2551 replies to this topic

[Trath]

More screenshots and convoluted English K11, I need my morning fix with coffee!

[Kablammo11]

Well, man with the funny South African accent (Afrikaaners often insist they speak the clearest and purest English of them all), you're in for a treat. Move your Boer keister over to http://www.perfectparallel.com/topic/3431-the-texture-thread/, asseblief, where you can hear me speak convolutedly for a lenghty period of time. And sorry if you aren't an Afrikaaner but one of the Cape Brits. Or an US citizen residing in South Afrika. Or a lad from Norfolk. 

Never mind, I'd like to hear you converse in my native language... Where are those kittens, dammit?

[Trath]

I am up for lessons, if I was smart enough I would love to learn to speak as many languages as possible.

 

One thing I can say however is that at least (many) English speaking South Africans are one of the few English speaking peoples that left that rainy island that can actually speak more than well .. just English.

 

I thought Seal pups were on the menu, at least temporarily as the kitten population recovers.

[Kablammo11]

I gladly concede that point, Trath: English speaking South Africans indeed are not language chauvinists like all their other English speaking cousins and the most polyglot specimens in the english lot - and for that I salute them. And you. 

But one more of anyone of you others pointing at my weird ways of talking and writing - and countless kittens, seal pups, baby elephants, dolphin calves, baby koalas, infant gorillas and even the very few panda cubs left on this planet will die horribly!

Puppy dogs however are safe. I'm a dog person.

 

Returning to more pressing matters, I turned my focus on the beach sections of Karen. Of which their are many. Not Karens, there's only the one, but beach sections. I blindly launched myself into this project knowing full well that this was going to be its most horrible and heart-rending part. Riparian and coastal waters edges are the most fake-looking and deservedly feared bits of computer course design. They look horrible, yet they must not, yet there is no way they can't be made to look good.

So, I added a new wet sand texture - that I will entirely redo soon, since it looks bad - and an ocean bottom wavy dirt texture and switched my water plane to "Refractive" - but NOT reflective.

 

 

One problem about my water prefab is that you cant set refractiveness to be limited to a certain depth. Everything or nothing is being seen through the transparent water. Also, the water to land transition still looks too sharp.

 

 

Still, it's adding a little something to a region badly in need of a little something added. But which something is best? And what about my tri count? Experiments are ongoing. I have time aplenty to figure out new methods, since I can't progress without an up-to-date CF, which Mac users don't have.

[TimBoch]

I thought I would work on a one of my original Links designs that imported fairly well.  I have layed out the holes and was wanting to do some touch up painting of textures, which would be my first attempt at this.  Unfortunately, when I tried to add some rough, it comes out much darker and looks to be at the wrong scale. It is the same custom texture I have used for the rough, so I am a bit stumped.

Thanks for any help you can give. 

Not sure when this course will get finished as I can't find much to plant it with, but it has allowed me time with a fictional design and to play more with the unity and CF tools.

[Kablammo11]

I have only the vaguest of suspicions about this, Tim. It looks like you used the exact same set of textures for both your CF rough mesh and your Unity terrain texture. That's good thinking - yes, it should be that easy - but a bad idea, because it isn't. 

 

For instance, the detail texture you are using in your Layers Library is not meant to act as a bump map, but as a shader. It's usually saved in a TIFF format, about which we all know that - together with PSD and PNG formats, it allows for the inclusion of transparency. A TIFF shader turns the bright parts transparent and lets the Albedo shine through - a normal map makes them gleamy and white. If you used your shader TIFF as a normal, Unity probably can't handle it, at least not if you designated it as normal map as well.

The terrain texture (Albedo) is also displayed differently - something with how the Unity light reacts to it, and about the fact that in CF the shader will turn your albedo darker, so that you will need to darken your terrain texture accordingly. Suffice to say that It will never look exactly the same as a terrain texture as it does as an CF mesh texture. It will, I'm sorry to report, not even closely look the same.

I'm not sure whether using the same texture file for both terrain and mesh, from the same location, might cause additional issues.

 

I would suggest that you have separate locations for your Unity mesh textures and shaders and your terrain textures and bump maps. Makes it a bit easier to keep your stuff organised as well, so copy your files to another location (Right-clicking in the Asset window offers you the option of creating a new, empty folder). Next have a hard look at your terrain bump map. It indeed it were a TIFF file, you need to convert it to jpg, that should do the trick. But you still will need to tweak both your terrain files, edit the colours and brightness, to get a closer match with your CF texture.

I'm afraid Unity is full of little tripwires like this one. Can't be helped. Through stumbling, we learn how to walk... Out of lemons, lemonade... sun after rain - all that trite crap... Let me know if this helped.

[J.H.Buchanan]

Ok back to Karen so actually she is still a virgin right ??

[Kablammo11]

To necrophiliacs she sure is. Also: Eewww!

[TimBoch]

Here are my textures in their own texture folder.

They are all .jpg files 1024x1024. These are files I used in APCD, in APCD they had to be converted to .tga files. The textures I have always used in CF have always been only .jpg.  So if I understand correctly.  I need to make a copy of my textures I use in CF, put those in a different folder and then adjust those in Paint.NET to get them to match more closely.

[Kablammo11]

Basically, yes. With one exception - I just went and checked: The shaders inside CF are in tga format. Targa! I designated as TIFFS out of memory, which is wrong. tga, not tif. Everything but these shaders can be a jpg. 

CF texture: jpg

CF shader: tga (converted into tga from original APCD jpg)

terrain texture: jpg 

terrain bump map: jpg 

And don't forget to set your bump map up as a "Normal" in the inspector. 

If you use the same file as a terrain normal and as a terrain shader (by not having two different source files), either one of them will not work properly, because these are different blending functions.

 

I honestly am a bit too close to the limits of my own knowledge to be comfortable with this. Perhaps a PM to Mike is in order...

[M Rose]

I'm hoping that some upcoming tutorials will include all these steps. I have textures that I'd like to start bringing over from APCD.

[Kablammo11]

Let's hope for that. It's a good sign that you guys are slowly trying to leave the trodden path of default materials. 

You might need 2048 textures, though, to get a better resolution going for you. 

 

Some rather unspectacular and monotone grass is starting to grow on small trial patches over at Karen. Not that anybody cares. Except me.

 

[NoPutt]

I care,about grass.Unfortunately now that Blammocorp has access
to your pics,they will move in with there skyscrapers,oil rigs,
nuclear power plants,and of course Taco Wednesday.

[TimBoch]

Since I am kind of stumped about how to replace my overhead texture with a rough texture. Thought I would waste a little time making a bench for my course.

Not really sure why the terrain does this strange grey out thing as you try and zoom in. I find that using my mouse wheel makes too course zooming, so I need to use the right click+W to try and get closer, but then the grey terrain thing happens.

Came out ok for a basic bench.

[Kablammo11]

That grey thing is some near distance clipping

1. Double-click on a smaller objet - such as the ballwasher. This will make your viewer centered and zooming it on it. (Neat trick to move about the entire plot, btw: object beaming)
2. Press the F key. This will F-ocus Unity on the smaller object
3. Draw your cam back again - the grey thing  (actually the background of your Unity editor) is gone.

 

I'm sure about that one. So many pitfalls out there, huh?  Nice bench!

[Trath]

Thanks for the updates K11.

[Kablammo11]

And they keep coming....

Behold those two measly trees:

 

 

They're not higher than 12 feet and the highest thing ever allowed to grow out there. Bushy fellows at 1400 tris only. 

Yet they were made by me, with the Unity tree creator tool, with materials of my own making. Would the gents over at Speedtree kindly close their eyes and imagine me exposing my outstretched middle finger to their faces? Hm... Worth a dozen kittens!

[NoPutt]

Nice K, guess we'll change the 'ol saying,"A Bird in the hand is worth 2 in the Bush".

[Kablammo11]

[NoPutt]

"  I'm shaking it Boss, I'm shaking it" (Cool Hand Luke)