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ratty redemption 
"understood..."
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Posted on: Sep. 04 2007,04:39 |
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please note this latest blender project of mine is still work in progress.
here's a shot of my low poly base mesh in blender.
this is a closeup of the mesh showing wireframe overlay.
this shows that blender's procedural cloud textures and displace modifiers can add in smaller (high frequency) detail to a low poly mesh.
notes: instead of rendering the normal map in blender, I'm now exporting the model to .ase using goofos's script. then loading the .ase into d3's built in renderbumpflat tool, as its normal maps appear to be higher quality. although blender renders them a lot quicker then d3, so could still be used for previewing.
the model needed to be rotated in blender so it faces the -y axis for renderbumpflat to work.
here's the resulting normal map so far. the grey areas are where there were large gaps in the model. eventually they will be filled in.
I'm very pleased with the tiling so far. as shown in this next test shot.
here's the first of the in game shots, using my previous test cave model and map. I've also fired off some flares from my d3 mod to show the lighting better.
notes: how the corresponding grey areas of the normal map texture are now black in game. this seems to be because those areas in d3 don't react when light hits them.
this is the same shot but with wireframe overlay and shows the low poly cave model, which it self is still wip as I intend to follow some advise of kat's to improve that model when I find time.
this shot is similar again but with my d3 greyscale height map texture, now mixed with the normal map via d3's material shaders.
notes: how the black areas have now been replaced with the height map. also the edges around where the base model had gaps still have darker shadows in game than the finished model will have.
here's a shot of my rock diffuse and specular textures mixed with the local (normal) map. unfortunately the uvw seem on the right side of the shot is very obvious now, but I'm not aware of a way to cover those up in the d3 engine.
here's a wireframe overlay shot of the above.
these last two shots are close ups of the rock. unfortunately in the second one, the players flash light is showing more of the lighting issue of the creases between the rock cracks, some thing I've been trying to fix but so far without any luck.
 
if anyone has any suggestions on how I can improve any of the above I would like to hear.
I know these results aren't perfect. also this base mesh took me a long time to build, although some of that included learning to use renderbumpflat and a lot of in game testing.
to be honest, I'm not sure that modeling base meshes for normal maps is recommended, especially considering how good results kat and donkey have recently been getting with crazybump's bitmap to normal map process.
Edited by ratty redemption on Sep. 06 2007,15:13
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| Post Number: 2
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kat
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Posted on: Sep. 04 2007,06:23 |
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That's some nice work there, and generally speaking yes, same problems I found.. it took far too long to do the simplest of things regardless as to the quality of the output... in fact I'd go as far as to say that with CrazyBump I can get results that are just as good. The *only* downside is anti-aliasing on corners, rendered 3D objects has is, 2D tends not to (although again CB doesn't have any noticeable problems from what I've seen so far).
The one 'problem' you have atm with what you've shown here is that it looks embossed.. not in a bad way, but in the way the depth of the stone work is all the same. What you need to do is work on ways to make the 'depth' change relative to both the top surface and how far down the edges go. When I was doing my brick walls, for example, I used to tilt and turn some of the stones to make the top surface uneven. then I'd use a separate plane underneath everything to act of the mortar; this could be flat or more often than not it was moulded to form some basic shapes and undulations. Combining the two works well.
Else... you leave the mortar out and render the normal map as a mask and then work the mortar into the image as a separate file. Either way tends to produce decent results (not that 'tone def' gamers would notice the finaries anyway ;) )
Very good work so far Ratty, very good.
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| Post Number: 3
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ratty redemption
"understood..."
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Posts: 1351
Joined: Sep. 2006
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Posted on: Sep. 04 2007,06:45 |
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thanks a lot kat, and I'll try your suggestions 
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| Post Number: 4
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carnage
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Posts: 435
Joined: Apr. 2007
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Posted on: Sep. 04 2007,16:05 |
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hats off ratty thats some nice work
the main imo that you could improve on is adding some variance to the height of each piece of rock to make it appear more uneven and less smooth
compared to the previous rock texture you were using it is a lot more interesting and is more believable as rock
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| Post Number: 5
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Red*Uk
Group: Member
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Posted on: Sep. 04 2007,17:31 |
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Looks great to me
I gotta take a break from mapping and get into this content creation lark, oh and also learn blender, oh and coding, damm i wish i had more time 
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Ruiner:
http://www.theruiner.com
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| Post Number: 6
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ratty redemption
"understood..."
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Posted on: Sep. 04 2007,23:37 |
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thanks a lot guys
carnage, thats what I'm working on next, as well as filling in the last of the rock pieces. I'll hopefully have some more shots to post over the next few days if all goes well.
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| Post Number: 7
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carnage
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Joined: Apr. 2007
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Posted on: Sep. 05 2007,05:17 |
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cool will be something to look forward to. I am right in thinking that the base model is hand made and not generated though cloud textures. When I saw that I got some ideas of how to create the basic rock shapes from cloud textures that im experimenting with now
also it would be nice to see some more in game shots with the texture shown less stretched (as in tiles more times) as the rock sections look quite big and i am curious to see how they look when shown as smaller pieces of rock
EDIT// this is what i have managed to generate so far without using anything but cloud and difference cloud textures are source then just using blend settings.
http://img209.imageshack.us/img209/9656/rockgenerationcy0.jpg
although im pretty sure there is improvement to be made it shows that there is some potential for generating this kind of broken rock procedurally. Now im working on trying to make it more tweak able to get better control over the results. i would also be interested to see what ratty could do with it if i supplied him the height map for this rock texture
Edited by carnage on Sep. 05 2007,06:00
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| Post Number: 8
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ratty redemption
"understood..."
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Posts: 1351
Joined: Sep. 2006
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Posted on: Sep. 05 2007,06:37 |
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carnage, yes my latest base mesh is made by hand, using the extrude edge/face method of modeling. a lot of control of the shapes but very slow work.
I then use subsurf, smooth and displace modifiers to create the high poly version, before exporting the mesh with goofos's .ase script.
I managed to save a little time by scripting a win xp .bat file to copy the .ase file into one of my d3 folders and run d3 and psp from within the .bat, psp is used to simply crop the tiled edges from the render then rescale the local map back up to 1024x1024
I'll take some shots later today in d3 using flat surfaces.
that's a cool idea and good test shot showing the cracked rocks generated from clouds. what apps are you using in these tests?
and I'll try out any source files (images or .blend project files) that you come up with as I welcome any help in improving the quality and or speeding up this creation process.
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| Post Number: 9
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carnage
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Joined: Apr. 2007
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Posted on: Sep. 05 2007,07:03 |
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i used photo shop CS to generate the clouds and apply the blend stages then nvidia's normal map generating plug in for the normal map preview
the thing is that the cloud stage actually contributed very little and only generated the random shape of the rocks. its actually possible to paint on black lines and then put though the same set of steps will become the cracks in the rocks
ill PM a copy of that height map and then we can see what you can without your arsenal of blender nodes etc. i also have a few idea how i can use the displacement modifier to get some more detail into this so lets see what we can come up with
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| Post Number: 10
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ratty redemption
"understood..."
Group: Member *
Posts: 1351
Joined: Sep. 2006
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Posted on: Sep. 05 2007,07:21 |
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understood and I've got your heightmap so will do some tests asap
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