Oolite Bulletins

Ah! No, unfortunately neither I nor any of my work are in these pics I did work on at least four of the games depicted though (most noteable is the beach scene at the bottom of page 1 - I built that level for the game)

Crow

Yeah, a lot of Shadow, mostly Tyranid though.
To be fair, the more I look at it, the less I like it. It's what my old graphics tutor would call, 'the beginning of an idea.'

Ho hum. I like the sound of the giant, mysterious living ships though.

Very interesting...

Crow

Yeah, I'm not convinced by the amount of arms and the composition yet. It's a bit repetitive.

Crow

Whilst I wrestle with materials and shaders in the Seraphim thread, and as part of my 'learn Z-Brush' training, I've started work on an alternative Thargoid. 1488 triangles with normal maps generated both from hand-drawn greyscale height maps in Photoshop (mouth and eye) and from a high detail mesh ...

Hmmmm....

Okay, finally got round to testing this. The ship is certainly much more shiny or glossy but it still seems to be ignoring the specular map. Neither r,g,b or a seem to be having any effect on the specularity.

Crow

That looks very promising. I'll try the new shader with the materials code and report back!

Thanks, as ever,

Crow

Yeah, I usually bake AO into the diffuse map (I use mental ray in Maya but I also have FAOgen which is pretty cool) but I've taken recently to making it a seperate pass so that it masks out specularity. I guess it could be baked into the specularity map for that reason.

Crow

Sigh. Thanks, Griff. (WAIT! That's a smile, not an upside down frown!) Okay, so what do I want the shader to do? Well, I need to have a diffuse map, natch. I'd like it to use the normal map for detail, a specular map for subtle light variations across the surface, an emission or light map for the li...

sh1t.

So I need to write my own shaders before I can even begin?

Crow

Okay, I'm looking for an easy way into this. I'm an artist, not a programmer (dammit, Jim) and every which way I approach this, I'm confronted with indecipherable programming gibberish. I think the easiest way for me to ease myself into shaders is to learn how to set up the data in the Shipdata.plis...

Right then, This morning I ripped a chunk of code from Griff's Adder and dropped it in in place of my materials code, editing the texture names accordingly (and putting the corresponding .vertex and .fragment in the shaders folder.) Result! The shininess and specular effect is much closer to what I ...

Nah. I'm using CS2 and it complains when I try to save with an alpha channel, telling me I need to save it as a copy. When I open it again, there's nothing there. If I merge layers, retaining opacity - even anti-aliased opacity - it 'remembers' it. Almost as if rather than being on a seperate channe...

PNG's don't have an alpha channel as such. They just sort of remember when something is transparent. This is entirely wrong (and doesn’t actually make any sense). PNGs have an alpha channel, but some tools (*coughphotoshopcough*) don’t have the option to import it as a separate channel. Well, allri...

You can see here. The spots are solid white, the squares are solid black and they look exactly the same.

The bright areas are transparent on the spec map.

Crow

That's what I'm finding. I'm running out of time for today, but the testing I've done so far has proven that the actual colour or tone on the Specular map is irrelevant. The more solid the alpha channel, the darker grey the specular.

Crow