Pyrian on 6/8/2019 at 06:42
Alright, I've done what people suggested and made the Cyborg Highway Fog-of-War a mask/dimming effect, seems to be pretty good:
(
https://imgur.com/N0Yztgn)
Inline Image:
http://i.imgur.com/N0Yztgn.gifThere's also new effects for when units get hit (a bright flash and a spray of sparks and bits). Also, cars do a slight bump when they run over a downed Cyborg.
August is looking very busy in a "life responsibilities" sort of way, so my productivity on this project is likely to be slow until September.
In...
Weirder news, the popularity of a test-mode I made has encouraged me to add the ability to toggle on psychedelic rainbow fog-of-war effects (press "r"):
(
https://imgur.com/4dacFQP)
Inline Image:
http://i.imgur.com/4dacFQP.gifLatest changes are up, free to play in browser on PC and Android:
(
https://pyrian.itch.io/cyborghighwaywip)
WingedKagouti on 6/8/2019 at 09:56
Quote Posted by Pyrian
Alright, I've done what people suggested and made the Cyborg Highway Fog-of-War a mask/dimming effect, seems to be pretty good:
That looks so much better than the pure black cone. Great work.
Judith on 9/8/2019 at 09:39
The Rainbow Vomit Van ;) looks a bit like feature creep It's quite distracting with those bright colors. It also seems like it changes brightness mid-screen, and other cars have this effect while entering the screen from either side (bug?).
Speaking of feature creep, I'm trying to push idtech4/TDM fork to fidelity level of something like Dark Souls 3, let's say. While I don't have time to model highpoly rocks and bricks to bake into lowpoly geometry and tiling materials, I can use Substance Designer/Alchemist materials and model some simple geometry on top of that. So far the overall effect is similar to parallax mapping, although the stretching is much less noticeable.
Inline Image:
https://i.postimg.cc/hvzt5zWj/image.png
Pyrian on 9/8/2019 at 17:54
Quote Posted by Judith
The Rainbow Vomit Van ;) looks a bit like feature creep It's quite distracting with those bright colors.
It's a joke feature. An Easter Egg at most. I'm not sure I'll even leave it in the final version. Maybe an option people can toggle during pride month or something, I dunno.
Quote Posted by Judith
It also seems like it changes brightness mid-screen, and other cars have this effect while entering the screen from either side (bug?).
The cars you can jump to are highlighted.
Quote Posted by Judith
Speaking of feature creep, I'm trying to push idtech4/TDM fork to fidelity level of something like Dark Souls 3, let's say.
Pretty awesome paving stones at the bottom. What's going on with the more distant ones? All of a sudden it gets flat.
Renzatic on 9/8/2019 at 19:24
Quote Posted by Judith
Speaking of feature creep, I'm trying to push idtech4/TDM fork to fidelity level of something like Dark Souls 3, let's say. While I don't have time to model highpoly rocks and bricks to bake into lowpoly geometry and tiling materials, I can use Substance Designer/Alchemist materials and model some simple geometry on top of that. So far the overall effect is similar to parallax mapping, although the stretching is much less noticeable.
That is pretty damn spectacular looking.
Right now, I'm finally getting around to learning the one thing I've always dreaded learning: high to low poly baking. I've never been able to get it right, and, well, I'm making progress now, at least. My current attempt is only halfway borked.
Judith on 9/8/2019 at 19:54
Quote:
The cars you can jump to are highlighted.
So they both get highlighted and you see the directional arrow? Maybe that could be simplified, since you got a lot of things going on on screen already. Maybe just an outline would do?
Quote:
Pretty awesome paving stones at the bottom. What's going on with the more distant ones? All of a sudden it gets flat.
I haven't finished modeling them yet :cheeky:
Quote:
Right now, I'm finally getting around to learning the one thing I've always dreaded learning: high to low poly baking. I've never been able to get it right, and, well, I'm making progress now, at least. My current attempt is only halfway borked.
You're in for a treat once you started getting the hang of it :) It does prolong the work though. But the ability to fake both surface details and beveled edges with a normalmap is almost like learning a new superpower.
Renzatic on 10/8/2019 at 09:20
Quote Posted by Judith
You're in for a treat once you started getting the hang of it :) It does prolong the work though. But the ability to fake both surface details and beveled edges with a normalmap is almost like learning a new superpower.
It took me practically all day, but I finally did it. I baked a high poly object to a low poly mesh. It is truly a red letter day for me.
And you know what the funniest thing is? For the longest time, it seemed I could not bake a normal without producing a ton of seams. Every attempt I made netted me terrible results, and nothing I tried seemed to move me forward.
...turns out all I had to do was set the image node I had my normal attached to to use non-color data. None of the tutorials I've read told me about that. How the hell did anyone expect me to figure something that small and nondescript out on my own? The only reason I caught it was because I decided to watch some random newbie video on baking, and it was mentioned almost as an aside.
"Oh yeah, while we're here, go ahead and do this right quick."
Well yeah you want to do that. It's kinda of important, given that it'll make everything look janky, and make you think you're not doing something right if you don't. That's not something you should mention in passing. That's something you'll want to go out of your way to draw attention to. Damn, people.
Judith on 10/8/2019 at 17:09
Not sure what node you're talking about, but normal seams are often result of not matching smoothing groups to uv islands or maybe model topology. Have you seen the video on pillars of perfect baking? Or just use the one from Substance, ut should give you better understanding of all the factors. Good hi poly model, low poly model with SGs reflecting the look of high poly model, and unwrapping with uv islands reflecting the hard edges. And good positioning of both meshes surrounded with good cage for baking averaged normals. That's like the shortest description I could think of :)
Renzatic on 10/8/2019 at 17:57
Quote Posted by Judith
Have you seen the video on pillars of perfect baking?
Nope, but I'll watch it if you link it.
What I did was read through a decent chunk of (
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Texture_Baking) this page on Polycount, watched (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Quote9UGDA) this video on Xnormal, and the use of cages and blockers, and eventually ended up on some random Blender specific tutorial that finally mentioned what ended up being the source of my problems.
It's weird how every tutorial I've read or watched on UV editing over the years has stressed keeping your UV unwraps as seamless as you possibly can without distorting the underlying geometry. That's how I knew to do it, and how I've done it for all these years. Now I'm finding out that normal baking seems to be about giving every flat space on your model its own unique island, completely separated from the rest, totally flying in the face of everything I thought I knew.
The only question that remains to me now is what to do when unwrapping models that don't have distinct hard edges to exploit, like spheres or mush.
(
https://i.imgur.com/9kGwIwX.png) Here's the mesh in question. Now all I have to do is paint it.
Nameless Voice on 10/8/2019 at 21:36
I've found that when you're using a tool like Substance Painter, the UVs really don't matter at all except to make sure that they are all unique (no two areas using the same pixels) and are all roughly the same relative size for the amount of surface area that they cover.
After that, it doesn't matter too much, because the tool handles everything else.
Though you'll still want to pack the UV islands in as close as possible so as not to waste much of your image's space, but not to put them too close so that they bleed into each other at lower resolutions.
UV mapping and packing really ought to be something that a computer should be able to automatically at a single click so you'd never have to worry about it. Sadly, it's a kind of complex problem and no one has developed a really good algorithm for it yet.