EVE General Discussion

Well, revert to phong,change specular highlights? Assign gradient to specular color?

well the most important part of that guide imo is breaking apart the graphics files that CCP has built. Though I am not a CG student so I have no knowledge of Maya as for me it would cost thousands without Piracy... and while I have no issues Pirating, I tend to use Blender since it is free and no fear of a copyright troll lawsuit.

Not trying to necro this thread in anyway but since I was interested I did a little searching myself. I came across this here: http://cargocollective.com/ThomasM/Eve-2-Unreal-UDK-Characters

Not sure if this helps at all. Unfortunately I only have limited knowledge of GIMP/CS5/Blender programs so it doesn't help me too much, figured it might help.

I would actually take the time to READ in the Triexporter thread instead of creating yet another thread begging for someone to do this for you, and then criticizing others for being too lazy to figure it out themselves.

The principles for textures are relatively the same across 3D programs unless you're working with Crysis, UDK, Unity or some other game rendering engine, which you're not.

As said, there are many video guides on youtube, including mine, and while the actual applications vary, the concepts are the same. I plan on updating my 101 series this weekend due to the significant changes introduced in the latest patch to Minmatar ships.

Learn a bit about Maya first and about what the different channels in your material mean, then follow up with trying to get it from EVE into Maya.

I'm a C4D user and while I can't claim to know it all, I know enough to:

A. Ask for help in the right places
B. Try on my own, using many of the guides out there
C. Listen to what others say the first time, in order that they might have half an interest in continuing to help me

*swoon

Its 3am and I'm notoriously **** with english at this time, but I'll quickly tell you what to do for PGS textured objects (this will not be the same for NGS textures)

0) Download an old version of the client that uses .red files to control what a ship looks like in game (these can be opened in a text editor) so that you know what base colours to use on your textures and texture masks. .Black files have replaced .red files but I have no idea how you read these.

1) Remember to always flip textures horizontally before you extract any channels or save a completed texture; when saving do so as a 24bit targa using the highest quality mipmap available from the .dds file.

2) Diffuse texture - ????_d.dds

3) Normal map - ????_n.dds, move the Green Channel to the red, Move the Alpha channel to the Green, delete the alpha channel before you save as a targa file.

4) Specular map - ????_pgs.dds, green channel

5) Self Ilumination Texture/ Light Map - ????_pgs.dds, alpha channel
5b) Make sure to check the lightmap to see if it has any tertiarty masks in it, you can tell because there will be solid white shaped that do not look like either lights or engine parts. You can either extract these yourself from the light maps and make into their own masks which are needed for certain ships that require actual geometry maskins (like the rifter sticky out bits, or the apocolypse) or you can set these up in your shader if you know how and the objects UVs are still intact.

6) Mask - ????_pgs.dds, Red channel, invert the texture before saving as a targa file

7) Submask - ????_pgs.dds, Blue Channel

8) Use composite maps instead of straight texture files, with atleast 3 layers in your composite map to account for the different effects. For example your diffuse texture setup is made up of 3 different hierarchical texture layers each with their own masks as shown below:

Example Diffuse Setup:
Layer 3: Texture: diffuse.tga with colour ramping to match .red file values under "submask" + Mask: submask.tga
Layer 2: Texture: diffuse.tga with colour ramping to match .red file values under "mask" + Mask: mask.tga
Later 1: Texture: diffuse.tga with colour ramping and no mask


9) When reading the .red files from old client files (.black files that are used now are currently unreadable) multiply the values found by 100, and apply colours to each of the texture layer in each of your composite maps. Depending on how you setup your shader or what program you use, you may or may not be able to use all the variables found in a .red file.

10) Save the whole scene and material setup without making any changes to any variables.

11) Play with the shaders and your setup manually to get desired results. DX shaders tend to look the most similar to ingame and have the added benefit of actually using your video card and will rasterise in real time (if you gpu is any good). However you will most likely be restricted to 3 lights.


Thats all you need to know to get started, but I'd suggest making a script to do all the above for you like I have, it saves a shitload of time.

:)

I'm liking the both of you more and more.

Ok, listen...
I realize that unlike some people you are actually trying to help me. The problem is the information you are providing me is based on an outdated system. The game was created in Maya. Ok?

Their is no reason the dds files should need to be broken down and even when breaking them down as you describe you neglect to mention where to insert them into the material properties.

The reason why you seperate them is so that you can manually adjust and fix any problems in photoshop easily, which you will get with the quality of some ships. You don't have to seperate them, but I do.

The textures are plugged into the obvious places :3 you should be able to figure it out.

Goodluck.

:circleshandsaroundhead:

You are not the easiest person to talk to sorry :|
goodluck