Shadow bugs

[eie]

Anyone knows what causes this? I'd like to make a nice screenshot of my track before releasing it, but it'd be weird with these kind of shadows on it, would be nice if I could avoid them somehow... Thanks in advance!

eie

[PCC_NS]

hi !

you talk about this?

if yes , it's a mod problem


Skeleton say to Crusades Mod:

They are very nice mods that you've posted but you need to understand how the specular works in the stadium. It needs an alpha. The mods look good but look bland because of no reflective areas which is where your specular comes into play. Whatever colour your specular is that's the colour that will shine back at you when light hits it, the only way it can do this is by the alpha in the specular (white shiny, black dull). Copy your specular image, make an alpha and paste then darken it so it doesn't shine to much. Also cut red channel from your normals and paste that into your normal alpha. This will make them correct and look more realistic to people with good graphics.

Sorry for telling you this now because I see you put a lot of work into them already

[eie]

Is this perhaps because I didn't include any Specular-files in my ZIP-folder? I thought TM automatically filled in the missing files, but now I'm not sure... :s

[Skeleton]

That shadow is because the normal isn't done right. If I can see the mod I will check it.

btw the stadium will use it's own speculars but because TM speculars use colour (most games just use a black and white specular) your mod will reflect the stadiums original colours and make your mods look wrong.

[eie]

Download link here:
http://www.trackmania-rpg.com/index.php?page=DownloadDBData&dataID=201
and it seems like I'm just gonna have to release it today, and fix the mod later...

[popgun]

PCC

Crusades Mod does not have this particular issue, nor do any of my mods.

Skeleton pointng out an issue with speculars not reflecting colours as well as he thinks they should is a different issue. All my normals are correct. Everyone who produces mods comes across this problem straight away, and it's easy to fix. There are 2 ways.

1. As Skeleton says 'cut red channel from your normals and paste that into your normal alpha'.i.e copy the contents of your images red channel and paste it into a new alpha channel, then save the image as DXT5 Interpolated alpha

or

2. Make a new channel and fill it with rgb grey 149,149,149, then save the image as DXT5 Interpolated alpha, to achieve a similar effect. The difference is negligible.

What Skeleton was talking to me about was colour reflection shine as opposed to just shine. One of the problems with modding is not shine but too much shine. I typically don't use an alpha on the the speculars because you can still get shine from the specular with NO alpha channel. You can see that in any of my mods.
For example:



or



Which I used to show Dose shine effects using mipmaps on another thread.

Skeleton's just pointing out that they could be slightly more realistic if I did this, which is fair comment.

Since I read his reply I made a photoshop action to convert the speculars on the Crusades mod to his preference and the results on my graphics card were so similar that I couldn't tell the difference. BUT, if other users graphics cards can give a better look on their pc's, then who am I to deny them, for very little effort on my part.



pop

[eie]

I've only got Photoshop Elements, which is quite terrible to use when I need to edit alpha, so would anyone please be really helpful and do it? =) (it's not a very big mod ^_^)

[popgun]

oops didn't notice your link.

I'll sort it and send a link tomorrow.

[Skeleton]

Anyone using photoshop and having difficulty with normals and speculars I made this video that might help. Details in description on youtube with download link for the action I made.

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPY9ziHGKRU[/video]

[eie]

I'll need to have it finished before midnight of this date (18th)

[popgun]

Check your pm

[eie]

Thank you very much =) but I think there is a problem with the mod :s

Any idea why these borders are orange and not showing their texture ?

[popgun]

Thats common when you dont restart the game after the mod downloads. I'm out for a few hours, but will check when I get back anyway..

[eie]

awesome :D:D I cannot express how grateful I am for your help, you are the best