Couple of blender questions.

Re: Couple of blender questions.

Postby AndiS » Tue Nov 01, 2016 8:54 am

I forgot a quite practical variant:

In Blender, create a new image of the (planned) size of your texture. In the creation dialogue, select "Generated Type" "UV-Grid" instead of "Blank". That produces a checker board with fine coloured crosses on it (1 px line width). Swapping your texture out for this grid permits three things:

a) You see how these fine crosses come out. Totally blurred - needs bigger texture; super-crisp - texture size can be reduced, maybe.

b) If the squares show much bigger on some parts of your model than on others, your UV map is quite unfair against those places with the large squares. If you have good reason for it, then keep it. If it surprises you, then try to get more space on the map for these parts.

c) If the squares are very stretched, it might be an idea to change that. How much is tolerable depends on the texture at that place.

The ideal is to see squares everywhere with the coloured crosses on them just visible. Of course, this is not completely possible in practice.


Regarding masochism, if you do it retrospectively, it is. But performance would greatly improve if every modeller would make such an analysis first. However, it is not possible for most objects to predict how far from the track they are placed. I am curious whether TSW will address this somehow, maybe by only loading distant LODs when it knows that the nearest one will never show? More likely, DTG have their in-house rules and don't care what others do.
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Re: Couple of blender questions.

Postby callum112233 » Wed Nov 02, 2016 5:24 pm

Thanks for that. I'll try and take it all on board. I'm not the best texture artist anyway so i'll just have to keep practicing.

Anyway, here is what I have managed so far. They textures are just flat colours with some grime layered over the top. The result isn't great but not bad for my first model.

Image


One thing did confuse me though. When I was setting up the textures in blender, I used TexDiff in the top texture slot but once I got the model in game, it looked weird like it was emitting light or something. So I changed the shader to trDiff and it seemed to work a lot better.

Next, i'm gonna try to model a building with windows, good luck me :lol:

Thanks all.
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Re: Couple of blender questions.

Postby VictoryWorks » Thu Nov 03, 2016 9:34 am

By default TexDiff is an emitting shader so it does exactly as you say, it lights up. You need to open the mirror section of the texture and change the mirror colour to black (just drag the right hand slider all the way down after clicking on the white square).
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Re: Couple of blender questions.

Postby callum112233 » Fri Nov 11, 2016 8:18 pm

Thanks for that :)
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Re: Couple of blender questions.

Postby callum112233 » Wed Nov 23, 2016 9:15 pm

Another question for anyone who has an answer.

Which material would you use for glass in a building?

Ta.
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Re: Couple of blender questions.

Postby TrabantDeLuxe » Thu Nov 24, 2016 1:00 pm

Depends on the building. Here's where the bit about 'selective detailing' comes in to play. Couple of options:

TrainGlass.fx is the go-to glass shader. You'll get colour, translucency, and reflections. It needs two textures. The first is RGB + Alpha; The RGB bit does the colour, the alpha is used to vary translucency. So you can have dirty bits being less translucent. The second texture is a placeholder. Just chuck a very small black square in here. 32x32 will do. In game, it will be replaced with an environment map.

TrainEnv.fx is basically the same as TrainGlass.fx, but does not have translucency. This might actually be quite useable, especially if you're not planning on giving your building an interior. The textures are the same as for TrainGlass.fx, although the first texture now doesn't need an alpha slot.

TexDiff supports transparency, by using the alpha channel of the only texture it needs. You won't get any of the fancy reflectiveness though.

So, which shader to use, well that's up to you. If you can be bothered to build an interior, and the object is meant for close-range viewing, TrainGlass.fx might be a good choice. For close-range objects without an interior, I'd pick TrainEnv. Now in both these cases, you'll have to give your windows seperate textures - otherwise your entire building becomes reflectives and brick doesn't reflect. At least not at this side of the channel.

Finally, TexDiff will do transparency, but I've never actually used that function. If your building is meant as background filler, there's no real point in bothering about reflective/transparant windows, so I would just make the windows fully opaque.

I assume you've read Derek Siddles 'Art of RailWorks' blog. If you haven't go do so now. Derek uses 3DS max, but a lot of the techniques he uses are useable for blender as well. The buttons you'll have to press are different, the underlying ideas the same. Also have a look at the RailSimilarity blog and of course the dev docs. Hope this rather incoherent post helps a bit!
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Re: Couple of blender questions.

Postby callum112233 » Sat Dec 03, 2016 6:48 pm

Thanks for the above, that helps greatly. I am yet to put it into practice with the windows though but thanks :)
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Re: Couple of blender questions.

Postby callum112233 » Mon Dec 05, 2016 6:17 pm

I'm a bit confused at the moment. Up to now my models have had one material and two assigned textures being TexDiff and Tex_xxxx (my textures created in photoshop)

So when I want to assign the TrainGlass.fx to a part of my model, how would I go about it? Do I need more than one material slot?

Thanks again.
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Re: Couple of blender questions.

Postby malkymackay » Mon Dec 05, 2016 7:01 pm

You will need to create a new material in Blender for any objects that need to use the TrainGlass.fx shader. https://zugguy.wordpress.com/2012/05/25/through-a-glass-not-so-darkly/should give you a pointer.
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Re: Couple of blender questions.

Postby callum112233 » Fri Dec 09, 2016 10:34 pm

Oh dear. I'm in over my head with glass I think. The problem is, a lot of the tutorials are for 3DS Max and although similar to blender, the interface is different and it blows my mind.
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