those, than they can be converted to S3TC in a blink of an eye........................


Which means any skin that has an actual utx package acompanied with, those can be upgrade to S3TC, aside the drawing itself we do have the technology to convert them.







All other things like plants, weapons, skins, that seems to be inbedded in the mesh itself or in the Unreal core itself, those we cannot add to the game (yet). Its up to you, to still go create them all, even without knowing if it ever can be added to Unreal. This however happened to me too The first 4 months in the project i worked my a s s off creating textures not knowing if we ever found a way, which we did at the end


Also, as note to above, if you still make those(original Unreal S3TC versions), you could make variations on the original Unreal textures, those could be added to new meshes with seperate utx files and could be released as new Editor goodies Basically like all the extra texturepackages i made like:

S3_UnrealCD.utx
S3_XmasWrap.utx
XmasTex2004.utx

And the new SG1 textures i am working very hard on at the moment.

Which than would mean, we already could release NEW variations, while the originals have to wait till we found a solution to add them without online conflicts.



To BOZO, ahaigh, Smirftsch :


I admit my knowledge there is pretty basic.

But if its done by a mutator, than i asume this will mean that you can only use it on servers that do have the mutator running, i am not sure if i like that.


At this point you can enter any server and there no problem or conflict, nor for normal players, nor for S3TC players, its all clientsided, either your normal  ::) or S3TCer.


Having it done by a mutator, than you all of a sudden have a handicap, meaning your unable to enter any server.


As said i am an idiot as far as written above, so correct me if i am wrong here............
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[DieHard SCWS]

Do you know how to do masked textures in s3tc?

Yes its very simple, its done by using an Alpha channel, i will later today edit one of your textures and add an Alpha blending to it, which you can download and have a look at how it works.

At this moment it seems we can only use 1 bit Alpha blending for Unreal, but that is sufficient for 99.99 % of the Unreal Masked textures So that limit does not pose any inmedate problem.
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[ahaigh01]

i will later today edit one of your textures and add an Alpha blending to it, which you can download and have a look at how it works.

Great, Thanks

If you create a highresolution (RGB 24 bit) version for those, than they can be converted to S3TC in a blink of an eye........................


Which means any skin that has an actual utx package acompanied with, those can be upgrade to S3TC, aside the drawing itself we do have the technology to convert them.

So if I understand you correctly - just convert all the textures in those packages to rgb 24 bit, 2048x2048 (BMP?), and worry about redrawing them later?  That should be no problem.

I don't have the Uteamskin.utx and I don't see it on the skins page here.

[DieHard SCWS]

Here is the Masked version of one of your textures:

[url=http://www.celticwarriors.net/S3TC/Newtree5maxAlphaChannel.zip][glow=yellow,2,300]Newtree5maxAlphaChannel.zip[/glow][/url]


Its a PSD file.

The result is not super because the file i used was an jpg comressed file which is more difficult because of the coloraboration that come with the compression.


Basically how it work is like this:

- Select all black parts in the image, and make sure it is as exact as possible.
- Invert the selection.
- Go to Select---> Save Selection and choose: New Channel

Than it will automatically create a new channel named: Aplha 1

If you now look in the channel menu you will see there a small thumbnail where the tree shows white surrounded by black.


After adding the texture to Unreal with the mergertool, Unreal (for than matter any other game) asumes that the Alpha channel is the Masked part.

If you want to see the selection:
- Go to Select---> Load Selection and choose: Alpha Channel.


You may also want to read these pages:

http://www.celticwarriors.net/website/S3TC/Procedures/Procedures.htm


You also will find a link there for DDS in and export.

So if I understand you correctly - just convert all the textures in those packages to rgb 24 bit, 2048x2048 (BMP?), and worry about redrawing them later?  That should be no problem.

No i am asking you if you actually could draw them, either in Photoshop and/or 3DMax. In RGB, size 2048 x 2048 24 bit

You could of course start with a simple homemade utx package. But that is up too you, if you think such a thing is too complicated i can see if i could find some other texture packages. And as said you still could go work out all the plants and other stuff. The only thing i am saying is, if your up to make the skins, than the final result from you can inmediatelly added to S3TC skin packages.




UTeamSkins are part of the servermod UTeamFix (all later versions)

Here is that link: [url=http://www.celticwarriors.net/Downloads/Skins/UTeamSkins.zip]UTeamSkins.zip[/url]

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[ahaigh01]

Diehard,

Thanks for the psd file.  I've been doing some playing with the playerskins and have found some techniques that yield very good results.  However I'm having a problem taking screenshots with F9.  It works when I'm in glide rendering but in opengl I only get a black .bmp.  Also, what method did you use to take those screenshots of the s3tc skin on your player?  I built a little room with one wall as a mirror to look at my test skins in-game, but this is a lousy way, because I can't get very good angles, or the back etc.  I suppose I could run a server with my test-skin player and then enter from another computer to take screenshots of my guy just standing there- there's got to be a better way than that

[DieHard SCWS]

The specific screenshot mentioned was taken online in the Celtic Warriors server. I asked BringIt to pose for the camera


As for the darkness,  for viewing purposes on the net i always brighten the picture so its good vissible, mine are black too, if i didnt do that.




And yeah sometimes i login my own server myself twice, and take screens from myself.




Which i did today to get this screenshot
[url=http://www.celticwarriors.net/SGC/Model06.jpg][glow=yellow,2,300]Model06[/glow][/url]
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[ahaigh01]

My opengl screenshots are just plain black.  Brightening them doesn't help.  I must have some setting wrong.  

[DieHard SCWS]

Maybe reinstall  :-/ ...............


Aside from that its indeed difficult to see if a skin looks ok, if i were you i would make a small room with several mirrors so you can see your back too. Also add a rifle to that map, so you can zoom in !


Than theres another option to have a fast look, simply go into your player setup, and choose the specific skin, now you can see it from all sides since the player is spinning in the playersetup.




Than there is a complete different way, which was the initial reason i wanted you to try the skins.

You can make them in Photoshop, but you could also load the playermesh into 3DMax and paint the skin while its wrapped around the actual mesh(and be able to look at it from all sides all the time). At least its my understanding, thats the way most advanced people do it.


After having created in 3DMax you still can edit some details in Photoshop.

but you could also load the playermesh into 3DMax and paint the skin while its wrapped around the actual mesh

You could also have the original skin in place, and start sharping that one up, bumpmapping the parts that needs to be lifted in height, make the metal actual shiny metal, while adding much and much more tiny detail.


But do not ask me how that is done, i have no clue about 3D programms like that

[ahaigh01]

Thanks.  Some good tips.  I never thought of the rifle zoom-in

As for the opengl screenshots, I think I found the cause.  I’ll give the boring details in case it is a bug in unreal’s new opengl renderer – maybe it can be fixed.  It only seems to affect the screen resolution of 1400x900, which is my laptop’s native resolution (hp pavilion laptop with ati radeon x600 video).  1024x768 and others seem to work fine.

I can get good screenshots by running a server with the test player just standing there, and then joining from another pc to take the shots.

Player skins:

Diehard wrote:

You can make them in Photoshop, but you could also load the playermesh into 3DMax and paint the skin while its wrapped around the actual mesh(and be able to look at it from all sides all the time). At least its my understanding, thats the way most advanced people do it.

Unfortunately I have been unable to extract the meshes for the player models with wotgrealexporter or utpt.  Most other meshes for decorations and pickups export fine, but it seems the ones that have lots of animation won’t.  I have been searching around to see if someone has ever been able to do this successfully, but haven’t found them already exported.  It would be helpful to have the player models in Max but it’s not a real big deal.  I can still work on the skins and test.

Trees:


I’m going to try to get all of my trees and plants skins done within the next few weeks.  Work is progressing well on them.  Since the skins are embedded in in unrealshare.u, it’s not as easy to get them in-game as it with a player model that pulls its texture from male1skins.utx for example.

Quote from BOZO’s “help with an experiment” thread
BOZO Wrote:

I have been experimenting with how to go about replacing the textures without having to reimport the meshes.  The problem is that most of the mesh textures are embedded within the UnrealShare.u and UnrealI.u files and it would be problematic to create a S3TC version of these core files.

A test I did:

I reimported the texture used for the Kevlar suit into the UnrealShare.u package at a higher resolution and it showed up on the model itself just fine. Of course I would not want to do this normally since we do not want to modify the UnrealShare.u or UnrealI.u files themselves. (I discarded my changes) This shows that using higher resolution textures is relatively easy to do though.

The next thing I am going to figure out is how to reimport new textures into the .u packages like BOZO did.  Then I can at least see the tree and plant textures in-game for my own testing.  (BOZO – please post any words of wisdom if you’re reading .  Another option would be for me to build new .u packages containing tree meshes and tex so I can add them to maps and look at them without disturbing the original .u packages.  Of course the new trees would not show up in an existing map – you would have to add them and resave the map to see them.

[DieHard SCWS]

Yeah, the sniper is ingame my most used tool to check on the textures i make, thats why i demanded that theres a sniper at the spawnpoint in DmSGC i am working on.


About adding them in High res; that is just fine, but only for testing, at the end, the final version MUST have the DDS textures somehow. If not, than the game will lag, which is the cool part of S3TC. Yes high res, nope no lag.


As for the not exporting meshes, i know theres alot of people doing it, i could ask around, but don't expect any answer soon there.
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[ahaigh01]

I've always hated the way trees 1-4 looked, so I wasn't looking forward to tackling these skins.  But I think what I've come up with looks pretty good after all.  Here is a test render of tree 2:


http://www.streamload.com/kkorker/unreal/tree2/newtree2.jpg

One of the worst parts of the old skins is where the branches fork from the trunk - you can see the seam very clearly because the textures just don't match up very well.  The new tree bark blends well at the fork now.  You can barely see the seam!

Overall the trees and plants skins are coming along well.  I've gotten most of the hard work done, so the skins should be ready pretty soon.