Game Texture Feedback

[Bliz]

Hi,

A couple of things spring out at me. The main problem is that the texture has a lot of noise and detail which is going to be lost or scintilate when it get's mipmapped by GameStudio. I don't think GS does tri-linear filtering yet so ingame your crate will be highly detailed when you are up close but will turn to flat uniform colour when the second mip level comes in.

The texture is too big for what it is going to represent in game. A texture that big is fine for say the whole side of a building or corridoor but for a crate thats going to be roughly half the size of the player it's too big.

the problem you are having with the cross brace. here's the solution - take the very top horizontal line of pixels that make up the top right hand corner of the brace and brighten them up to the same intensity as the top line of the crate. Also take the top line of the diagonal of the brace and brighten that up by a lesser amount [say 50%]

Can you use a 3D package? I've found modelling such things in a 3D package takes a lot of guess work out of the shading and lighting.

[bupaje]

Originally posted by Bliz

A couple of things spring out at me....texture has a lot of noise and detail which is going to be lost or scintilate when it get's mipmapped by GameStudio. I don't think GS does tri-linear filtering yet so ingame your crate will be highly detailed when you are up close but will turn to flat uniform colour when the second mip level comes in.

The texture is too big for what it is going to represent in game.....
the problem you are having with the cross brace. here's the solution...Can you use a 3D package...in a 3D package takes a lot of guess work out...

Hi Bliz,

Thanks for the very detailed and helpful response. I'd like to ask some questions based on your explanation in a sec. Just to respond to the last two points.... The images are big because I send them to a more experienced team member and he wants them big to make any tweaks and then resizes them. Thanks for your tips on fixing the shading -seems to be a toughie for me though I have started to get better at it by stopping using the filters for shadows and just painting them instead. As for a 3D package I have started to do some modeling with some initial success however my PC is a frankensteinian collection of old and new parts, some minor overclocking to make the older CPU work with the motherboards miniumum bus speed, old graphics card and WinMe. The result of all this oddity is that detailed renders take some time and then if I have to adjust and do again it takes forever. As soon as I can gut this machine and maybe find some newer parts I am going to do some surgery on it....

You raise some interesting issues I'd like to know more about. I have had varying results and not known the reasons and would like to if you can. For example I'll not that I do indeed some of the textures do what you say, and then others where I've added scratches in an opposite direction or shadows will sometimes seem more detailed than expected. Can you elaborate a bit on that first paragraph, explaining basically trilinear filtering and the mipmapping and how it relates -I'd really like to understand why/how.

I'll bore you with a door I did yesterday -guess the same problems are likely


http://www.cavebrain.com/CaveBrain/3d/wood_door_12.jpg

If you have a fast connection (otherwise have to wait a bit for the texture to load) I was trying to build a simple texture viewer using viewpoint.com tech. Still waiting on the license key and haven't optimized the images etc but if you load one of the crate textures

http://www.cavebrain.com/CaveBrain/viewpoint/interface3.htm

and tilt the crate up about 45 degrees. You can see -to me at least- the texure seems very 3D for being on a cube. Is it just me, or is there something going on -just wondering if there is something about the way that lighting gets calculated, or that the colors 'react' or something like that that I can take into consideration when designing the texture -sorry to be so vague but I have created a few textures that seem 'extra 3d' and am not sure if it is just by luckily correctly using shadow or if there is some technical thing going on I can take advantage of like the issues you mentioned in the first part of your response -thanks very much.

Burt

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