basic values
type:
DcDt,a normal texture
DcDtEcEt,can render alpha channels & glowmapping
DcDtOcOt,a glass texture which can be glowmapped w/ Ec color values

for glowmaps you need three extra values
Et_flags Et_name Ec
Et_flags can be filled with the string @
Et_name has to refer to a texture in the library,this is the glowing texture
Ec is a float value for RGB and lighting value
if you glowmapped a black and white DcDtOcOt texture with these nodes and set the Ec value to 0.900000 0.000000 0.000000 1.000000 you would get red,0.0 0.9 green,next red and so on.if you glowmap a normal EcEt texture the color values are ignored and only used to determine brightness

so if you use a transparent tga for your Et_name only the non transparent parts will show up & if you fill the Dt_name with the name of a texture you will see it appear underneath the glowmap(i like to think of it as an Emitter Texture)

of course all this is just from my terrible short term memory so some of it is bound to be flawed but this should get you started on your way to texturing nirvana

Edited by - Cold_Void on 6/1/2005 10:13:52 PM

And don't forget DcDtBtOcOtTwo, which is the Nomad Material. I'm not sure what Bt means, but probably means "blitted", which refers to the fact that the Nomad Material makes use of two textures (with alpha channels) that are being blitted on top of each other at various positions (x,y) before being applied to the polygons. Just a working theory, though- I haven't had enough time to dig that out completely.

The Two definately tells the FL game engine to render the polygons of that object as two-sided polygons, instead of culling the backfaces. This may be rather useful for a number of different things, but not culling is a performance issue, and the Nomad ships are exceptionally polycount-efficient, probably because DA knew what a big hit rendering the objects that way was going to be, along with all of the alpha channel opacity and glow being used.

BTW, EcEt textures just need to have the following Nodes:

Ec (this is a Float, and like the example below)
0.800000
0.800000
0.800000
0.000000 (I do not know what this last one does, but I think that tells the game engine whether to use the alpha channel or not, and how much- for the method I use, 0 is a good value)

Et_flags (this is an Integer, and always the same values)
64
0

Et (this is a string, and should, ideally, be the same named texturemap that you applied to your model when you made its uvmapped texture, so that you aren't wasting texture memory on multiple textures for one ship).


The same three parameters are also used for OcOt textures. The only difference is Oc, which is a Float, but doesn't have RGB values, just a simple pair, like this:

0.800000
0.000000

Last note... you can use Dc to color a model's polygons, or to give it a RGB "hue" for a given area. Theoretically speaking, this means that it's possible to make a series of ships that are all different colors by making the texturemaps grayscale, cloning the CMP with FL Model Cloner, and giving each version of the ship different Dc values... In the practical world, however... that'd be a much bigger pain in the butt than just making different texture versions of the same ship, working from a common template, and the quality will be much, much higher.

Last, last last note: when working with Materials... MIPS are DDS, MIP0 are TGA (MIP0 basically tells the engine, "this doesn't have mipmaps". It's too bad that MIP0 isn't compatible with zero-mipmap DDS files (which is what I make, because you get almost the fidelity of TGA but with a much, much smaller filesize) because MIPS probably wastes at least several decision cycles every time the ship is loaded into memory searching for mipmaps in the DDS file... but quite frankly, I haven't seen any performance hitches, so this is probably a very minor issue.

i'm using psp pro 7 now and the dds plugin interface is completely different than the one in 8. best of all is you can choose how many mips to generate, i set it for 1 or two and it seems to run great w/ none of the fuziness you get from having 8. here's an example of using two different textures w/ alpha in dcdtecet to get a singular glow on a normal unglowing textue.i have played with the last float in Ec and it has no effect on alpha at least in EcEt



Edited by - Cold_Void on 6/1/2005 11:16:56 PM

The problem with the above is that it's all theoretical. The entries should work but but trying to combine effects is an exercise in frustration.

Case in point is the Nomad texture. I have done a lot extensive experimentation trying to duplicate the effect without success. I've even tried duplicating the texture entries from the nomad .3db exactly in a mat file and it still would not work in-game.

I've been able to create transparent textures and glowing textures easily enough but every attempt to create a texture that is both transparent and glowing has failed.

Furthermore appling a texture to a transparent material (or applying transparency to a material using a texture) will not work.

When I say failure I mean that the object that the material applied to shows up in-game neither glowng, transparent nor displaying a texture ie dull grey .

This is the first time I heard anyone say it can be done so I would appreciate it greatly if someone could tell me what I'm doing wrong .

Edited by - PantherX on 6/2/2005 4:05:09 PM

PantherX... you have looked at the stuff I've been posting to the "show-off" thread, yes? Glowmaps are entirely simple to do, aside from the art side (which is much trickier than it looks, but that's what practice is for.

Basically, to do a glowmap... the easy sloppy way... just make a second Material for your object in MS3D... name it using the standard conventions for unique naming and adding "glow_glass" to the end. The "glow" is just there so that you'll know what you're looking at in UTF Edit... it's the "glass" line that's important (this applies to using textures on transparent objects too btw). So, for example, you'd have a Material named "arghs_NeatoShip_glow_glass".

Once you've gotten done exporting the CMP and MAT (or "updating" the CMP with the MAT Export plugin, which is what I do, because then you don't have a seperate MAT file- it keeps things simpler)... take a look at the ship in HardCMP. The Materials with "glass" in their names are going to be black (and will show up as sort've lightish blue in the FL game engine). This is because the MAT Export plugin assumes that everybody exporting their models just wants a very simple glass. But you don't have to stop there- a few minutes work with UTF Edit can take care of the issues.

For glass textures that refer to your texturemap, you need to go into their Material Node, and add the following subnodes:

Dt_flags
Dt_name

The flags and name should be entered as I've explained above. Now go look at your ship- the glass areas now have your texture on them- and if you got fancy and used an alpha channel, you may have varying amounts of opacity, which can be used for various things. Go download Epsilon Mod, where you can see Harrier's work in this area... he's done several ships that feature alpha channel opacity on their glass.

For glowmaps... you need to add a few more nodes than with transparent textures. This is because glowmaps need to refer to a "base texture" and a "glow texture", which may be two different things (as Cold_Void was demonstrating above). Here are the subnodes:

Dt_flags
Dt_name
Et_flags
Et_name
Ec

Delete the Dc and Oc subnodes, if present- you don't need them, nor do you want your glowing texture to be transparent unless that's precisely what you want- even objects with an Oc value of 1.000000 still eat up more processing cycles (i.e., lower FPS) than objects that don't have an Oc at all... and for most glowmaps, you're just making something look like it's either transmitting light or reflecting light, such as this example:



If you look at the "eye" area, you're looking at two Groups (before I consolidated my Groups in MS3D- which is one of the steps everybody should take before export- it makes keeping named Groups unique much easier if you only have 3 Groups as opposed to the typically 30-50 I start with when I'm texturing an object). This area of the "eye" and the geometry around it is all part of the glow_glass Material for this ship. If I was being super-anal about accurate depictions of light (which I'm way too lazy to bother with), I could've even had the "ring" geometry around the "eye" be a different EcEt Material... still referring to the same ol' texturemap, just like everything else, for efficiency's sake... but with a different Ec value, so that it would be shaded more by the game engine, thus making it seem that the "ring" area was catching both the ambient and point-source lighting in the game world as well as "reflected" light from the "eye".

If you go look at the various shots I posted in the "show off" thread, this will all make much more sense- I didn't want to include all 4 shots here. But I think you get the gist... basically, OcOt and EcEt Materials are both possible and practical, and easily implemented, once you get the idea that the MAT Exporter can be "tricked" into having multiple Groups all referring to the same texture without actually duplicating the texture... which is wasteful and inefficient.

Pantherx,

Nomad textures are possible... tho as Argh said and I found out they are a bit tricky.. B

Back a little while ago I did this:



The Nightmare....

This is fairly early in the final tweaking and before I had moved all the weapons etc inside.. (where they cannot be seen..)

Nomad ships are like weapons (and any ship can be)..., the texures are in the .cmp file. The 2 textures are basically mapped to the same surface, one is the texture, the other is a gradient map that references in a .thn file.. it's very strange.. it also uses an odd hardpoint - HpFixed/HpFx01, tho I am not entirely sure what it does..

The shiparch has some oddities too..

Like:

DA_archetype = ships\aefleet\nightmare\nightmare.cmp
material_library = ships\nomad\nomad_fx.txm
nomad = true

without these lines in your shiparch.ini.. you are wasting your time.. no offence.. , somehow the shiparch references are important tho I am unsure why.

I basically made a ship then copied the structure as close as I could to the nomad ships/textures, and then tried it, the first few efforts were invisible(frustrating head scratching time), then it just clicked, tho I did have to play with the ms3d files and build a secondary 'skeleton' ----- somewhere in there it appeared :

It is relatively easy to 'light' textures or make them 'translucent' (to completely invisible).... there is structure involved tho, the good thing about translucent textures, is that equipment/weapons hidden inside the ship disappears, yet the ship stays 'see through'. Some things however stay visible, the pilot (if used) and the shield generator.. which may explain why the nomad ships had no shields.. Both are fixable, the first by omitting the pilot hardpoint and the pilot call in the shiparch.ini. The other.... well.... I never really looked.. but it may be another shield.cmp model, or build a box around it and tex it the same as the nomad texture is used.. that may fix it also..

Harrier

You can just make an invisible CMP/3DB to use for the Shield Generator. This is easy enough to do- simply make a triangle, name it, assign a named Material with glass in the name... and then go in with UTF Edit and tell the engine that the Oc values are 0.000000

my understanding on glass is that you only need ocot when you want to color your glow,otherwise you don't need to export as glass to get a nice glow(plainly demonstrated with the .dfm file)-i will definitely be looking at harrier's glass transparencies as i haven't been able to get them working myself.the ecet map on trent is 1.a colored emitter .tga w/ transparency(i haven't even gotten transparencies to work in DDS but photoshop would probably do it...damn inferior tools)and 2.a background .dds texture which is also a negative.

When I'm done making this new ship and start working on the updated ship creation tutorial, I plan on explaining glass and glow maps.

I'm going to need a little help here though.
So, create a uvmap of your ship. Just one.
What then?? When you export in milkshape do you just create a random group and call it whatever_glass?? Or whatever_glow_glass?? How do you set the glow on only certain parts of the uvmap??

Pics would be nice too.
Here I'll start things. Let's get this figured out.


No what do I do to make the glass transparent, and the wing glow??

Hmmm,

There are many ways to do this..

My approach in this instance would be to treat the glass and the glow as separate objects:

Glass for instance :

: Can be a transparent .tga or .dds..
: Can be used simply as a 'glass' name without Mipmaps and thus not exist.. and still be coloured.. but may throw server console errors
: Can be saved WITH a texture and mip maps and 'suggest structure" and usually does not throw server console errors.
: does not need to be a huge file and thus does not contribute greatly to a .mat file size (or when imported into a .cmp).

Glows can also be treated the same way.. or included in the same uvmap, It should be remembered however that not all ships are uv mapped .. I myself make use of box, planar, and tile mapping as well as cylindrical and unwrapping.. but I may just be old fashioned..

However, it appears to me that much valuable info is being scattered thoughout a number of threads..

Now I could simply make this thread sticky but too many sticky threads and they clutter up the place..yet this info which adds colour and new life should not be allowed to simply dissapear as many do.. perhaps a thread on "Freelancer textures and how to use them" ??

My suggestion is that we start to collect a lot of this specific info into one thread..

Suggestions welcome..

Harrier

So glass has to be a seperate texture.

Glow can be in the same uvmapper texture. Okay, how do I get just the wings to glow and not, say the rest of the ship?? Is the glow key universal??

Nonono... glass can be the same texture. Everything can be the same texture. You just make seperate Materials in MS3D, and have each of them pointing back to the same DDS/TGA file

And yes... I think it's high time to have a sticky about texturing techniques. As for using Planar, Box, etc... those are all uv-mapping projections- you just don't think of them that way, because you're doing them in MS3D

Lemme write something up on this... I think I have enough time today...

Edited by - Argh on 6/4/2005 11:13:43 AM

You don't need a texture for glass at all actually unless you actually want a texture applied to the glass. I usually create all my my files from scratch using the UTF editor but the MAT File Exporter plugin for Milkshape will create the glass texture for you automatically (along with the actual .mat file of course )

We've already established that DcDtOcOt are the flags used in creating a glass texture.

The Oc value is what determines the transparency of the material and the Dc value value determines color. The values are easier to understand in float array format in my mind so I always edit that way.


Using the li_playerships.mat as an example we'll look at the L_glass. Make sure that "float array" is selected in the "Interpet data as..." window.


If you edit the Oc entry you'll see two values. The top value determines transparency where 1.00000 is completely opaque and 0.000000 is invisible. Glass materials in FL have transparency values of 0.800000

The bottom value does nothing as far as I can tell.


Looking at the Dc value you see four separate values representing the color in RGB format. The top representing the Red value and the next two representing the Green and Blue values respectively.

So white would have all values as 1and black all zeroes. Red on the other hand would be
1.000000
0.000000
0.000000
0.000000

Green would be;
0.000000
1.000000
0.000000
0.000000

If you use the color picker in photoshop you can get the rgb values for your color.

If you use the .MAT file exporter you simply have to use a 256x256 .tga pic with the color you want the glass to be and it will create the color entries for you with a transparency value of 0.8000000

@Harrier and Argh

First thanks for the quick replies . I never use transparent 'tga's for my glass as you can see. When I have tried applying a texture to a material in combination with modifying the above flag values I experienced the problem expressed in my previous post.

Getting textures to glow is also not a problem but getting them to both glow and be transparent has also given me fits.

I'll try doing what you suggested and see what happens.

Edited by - PantherX on 6/4/2005 1:35:03 PM