News:

Welcome to World of Banished!

Main Menu

Help a newbie!

Started by jesta030, January 22, 2017, 12:03:50 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

jesta030

sure i can. but the Roof is a seamless texture that has 2 decals (the upper end and the moss) laid over it. i could bake it all into one texture, but i dont want to. :)

RedKetchup

you would need to bake it in one texture, you cannot put 2.

about the decal, it only goes to the ground, not on the building, you can draw (copy paste) everything you want in this decal... dirt.... grass... moss.. it is only an image and the decal will reproduce it on the ground.
> > > Support Mods Creation developments with Donations by Paypal  < < <
Click here to Donate by PayPal .

jesta030

nearly done:



3 progblems remain:

1. smoke always comes out of the middle of the house although the "smoke" point is sitting in the chimney
2. how do i change the decal on the ground?
3. people walk through the house when interacting to bring food/firewood or eat/warm up?

thanks for all the great help everybody!

RedKetchup

make sure the name of the smoke point in blender and the name inside your template is the same.
make sure the "smoke" point in blender is "linked"or "attached" to your point called "points" in your mesh
you also need to add a link to your point list inside your particle function like :


ParticleDescription particle
{
PointList _pointList = "Models\PlymouthHouse01Points.rsc";

ParticleAttachment _systems
[
{
Time _fadeInOutTime = 2.0;
bool _addOnCreate = false;
bool _addOnNotify = false;
Particle _particle = "ParticleSystems\Fire\FireSmall.rsc";
}
{
bool _addOnCreate = false;
Particle _particle = "ParticleSystems\ChimneySmoke\ChimneySmoke.rsc";
String _attachNode = "smoke";
}
]
}


about the people walking through ....
the allowed path is always described in your MapDescription map function
#### = not allowed to go there
_ _ _ _ = allowed to go
...... = roads

about the decal on the ground, which i call "footprint" you use a program like Gimp2 which can do transparent png ... and you draw your own brown ground yourself
> > > Support Mods Creation developments with Donations by Paypal  < < <
Click here to Donate by PayPal .

kid1293


About points.
I have had my share of problem with points (and Blender).

They do not work as intended if they are in scale=1. My experience.

I always export fbx (scale=1) - import fbx with scale=0.01 then immediately export fbx again.

I know most models are in 0.025 (inches) but I have learned that
0.01 (centimeters) are fine too.

My points never worked when scale=1!

RedKetchup

@kid1293  is the expert in blender !!  ;D
@RedKetchup  is useless in blender ^^
> > > Support Mods Creation developments with Donations by Paypal  < < <
Click here to Donate by PayPal .

Necora

#66
Hey! So I'm a bit late to this party, didn't see the thread until now.

I've been stumbling my way through blender since December so perhaps another point of view will be useful..

Re. texture map vs multi material... I started off with the texture map but when @RedKetchup introduced me to multi material I have not even thought about going back, I love it. I find a texture map finicky and annoying going back and forth between blender and gimp (mainly because I don't like gimp... but it is free). With multi material, I can do all of my scaling and adjusting in blender, saves a lot of time. A lot of my stuff is themed sets, so I only use a handful of textures, a few sidings, a couple of roofs, a couple of beams etc. so I am using far less textures than if I had a map for each building.

Now, in cycles you could use the multi material approach to texture your models in blender, then use the texture paint tools to 'paint' that texture onto a new UV map, render it, and save it as just one texture map per building, if you were that way inclined. I've not tried it yet, but I did use that to texture a goat and it worked really nicely.

Re. Ambient Occlusion, I actually used the same approach as @RedKetchup before, a white AO texture. But recently I have cracked how to make a good (in my opinion) AO in blender while using multi materials for texturing.

Firstly, I don't use cycles render, just blender render. But I did use cycles to make the custom goat texture map and also some trees. In blender render here is what you do...

1 - Set up two UV channels. Go to the 'Data' tab of your model, scroll down to UV maps. Re-name the first one to 'UVChannel_01' then add a second called 'UVChannel_02'.

2 - Unwrap your model on UVChannel_02. In the 'Data' tab, click make sure you select 'UVChannel_02'. Then in the edit mode, select all (A) and get the unwrap menu (U). Then select the 'Smart UV Project' option. Keep the angle limit the same, change the Island Margin to 0.03 (just to space them out a bit), de-select 'Stretch to UV Bounds' otherwise the edges of the UVs will be at the edge of the map, and you get a thin black line in game. Then click unwrap. Make a new image in your UV viewer, 1024x1024, white background.

3 - Test. Go to the 'Data' tab, and select between the two UV maps. You should find that UVChannel_01 has the original unwrapping from when you made your textures, and UVChannel_02 has the new unwrapping for the AO. The game reads the first channel for textures, and the second for AO. If you are using multi materials, then in the 'Material Veiw' mode UVChannel_01 will look perfect, UVChannel_02 will look funky, this is good.

4 - Set the Scene. Make sure you are viewing 'UVChannel_02', although this step is universal, it is best to keep it selected.
4A - Go to the 'World' tab. Scroll down to the 'World' drop down menu. Click the colour box beneath 'Ambient Color:' and make all three channels (RGB) 150.00.
4B - Scroll down to the next section, 'Ambient Occlusion'. Select the box. Change the factor to your liking... I use 2.5. The higher the number, the more defined the shadows. I also change it to Multiply rather than Add... again it makes them more defined but you could argue that this is too much. You can play around with these later to see the difference.
4C - Scroll down to 'Environment Lighting' and 'Indirect Lighting' and tick them both. Not sure why, but it worked when I did it.
4D - Scroll down to 'Gather'. Make sure you have 'Raytrace' selected. Change the 'Attenuation:' to something in the order of 20 cm (0.2m). This is the distance that objects and faces will cast a shadow on one another. With 20 cm, anything within 20 cm of a face will cast a shadow onto it. The higher the number, the further away a face can be to cast a shadow on another face. You can also play with the drop off values, this is how quickly a shadow fades away from the face or object that cast it.

** Note - All objects in the file will case a shadow, whether they are in the scene or not. If you have F-variants or build stages, make sure they are moved well away from (and possibly hidden fro view) the baking otherwise they will make everything dark.

Make the 'Samples' 10.

5 - Bake. Go the the 'Bake' tab. Scroll down to 'Bake'. Change the 'Bake Mode' to 'Ambient Occlusion' from the drop down. Click 'Normalized' - this is important with materials assigned to your model, it forces the render to see all materials and textures as white. If you do not click this, you'll end up with funky shadows due to your materials. Change the margin to 10px, and click bake!

6 - Go into 'texture view' to see the resulting bake cast onto your model, and save the image as xxxxAO.png. When saving the image, in the png options click 'BW' - there is no point saving it as a full colour image as there is no colour... this saves a lot of file size (about 1/4 in what I have done) of the resulting .png

There you go, that should bake you an awesome AO. No lighting is required, blender bakes AO regardless of lights, so no suns etc. are needed.



Another hint, you can check things on the fly. If you 'Run' your mod in the mod kit, then you can re-bake AOs, change textures, resize models, add/remove what ever, and see the changes happen instantly in game when you export the model again. It is great for playing with the AO.


Another thing with blender, I now do everything to that specific model in one file. Build stages, F-variants etc. When ready, I just scale everything to .01 and export - this works perfectly fine. No importing or exporting models at different scales.

Hope any of this helps.

Edit - a big thanks has to go to ShockPuppet at BL for the AO stuff, while he uses 3DSMax and didn't know the functions of blender, he was great at generally helping me understand my way through it.

jesta030

#67
Just wanted to let you know, I'm not dead. :) Been taking a break, trying to figure out whats the easiest way to get things done the way i want to.



i think it fits quite well with CC and SmallTownRowHouses.
i have a .pkm if you want to try it out:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/bvvcyeylxrbofpx/HouseSmall.pkm

RedKetchup

congratulations for your first release @jesta030  it is a very nice house :)
> > > Support Mods Creation developments with Donations by Paypal  < < <
Click here to Donate by PayPal .

QueryEverything

Hiya @jesta030 I wanted to try your new mod, but I received a warning error when I tried to.
Can you host via dropbox or google by any chance?
[color=purple]~ QE, I query because I like learning new things.  [/color]

Banished pinterest & Banished mod ideas
[color=teal](Gently) Please: if you download mods please rate them, this helps & encourages the modders. :) [/color]

jesta030

im not at home right now so i could only download from that site that Chrome wanted to block and reupload to dropbox. the file size is the same as my original so i dont think it has been tampered with. anyways, the post above has been updated with the new link.

RedKetchup

Quote from: jesta030 on March 13, 2017, 07:48:13 AM
im not at home right now so i could only download from that site that Chrome wanted to block and reupload to dropbox. the file size is the same as my original so i dont think it has been tampered with. anyways, the post above has been updated with the new link.

if you allow me... i will help her, i will send her a copy placed on google drive. that way you wont have to worry :)
> > > Support Mods Creation developments with Donations by Paypal  < < <
Click here to Donate by PayPal .

QueryEverything

Thank you both, I got the house, will try it in my game today :)
Great work!!
[color=purple]~ QE, I query because I like learning new things.  [/color]

Banished pinterest & Banished mod ideas
[color=teal](Gently) Please: if you download mods please rate them, this helps & encourages the modders. :) [/color]

jesta030

BTW on the topic of AO: I decided to use a texture atlas for the house and bake AO aswell, overlaying it on the texture with 60% opacity. for banished i use a 16x16 white AO image.

Texture atlas:


AO bake:


Combined, as used in the mod:


The house just looked weird without AO IMHO and I think this is the simplest and most efficient way to incorporate it without inflating mod size.

Side note: imgur doesnt like transparency apparently. white in the above pictures should be transparent...

Necora

@jesta030 I think the AO has something to do with lighting between 'rain' and 'sun' in the game and also snow covering... so you might want to make a version up with AO incorporated as you have and also separate as you might find it comes out quite different, or not, would be interesting to know either way.

There are ways to shrink the AO, for example from blender save it as a black and white png rather than full colour, and also compress it a bit, that shrinks the file size. Also use something like RIOT image tool, that also can help you decrease file size without decreasing quality.


Also, a general question to the crowd, how do you make those texture maps??

I always struggled doing them by hand as @Discrepancy 's tutorial showed, which was OK for small buildings but too finicky and always came out looking bad on larger ones. Now I use the multi material way but I would like to know how you do those.