Skin Concept

[C2 Scientist]

Hey, what? Is that really what causes the material wipe? The solid green phenomenon? I also sometimes apply mats straight to objs, then after flattening some hierarchy they're within, they become solid green! The next time when I open up the 'project', it asks for some identifier thing, but I don't remember what it exactly said... and then sometimes the textures are really wiped out on the next load and replaced with gray, but sometimes they remain there normally! (which saves me from extra & unnecessary mapping)

Like when I was making my recent 'drones', and flattened every object in the end: (except wheels) some polys became green, but textures were always fine when I reloaded it, tricky. But with my addon cars this appeared more often.

Would selecting all faces for mat applying be more recommended method, then?

[Small Block]

yes, I noticed numerous things in your drones!

You're referring to the "flatten hierarchy" bug. Certain surfaces becoming solid green and Brender asking for INTERNAL_HIGHLIGHT_MATERIAL when you open it again. It's not directly linked to the material wipe when amalgamating, but I noticed that the only surfaces that went green when you flatten a hierarchy were those that hadn't had a material applied to their faces. If you just applied to the object, it may be why it happens even though it looks textured.

[C2 Scientist]

So that must be 'yes' to my last question, good. I'm glad someone knew how to fix these strange greeny effects! But what were the 'numerous things' you noticed in the drones? I don't think you went to flatten those because there isn't much to flatten there, did you?

Another material thing: Have you used BeMax much? Beroc has said there's a multimaterial limitation. Of course, there aren't exactly 'multimaterials' in C2 / PT2 as they are in 3DSMax or Gmax... but what I've seen, is that after a BeMax conversion, there are more than only one material in the thumbnail box in PT2, however, changing their settings (bitmaps used and such) doesn't seem to have any effect in the car, ie, making all the materials use some bitmap doesn't result in car polys showing that bitmap, as if there were materials that aren't used anywhere!

Any clue? Maybe I'll have to test with exporting different files from the modeling programs... it would be handy to be able to texture things just by editing the bitmap-used setting in materials, instead of manually creating new ones and mapping them self... oh well.

[Small Block]

Well, it wasn't really many things, rather the same thing repeated a large # of times, it being the dreaded green bug! You do know that to make it disappear, all you need to do is click "cancel" when it asks you for the material, then save, right? It may create materials that aren't applied anywhere, though, so you should check by reloading it right after. As for BeMax, I haven't really used it intensively, but I noticed that some of the C2 cars from LOD did have excess materials. It's not necessarily a BeMax bug, though.

[C2 Scientist]

Yeah I always cancel and save. Even with the addon cars, and it didn't work always...

Nevermind the latter question... I got the materials working, kind of... but they just seemed to be mapped to all polys in some objects... that was the limit, so it was like applying mats to whole objects, again.

[Lumberjack]

Interesting... when I applied the texture to many objects, I did notice that an attempt to do manual mapping showed only green, not the actual texture... but I didn't save or anything. No doubt I would have encountered this green problem if I had. So the jist is that PT2 can't handle mapping over more than one component? Stupid PT2, surely that could be modified... does that resource hacker allow things like this to be done?

[Small Block]

If you mean that the manual mapping window only showed a blank background(which happens to be green), it has nothing to do w/ the INTERNAL_HIGHLIGHT_MATERIAL green bug. It's just the fact that the texture isn't really mapped to any face.

[Lumberjack]

It is a bit odd... I remember applying a round light texture to some of the wheels and another part... I think the mapping was maintained on those objects, as the wheel texture was replaced by a nice light texture and it didn't look that bad. So that means just the texture on the object was changed, and not the mapping? So how does that work out, with "It's just the fact that the texture isn't really mapped to any face"... interesting.

[Forsaken Brolly]

sometimes in the manual mapping window, you will only see green becase of that texture having an alpha channel.

[Lumberjack]

Hmm... but I don't think this particular texture had one.

[Small Block]

Something that's been mentioned elsewhere: if you just select an object and then hit "apply material", Brender, for some reason does not consider the texture applied to the faces composing the object....just to the object in general. I know it doesn't make sense, but that's how it works. It is, btw a factor in some cars' slowing down of the game....one person did it almost everytime on his........

[C2 Scientist]

Dammit! Dammit again!

How about a mix then? Say, apply a wheel texture to a wheel object, but then map a tread texture to the tread polys? (so that the outer side of the wheel -the rim side-, and the inner side would still have the object-mapped textures) And how come that's something that slows the game down?

[Savage-Elve]

All my trucks have different textures for the rims and the side of the weels. But I never use this function 'apply material'.

Btw. there are some other interesting funks like slither (used for the water in levels) en roll. This function slowly move a texture up and down or circular. Then you only need one texture and it aplies to all mapped pollies.

[C2 Scientist]

Wasn't the circular feature that it moved a bit along a circular 'path'? But is there a real spin-funk? (such as the groove is) That'd be useful.

[Small Block]

How about a mix then? Say, apply a wheel texture to a wheel object, but then map a tread texture to the tread polys? (so that the outer side of the wheel -the rim side-, and the inner side would still have the object-mapped textures) And how come that's something that slows the game down?

Why the hell would mapping more than one texture to one object be a problem?? You can map as many materials to a single object as you like. Click the faces select knob, then hit the one just below. Now, when you click 2 faces (click at the seam b/w the 2), the current material will be mapped to them(it'll consider the 2 triangles as a square, so you'll have to edit the mapping). This is usually necessary b/c it resets the maps on those surfaces, thus preventing the adjacent ones from having their mapping screwed when you hit "d"(of, course, you can also detach the surfaces, map them and reassemble the different mapped parts).

Why it slows down the game I'm not sure....probably b/c it's been optimised to respond to mapped surfaces.....or something about attributes that forces it to perform more calculations?

[Savage-Elve]

I don't know of a spinning function. For the vents in the GP30 I simply used two textures.

And yes. the slither function is moving along a circular path, while roll is moving along a linear path (either y or z.)

Btw. I'm still figuring out why the Oshkosh is so very demanding for my comp. Maybe this skinning thing is a clue.

[C2 Scientist]

Didn't way it'd be a problem. Just wondered how much it would slow down to have partially object mapped and partially polygon mapped textures in an object. Oh well, not that I care so much of this... but I'll keep it in mind as another optimizing tip.

[@ob]

can u put 2 textures on the same polygone in PT2?

i tried... but only got this...

[C2 Scientist]

Hmm, how did you get even that?

Two textures in same polygon, even if it 'worked', I'd imagine there would be some clipping problems.

[K@VeRa]

If im not wrong C2 cant handle too much "high" quality shit...or even big tiffs...bigger than 512x512 i believe...i had some stuff like this whit some skins of mine...

[Savage-Elve]

256x256 is max, although PT2 can handle 1024x1024

[@ob]

dude... no wonder... i hade it up too..... 600x600 or somthin.

ill just resize that then...

i resised it... an now its on but it took off the other picture...

did i do something rong?

[C2 Scientist]

And 600x600 wasn't even the power of two, like 1,2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,512,1024. Only those can be used for texture dimensions in games. (64x128 , 32x32 , 512x1024 , 1024x16 , etc... not 600x600, not even 600x512)

Besides, you can't map two textures in a face by mapping one first, and then mapping another, if that's what you tried... it only replaces the first mapping.

That blue/chromish chrome looks good BTW.

[Forsaken Brolly]

hey @ob, if ye be usin PSP7, dont use greyscale. if you want it like that, grescale it, copy, undo, then paste as a layer. then merge all the layers to one.

[Apex2003]

[Qwerty_86]

That car is Small Block's Chrysler LeBaron.

And SHIFT+PrntScrn usually doesn't work. I think SHIFT+D saves it as a BMP to the data folder.

[Savage-Elve]

SHIFT+ALT+PRNTSCRN throws me out of carma and into ability menu. Very anoying. Got myself a screengrabber, but if you use right-shift_alt_prntscrn it could work also

[@ob]

erm... FB woulden grey scalin it make it... black an white in game?

'cause thers no point of havin that...

an' cant we put 2 textures on one poly in PT2?

if so... HOW?? i wanna know, then ill have a CRAZY CHROME!! an ill show all of yous