Star Wars: Republic Commando RTX

[dusk trail]

Star Wars

[static mason]

best ss fr

[static mason]

Wow you are growing as an artist

So jelly of how good you are getting

[dry shoal]

What I've done is nothing compared to your car work everyone's inspiring one another, that's what makes this such a cool community

[dry shoal]

Little update:

Currently getting acquainted with the GitHub workflow as part of the shared work being done on assets between myself and the Republic Commando Remastered guys (non-Remix project). As it stands now I'm way too messy with organization and whatnot, suboptimal layouts that make it easy to lose stuff. Soon enough things should be far more structured and therefore easier to keep everything on track. Thinking about it now I should probably open a private repository for RC RTX* so completed assets are in a fully dedicated space

My work so far has been extremely iterative. I'll get something in-game, make changes, injest the new version and replace the previous while the files are still there unused, all sorts of stuff like that. I need a smarter way of working and I hope to have that in the near future

Not long ago I also mentioned getting a custom Remix-targeted mod for Republic Commando. It was made by Leon, the same person behind SWRCFix, the RC modding wiki, etc. It has a lot of promise but I've had some issues getting it working on my end and he's on vacation so it'll be a bit till I can get on that lol

[modern isle]

I think you could benefit from a style guide, as long as you're willing to actually follow it.

[dry shoal]

You mean for the art side of things right?

[modern isle]

No for project organization

[dry shoal]

[modern isle]

Project organization is half the battle

[dry shoal]

So I've noticed

[modern isle]

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fPwKbA4prmOwzJEPPH3G95JHGy5vpIi34HzOv-BoeZU/edit?usp=sharing

You're welcome to use the one I adopted :)

Generally you should explicitly split the project files and your working files. In my case I have a Folder called Remix_UT99GOTY (the prefix follows my naming convention, commissions have the client name as the prefix for example, personal work has Rune as the prefix, but that's not that important here anyway)
in that folder is the RemixProject, with all the mod files. Next to it is my Materials and Meshes folder, both with subfolders named after the original package name so that I can find my replacements based on the OG assets.

[dry shoal]

This is great stuff

Total side question, but is this possible in Remix? I'm guessing the answer is no

@modern isle

[modern isle]

unfortunately not right now

actually a good point though

@royal sonnet sorry to bother, would channel packing for textures be feasible? I'd be totally fine with a rigid solution as well, given that the changes to the shader shouldn't add much complexity.

I'm not sure if RTX IO is the bees knees and makes packing obsolete or anything, just curious.

[royal sonnet]

the textures are separated to optimize memory access on the GPU, since we don't always need every channel.

might slow down load time a bit, but it improves framerate to have them separate.

[dry shoal]

That's a fair reason. Damn shame for the productivity/organization side though. That said this style guide should help a lot with that

[modern isle]

makes me wonder if a small optimization would be possible with normal and roughness though as in almost all cases if a normal is present, a roughness is also used and the octahedral normals don't require the blue channel since they compute Z at runtime, right?

UX would suffer however so probably not.

[royal sonnet]

It's been a couple years since we looked at that, so it's possible that some degree of packing might be worth looking into...
but it'd be far more expensive to have to support multiple different modes, and we wouldn't want to break all the existing assets.

[dry shoal]

Assuming the naming conventions are consistent as well as the channels used when injesting, I imagine it could be done automatically. Like Remix would know that an Injested octahedral normal would have roughness in X channel when selecting that normal in the roughness box

[modern isle]

yeah I assumed as much, it ain't a simple "add a .r here and a .g there" affair.

[royal sonnet]

the problem is having branches that act differently for different materials

[dry shoal]

What does that mean

[modern isle]

would a global variable potentially solve this? i.e. new project you either go for individual textures or you use channel packing, but you're locked in for the whole project into that choice?

[modern isle]

all or nothing is preferable performance wise

[royal sonnet]

If your brick material has separate roughness / normal textures, and your tile material has them combined, then when the ray hits the material, we would need to check which mode it is in and access the data depending on the mode. That is much more expensive than just having a single standard way to access the data

a global variable would fix that branching behavior, but it also means that going forward we need the code to support both paths, we need to test both paths, we need the tooling to support both paths, etc etc etc. It'd be a big maintanence burden

if the perf uplift was large it might be worth it.. but I doubt it'd make a big difference

[modern isle]

true, I'm just thinking about compression and filesize on disk benefits as well.

[dry shoal]

Not worth it then I suppose. I think if the auto population Pete mentioned comes to fruition (selecting base color -> all 4 maps populate via file naming) then at least the workflow side of things should be okay

[royal sonnet]

size and access speed in VRAM is generally much more important than size on disk.

[dry shoal]

I get the testing to see which map it is bit, but wouldn't VRAM consumption be lower + quicker access if the same asset is being used for multiple things

[royal sonnet]

it's the difference between having

[(a, b), (a, b), (a, b)]

and

[a, a, a]
[b, b, b]```

If you always access `a` and `b` at the same time, the 1st one is a tiny bit better.  but if you access one without accessing the other, the 2nd is much better.

[modern isle]

not necessarily, if for example the texture packing includes roughness, metallic and height and you only use a roughness map, then the shader still samples the texture for metallic and height, even though those are unused by your material. A constant value is sooooo much quicker to access and read than a full texture.

[royal sonnet]

the space in VRAM is the same

texture packing makes sense when you're dealing with custom shaders that will definitely use every part of the packed texture, since that minimizes the number of lookups it has to do. It doesn't make as much sense when you have a single shader for all materials.

unfortunately, since rays can bounce anywhere, having a separate shader per material is much more expensive when raytracing

[dry shoal]

Understood. Thanks for the explanation, Mark

Okay fine I'll add the comma!

[dry shoal]

Oh we're about to be organized baby

[modern isle]

if only git wasn't awful for organizing non-code files 😅

[dry shoal]

What makes you say that

[modern isle]

Perforce and PlasticCSM existing makes me say that git is terrible for assets

git has trouble with large files if it isn't gitL...AM? LTM? gitsomething with an L

[burnt light]

you can store large files through releases for free, but it won't let you put them in the main repo unless you have LFS (which is what you meant)

[modern isle]

That's the one. Large File Storage!

[dry shoal]

What do we mean by large files? Because if I store only completed models and textures, I doubt they'd exceed a certain limit

Also what's ur response to this individual @modern isle

[burnt light]

100 MB i think

i couldn't add the newer AI models to the PBRify repo directly because of it

[dry shoal]

Oh that should be plenty if I have the files split up

[modern isle]

Unity bought Plastic SCM, you can figure out the rest from there. We used Perforce on all our projects

[dusk trail]

Git LFS is pain, Perforce all the way, that's personally what I use for pretty much all my repo needs

[dry shoal]

Is there a free version for a noobie like me to benefit from

[modern isle]

P4 Helix has a few free seats iirc

[dusk trail]

It does

[modern isle]

https://www.perforce.com/products/helix-core/free-version-control

[dusk trail]

Up to I think 5

That being said you can technically have multiple people on the same user but different workspace, altho that has a lot of issues sometimes and idk if it's against their tos or not

[modern isle]

-ish

[dusk trail]

Fr tho Perforce is an awesome repo tool

[modern isle]

just make sure to release files after you're done editing...

[dusk trail]

Ye

[modern isle]

nothing more annoying than trying to edit a file and seeing it checked out by someone who's clearly asleep right now and obviously not working on it.

[dusk trail]

Dude I've had people on community projects who just checked out half the repo then went mia for months and never checked their stuff back in

[modern isle]

oof

[dry shoal]

That's a society moment

[dusk trail]

Luckily I was the repo manager so I just removed him and nuked his stuff

Dude never came back so eh

[naive robin]

Doesn’t perforce require some sort of server setup tho?

[dry shoal]

That appears to be the case

[naive robin]

Yea we went through this whole thing when setting up u2.

Perforce fit perfectly but it is pricey if you’re not a studio.

[dry shoal]

Technically I do have a low power consumption PC I could use as a server but it seems a bit much given this project doesn't have a coordinated team

[naive robin]

We also looked at https://www.anchorpoint.app but it does not have usd preview support which was less than ideal

[dry shoal]

Ooh I like the UI

[naive robin]

It’s a “unique” looking software. Still costs money tho.

[dusk trail]

Yes, I use a Linux dedicated bare metal server running Ubuntu myself

[dry shoal]

Work continues today question is what to work on

[dry shoal]

I think I'm doing this right

[dry shoal]

I couldn't decide what to work on so I did a little gaming

[late jetty]

Hey Auto - are most of the indoor levels black like this for you?

[dry shoal]

I should mention that's where I stopped tagging stuff for remix. Try enabling auto sky detect. If that doesn't fix it then you may need to tag lightmaps

[late jetty]

Ahh bingo, sky detect by camera position without depth flags fixed it - thanks!

[dry shoal]

cool! haven't actually played that far with remix so it's interesting to see it

I'm too focused on art lol

the assets being shared from the RC Remastered team are really great. Before and after of TheMan's model with a quick color thrown in + metalness

[late jetty]

Nice! Those look great

I thiiiiink I remember you maybe investigated the shifting terrain textures - was there ever a fix for that, or was nvidia gunna look internally for a fix? I know a few games have this issue, far cry and battlefront 1 on some terrains

[dry shoal]

I don't recall that actually. But if it follows your camera then it might be throwing a fit with how I got the helmet working. In the texture categorization, try removing all HUD elements labeled under "terrain". See if that fixes the ground moving with your view

[late jetty]

No dice, but I'll fiddle with it. I think I remember sometimes adjusting the scene scale and looking for a possible lightmap could fix it. I remember Mark saying old games sometimes use alpha blending to transition between terrain textures and miiiiight be what's happening here

#1220295377576656906 message

[dry shoal]

it probably is. For example much of the debris (almost all of it) surrounding the arena in the first mission doesn't render correctly

comparison for reference

I should mention the geo here doesn't match the originals, I was testing some stuff

but it's using the original textures that show ingame

on the original assets

[dry shoal]

I've begun working towards organizing my project and asset files. Going through GitHub for completed assets I think will make a big difference. The problem is I have so many blender project files that it's hard to get a clear head on what needs to be done. I have WIP versions of many things

Thankfully with instaMAT I've managed to keep a good few things tracked just by keeping multiple projects within one overarching package. I think it makes the most sense to continue all of my work within that package rather than have a whole bunch of different files

[dusk trail]

[dusk trail]

This was so long ago, but I was wondering how you went about making the height maps exactly, they look very close to what I had made with real geo

[dry shoal]

Real geo better

[modern isle]

Signed Distance Fields

[dusk trail]

Real geo takes hours to do

[dry shoal]

For cuts like that? ok I missed a few things

[modern isle]

want the instamat file for this?

[dusk trail]

Sure I'd love to take a look at it closer in depth

[dry shoal]

He cooks, you'll get good stuff

[dry shoal]

Why do signed distance fields appear to do everything

[dusk trail]

I add bevels and manually do the sharps grating and ect, it can take awhile yeah

Depends on the mesh tho

[modern isle]

https://tenor.com/view/magic-gif-26166638

[dusk trail]

[modern isle]

nah for real, SDFs are great for creating shapes of any kind, that dopefish is entirely made with SDF

[dry shoal]

This is one of those things where I think access to add-ons would be a huge time saver. Because I think I could recreate most of that fairly quickly

[dry shoal]

Ok I need that how do I use it

[dusk trail]

Same

[dry shoal]

The trim that gets used everywhere needs a replacement

[modern isle]

SDF Shape is the base and then you can use SDF Operation to add or subtract the shapes from each other with optional rounding to get smooth edges, as the final step you use SDF Fill Effect to solidify it into a mask.

[dry shoal]

So is it like booleaning specific shapes?

[modern isle]

not really boolean since SDF are gradients

[dry shoal]

Oh no my brain is gonna break isn't it

[dusk trail]

[dry shoal]

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1196836285545971712/1248706220760633456/Screenshot_20240607-143208_Discord_1.jpg?ex=666c8cca&is=666b3b4a&hm=103a1d604f3b5564666ae9345474cd07eaaf5ac0ce287c86a74ca15bac1df63b&

@modern isle I would use SDFs to make this wouldn't i

[modern isle]

you absolutely could

[dry shoal]

Omg I can totally pull that off

[dry shoal]

I think that's for @dusk trail

[modern isle]

for you as well

so you can check a look at how SDFs work

[dry shoal]

[dusk trail]

https://tenor.com/view/cr1tikal-penguinz0-meme-woo-yeah-baby-gif-19316511

[modern isle]

oh y'know, just set displacement mode to POM instead of tesselation in instamat

[dry shoal]

Yeah tesselation sucks

[dusk trail]

POM all the way

Cheap displacement for the win

[dry shoal]

I don't really know the difference all I know is POM is what Remix uses so

[wind briar]

Tessellation dynamically subdivides the geometry based on camera distance, then a displacement map is used to push the new verts out to create real geometry

POM fakes it all in the shader

[dry shoal]

So POM is more based?

[modern isle]

Tesselation would be better actually, but it has its own issues

it all comes down to shifting costs

POM is veeeerrrry heavy on pixelshader cost, but tesselation is very heavy on vertex and base pass cost.

You (read as: project lead with tech artists) have to weigh your costs and pick the effects you can afford. Which is why so many games don't have much POM as the additional shading cost is not worth it outside of maybe for small decals like bullet impacts and such.

Ever wondered why ragdolls are generally not synchronized in multiplayer games? Similar thing, the cost of transfering all the additional data (and interpolating between it to make it not look jittery) is not worth the bandwidth cost.

[wind briar]

Bless you, seeded physics engines

[modern isle]

Reminds me when I made a persistent destructible railing feature for a prototype, usually debris like that vanishes after a while. Not on my watch, I did have to cheat a little but it was totally worth it.

[wind briar]

Oooh that sounds awesome!

[mossy void]

Everyone should adopt something like Nanite

[wind briar]

Nah, people should wait until the tech is more mature

Nanite in its current state has a ton of different issues that still need to be solved

[burnt light]

i love it when detail like that persists

[mossy void]

They are basically all solved at this point. Skinned mesh support is in the preview build

will make it to main branch next major version update

[wind briar]

All solved my butt X)

WPO still has massive struggles and things like vertex painting based workflows suffer heavily still

[mossy void]

I said basically all solved

They fixed the major issues that prevented it from being viable in real game releases

[wind briar]

It's certainly better than before, but it still has many drawbacks and unless you're epic themselves you'll struggle to see the same benefits from it that Fortnite gets

[mossy void]

I was talking about other developers also innovating with their own versions of it, nobody else is actually doing it

[wind briar]

That's not true, there are plenty of folks investing into virtual geometry rn

[mossy void]

See no sign of it anywhere, Nanite is already in shipped games

And loads of upcoming AAA releases since so many studios switched to UE5

[wind briar]

Sure UE5 is definitely on the forefront of it 😛 AIn't nobody disputing that

But others are looking into it too

[mossy void]

Alan Wake 2 is probably the closest I saw to Nanite geometry density

but it had some really bad LOD issues on vegetation

super aggressive

I had to use a mod to stop the pop in a few meters in front of camera

but it cost a decent amount of performance

[wind briar]

In fact if I recall correctly there were some leaks from unity recently that even they're implementing something similar

So you'll see it popping up elsewhere very soon ^^

[mossy void]

That was some Chinese version of Unity

[wind briar]

Right?

Just shows that stuff is being done? What's it matter who is doing it lol

[mossy void]

that I'm not sure has anything to do with the main one everyone uses

Unity has so many other problems that virtual geometry should be the last thing on their sights lol

[wind briar]

Right but that's not what we were talking about 😛

https://forum.unity.com/threads/nano-tech-similar-to-nanite-high-detailed-rendering-for-hdrp-urp-and-built-in-rp.1292223/

You've also got this lad doing work on it

So stuff is happening if you just look around

[modern isle]

Same, I also made a persistent blood, scorchmark and snow trail effect all rolled into one render target, the only limitation being that I had to limit it to 150m range with the textures perfectly following the player and fading out stuff that gets close to the borders aka far away.

Still have a sketch of it on my whiteboard

[dry shoal]

Meanwhile the finals with fully server-side player movement and synced destruction physics

[modern isle]

Ever looked at the data transfer rate of that game? Especially compared to something like cs2

[dry shoal]

Tbf counter strike is as lightweight as it gets in some ways

For a major shooter

I would definitely be curious to see the numbers for the finals though, I'm sure it's considerable

[dry shoal]

Getting some updates on the Remix compatibility mod used to generate stable mesh hashes for any material. I didn't find any success with it when I tried, either there was no change in behavior from vanilla or, when using it through shortcut commands, instant crashing. Found out where the problem was coming from and got a debug version of the mod to test later today, as it appears to be working perfectly

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1241118293855703062/1251193832243200150/image.png?ex=666db08f&is=666c5f0f&hm=6351b3d175d8442fad7ceb6a5d7a86d6b6d21feaf4f8d4a7ef5e1a70e7d28f38&

This is a screenshot of it in action

@sick river in the past I had an issue where deleting the original stable mesh also deleted the light source I would have parented to it. Is this still an issue? If so then this mod will likely need some changes and/or workarounds

[dry shoal]

it's always easy to forget how gloomy and dim the arena is on the first level

@modern isle one of the light properties in the toolkit changes how intense the shadows are right? I feel like I looked around for it and didn't get any differences. Regardless, I think softer shadows might be the play here, gotta experiment

[modern isle]

not sure what you mean by intense, are you referring to the sharpness of the penumbra? Yes that's angle

[dry shoal]

Most likely that. I feel like I messed with that value but maybe my memory is wrong

I'll look into it again

[modern isle]

the angle changes how quickly shadows get fuzzy over distance from caster to catcher

[dry shoal]

But the distant light doesn't have any relative location, just rotation

[modern isle]

why is this relevant to how penumbras work?

I think you misunderstand the concept

[dry shoal]

Ah I understand, makes sense

Thanks for the visual

[modern isle]

here's a clearer showcase of what the angle changes

[dry shoal]

yeah that's exactly what I'm looking for. Maybe I can get closer to the original look, see if I like it

[sick river]

I think on the public build it still is. There was a task to work on that I saw recently, I'm not sure if it was merged or not though

[dry shoal]

Got it, thanks. Definitely makes things a tad more complicated but I should be able to figure it out. For example, if there's any replacement mesh parented under a deleted original mesh, it'll still keep those light sources right

[sick river]

I'm not sure exactly what the bug is and what workarounds would be, I just recall seeing something similar

[dry shoal]

originally I wanted to parent lights to the triangles seen in the screenshot, then delete the triangles. Instead I would make a tiny quad or something to go with each triangle so the light stays around when I remove the original tri

[dry shoal]

from my understanding this is the behavior I've seen before. Like replacing a light fixture model involves the model itself then adding a light. In that situation you can delete the original mesh just fine

but adding the light and deleting the original mesh without a replacement mesh would not work. iirc

[sick river]

Yeah, that sounds about right with that I remember, you would probably need a microscopic cube to workaround this

[dry shoal]

I'm fine with that, especially since I should be able to offset/scale it any way I need without affecting the attached light. Like having the cube far below each blaster laser so they're always outside of the level, leaving 0 chance of the player seeing them

Honestly I'm just excited thanks to base game modding that this is possible at all. I can have a unique static mesh for any original material in the game, bar none. I can also share the same static mesh between multiple materials depending on how I assign their values in an ini file included with this mod

Textbook example of base game modding enabling Remix to push even further

Previously I would've had to manually edit the properties of every single actor associated with a given material to append a static mesh onto it. Which also requires me to import random anchor cubes through Unreal 2 directly so they don't share hashes

A huge headache solved if it goes to plan

[dry shoal]

angle set to 0 vs 180. Moving the slider doesn't change anything it seems

[modern isle]

Say... You don't have two directional lights still, right?

Because the right image does look different

[dry shoal]

Considering it has a unique icon that I didn't see when I flew around looking for this one, no

Also I'd see double shadows

[modern isle]

not if they're in the same direction

but an easy check is to just delete the directional light and see if the world goes dark

[dry shoal]

I moved the rotation the other day so it would've been immediately apparent

[dry shoal]

Roger, I'll try it soon. No harm in double checking

[dry shoal]

@modern isle 180 vs 360 angle

[modern isle]

Dude

Try 1 and 5

Not HEMISPHERE AND FULL SPHERE

Those are completely wack numbers

You're inside the Dyson sphere with 360

An angle of 180° is wild

Iirc our sun is like 0.54° or so?

[dry shoal]

THAT'S THE DEFAULT VALUE

okay I'll try it in a sec, UV unwrapping something

[dry shoal]

yep this worked perfectly

in my defense the UX is like the opposite of what it should be if the useable values are so small in range

nvm now it's not doing anything...

[modern isle]

when in doubt check in-game

[dry shoal]

it just occurred to me that angle =/= cone angle

I was messing with the wrong thing

1 vs 5

[analog wedge]

10/10 dilta skwodds

[naive robin]

That is correct

[dry shoal]

is it basically a measure of the surface area of the sun relative to the sky

[naive robin]

Solve for apparent angle

[severe flare]

Is it fucked up that didn’t even notice we were in the arena on my first play through?

[dry shoal]

Lol depends on the last time you saw the movies. I haven't seen episode 2 in probably a whole decade at least

[burnt light]

i don't think i'd have ever noticed lmao

[dry shoal]

I didn't realize it was the arena until I explicitly saw it referenced in the game files

[modern isle]

I didn't know geonosis only had one arena

[dry shoal]

I forget if there are multiple but I know the one in the movie (and I believe SWRC) are like

the big one

it's a significant location. Pretty sure SWRC takes place around the same time the Geonosis battle is happening in episode 2 I wanna say

[dry shoal]

ngl the incompatibility with the latest remix builds is low key pissing me off

[naive robin]

Don't use bleeding edge in production

[dry shoal]

it's like with each launch it's getting slightly further and further into the menu

[dry shoal]

normally I'd agree but remix has been the exception for the most part

only recently I think have people started seeing meaningful regressions

@royal sonnet how unlikely is it that more recent crashing issues could be related to shader compilation? it feels like each launch lets me get a little bit further, and whenever I do anything semi significant -> another crash

^

So about this

Switching to DXVK build 565 works fine. The latest bridge with it also works fine

So there's a regression going on around where I found issues when testing

and that regression is related to dxvk

Now I'm running to an issue where keyboard inputs are kinda fucky? The remix overlay and even moving in-game sometimes are delayed or take multiple presses to work. Mouse works fine

I still get crashing but it's much delayed now. Dunno what's going on. Gonna share logs then eat

[royal sonnet]

It's a tricky one. I haven't been paying close attention, but I know the people working on it have had to reach out to multiple other teams at Nvidia to try to figure out wtf is causing it.

[dry shoal]

relating to the kbm issue, could that also somehow be remix? unsure what this log entails but it sounds about right with how hard it is to move around rn

Ok I'm gonna go crazy, now the mouse is just obscenely fucked with the overlay. Incredibly slow and never stops moving, it just drifts wherever it was heading last

okay the answer is yes. @royal sonnet Downgrading from the latest Remix bridge to the 0.5.0 bridge fixed unplayable input latency/response

everything seems to work as I'd hope with dxvk 565 and the 0.5.0 bridge. Latest bridge has input issues, latest dxvk likes to crash shortly after launching, maybe shader related

I'm truly lost. There's something absolutely reproduceable here but I'm just trying to make my mod

Latest bridge also had massively worse performance. Like I'm talking 2-3x different. Now I'm back to getting over 100fps w/ FG

[royal sonnet]

that sounds like a pretty serious regression. Could you post up a github issue for it?

[dry shoal]

Fuck it, guess this is gonna be my night. Yeah, gonna take a break from the headaches and go back to testing bridge versions to see exactly which build makes everything go haywire

After I find the latest safe bridge version, I can do the same for dxvk

[dry shoal]

https://github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/rtx-remix/issues/542

hope this is helpful @royal sonnet

[royal sonnet]

I thought the bridge bug was the input performance?

and the crash came from the runtime

[dry shoal]

funny you mention that, because they are two separate issues

with seperate bridge versions

so I'm gonna be testing that now. I know the latest bridge commit consistently has this input performance + general low performance. Gonna see when it started

[dry shoal]

https://github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/rtx-remix/issues/543

@royal sonnet and here's the second issue, also with references to which commit the issues started with

Finally got around to writing up reports and did two of them back to back

now I can return to working on my mod. ||the above meme is a joke||

[royal sonnet]

Thanks!

[modern isle]

Sounds like the issue I have with ut2k4, renix ui only works when I open a game menu first and then use alt backspace in the remix ui

[dry shoal]

That didn't work either. Mouse became responsive in the overlay (wasn't prior) but the clicks would always hit the wrong things and all sorts of other annoying things that make it not a viable solution

[modern isle]

are you running fullscreen or windowed?

[dry shoal]

Happened with both

But remember, the entire game's input was fkd up. The overlay was the least of my worries

[dry shoal]

WIP DC15a for the clones

[dry shoal]

I was bored so I wanted to give our very low poly friend here a chance to try the unfinished gun

[late jetty]

stir wes: repebic colmende

The gun's looking great!

[dry shoal]

just wait until it's complete

banger incoming

[analog wedge]

republic covfefe

[severe flare]

woa i remember the clones looking wayyyy better than that wtf

[past escarp]

That's definitely a LOD model. Probably the lowest LOD.

[static mason]

Are the clone troopers gonna be redone or nah

[modern isle]

Oh that's absolutely a LOD4 or so model.

[dry shoal]

This is not what the clones actually look like. This is a lower LOD model since I took the the remix scene capture super far away from this spot. The player never sees this level of detail in real play

[dry shoal]

That's the plan

[static mason]

moment

[modern isle]

Hmmm speaking of LODs, I reckon that using the set command could help with making actors always use the highest lod without editing existing packages

Would need to investigate UE2s command structure as I only know how to do it in 3 and 4.

Random thought that crossed my mind, what happens if you use behindview 1

[dry shoal]

This would be a life saver but I don't know of any way to do that. I have someone who's worked on some scripts for the project but AFAIK there's no way of doing this easily in UE2

@deep gulch or is there

[modern isle]

If the set command works you can overwrite class settings

[dry shoal]

I've looked through the commands available in RC from the modding wiki, which includes UE2 commands but it's not unlikely they don't have all of it. It's UE2 after all

[modern isle]

Worth a try

From the top of my head it expects 3 parameters.
set Classname Variabletochange Value

[dry shoal]

An RC modder I'm working with thinks it should be doable via renderer modifications. If it could be done via console/scripts I think he would've mentioned it just going off of his experience

[dry shoal]

What has this done in newer versions of UE?

[modern isle]

since the beginning it has been the third person command, it worked in most games even if they didn't have a third person mode

[dry shoal]

Oh then yes the game has this

Commands can trigger a third person mode

It puts a rudimentary model of the clone commando in place of the player

[modern isle]

the set command is very powerful for debugging, I need to doublecheck if what I'm thinking can be overwritten. The only thing that might need to be checked is if it persists between level transitions, loads or the like.

[dry shoal]

The Remix targeted script I have already runs all scripts again on level load including death. So that should to be an issue

Speaking of the third person view, I just asked about the possibility of having that third person model rendering even in first person. That would let me have proper player character shadows

[modern isle]

I believe that should be possible without requiring the third person camera position and all that.

[dry shoal]

I've been told it isn't really doable in that way since the default player actor only has walking animations. Nothing for reloading and such

So I'd have to do something that goes a bit deeper to get the full third person animation set reflected in shadows

For that reason I'm putting that idea on the back burner. Definitely something I want to do though

[modern isle]

would that be a dealbreaker?

[dry shoal]

It would certainly be unideal

Especially if I want near AAA quality which is my long term goal

[modern isle]

and you can fix that "in the long term", but personally I'd rather have a feature working but not at its best, instead of not at all. But that's just me

[dry shoal]

You think it's worth having just as a quick and dirty placeholder? That's not a bad idea

[modern isle]

keep in mind that there are plenty of games that don't have correctly synced third person animations with their first person counterpart, this also applies to games that do show your own shadow.

[dry shoal]

I know, I never meant to get a true 1:1 match with the first person animations. Just something that represents the player in a satisfying way

I think reloading and seeing your shadow stand still would be kind of a vibe killer

But if it has some generic reload animation then that's good enough to sell it

[dry shoal]

threw this together for a couple modders assisting me. If you're curious to try the latest/most stable setup I could find, drag and drop this. I tried to make it fairly seamless

don't wanna upload the rtx.conf alone bc different remix builds have some regressions

don't know if I'm comfortable saying this is good to use for anyone wanting to try the game in any capacity with remix, but ig if people test it they'll let me know

[late jetty]

YOOOO!! I know what I'm doing tonight

[dry shoal]

Just a heads up, it's meant for use without the helmet enabled

[late jetty]

Sounds good! I was gunna test last night but got into a rabbit hole on a project idea

But today I will

[dry shoal]

Screenshot of what I said to the modders when I shared it for a bit more context

[dry shoal]

Would any star wars nerds here happen to have sources for official artwork/collections of screenshots or some shit to use as reference material :)

[dry shoal]

more progress

I'm gonna lose my mind at how slow this process is

not the modeling, the modeling combined with everything else

most of today relating to project work was just testing the damn game to make sure everything was in order, troubleshoot a couple things, researching texture names for the base game Remix mod. Then I did a little on the model

if I don't have more direct help on this project in particular this is gonna take so goddamn long

https://tenor.com/view/anime-headesk-bang-headbang-dessert-gif-17584997

[late jetty]

Yeah it's working great!

[dry shoal]

Good to hear

[naive robin]

@dry shoal https://youtu.be/fosxlszKGQM?si=on8qofSuz6x3OTGW skip to about 45 min in.

Also; https://www.artstation.com/artwork/L3NKel

[dry shoal]

Pinning this for myself bc I can

And yeah I've gotten Greg Knight's concept art, the ones that have been released that is

[static mason]

I thought I said no star wars....... anyways

[severe flare]

Would it be possible to release a build with fully remastered lighting before the entire remodeling venture is complete? From what very little I understand it seems that lighting does like a solid 80% of the “making things look new” whilst taking way less time to handle (but again what the fuck do I know)

[wind briar]

"Making things look new"

More like

"Making sure you can really tell that the old assets aren't holding up anymore"

[severe flare]

I haven’t run a build myself so I obv can’t properly scrutinize but the lighting overhauls looked rly cool so far

[wind briar]

It has the effect of making any non-remastered surface look like shiny cardboard

[severe flare]

I mean I agree overall, but it’s kinda true both ways (looking at the Battlefront 2 remastered mod)

[severe flare]

Oh riiight, is that just the default setting in Remix for surfaces it doesn’t recognize?

Still, that’s gotta be like at least my third favourite type of cardboard

[wind briar]

No it's just that oldschool diffuse based textures just don't hold up well with modern lighting

[severe flare]

Gotcha, and if ur gonna redo the texture might as well throw in the PBR, am I following?

[wind briar]

They have baked in lighting already which totally just go against the newly added lights and end up making no sense, that on top of the fact that there are no roughness or other PBR settings to make the materials behave decently just makes the surfaces overblown and weird looking

[wind briar]

Yeah if you want decent results out of a physically based renderer like remix, then you're going to need your PBR values

[river tendon]

When you replace the textures with proper PBR materials, you'll need to redo all the lighting setup.

[late jetty]

Yeah it’d be the other way around, lighting would be the last thing to implement to make things look new. Here’s what remix looks like on an old game with no PBR

[severe flare]

So you can’t have one without the other is what I’m hearing

[wind briar]

I mean you CAN, it just won't look good

[severe flare]

That shiny cardboard anaology from earlier has got some merit

But riddle me this

All things considered I think this looks kinda nice

Maybe I just misinterpreted the “no replacement assets” thing, because what I ASSUME that means is that auto didn’t adjust them at all, but maybe it just means he didn’t swap out the models

That said I have NO clue where the light in that room is coming from

[river tendon]

A dark scene can hide many visual artifacts.

[late jetty]

Oh absolutely, for me personally the lighting alone is incredible, seeing old games have realistic lighting effects still blows me out the water. It would be possible to just take capture and tweak the lighting/add lights and just go with that. But the runtime actually does well with the game as-is during my playthroughs

[severe flare]

Oh sweet sweet validation

[wind briar]

Darkness DOES hide a lot indeed

[severe flare]

Make the entire game black case solved

And also remove the geonosian that kidnaps the clone at the start because it makes me sad

Also also swap out all of the clone models with stormtroopers and give them boobs

And flamethrowers

[modern isle]

Feedback has been noted

[dry shoal]

That's just where the original light source in the original game is lol

There's so many random floating lights

But that's just a product of the era and how that lighting worked

[severe flare]

Oh that creates the really interesting challenge of adding lighting that doesn’t compromise the atmosphere whilst also…making sense diegetically

[modern isle]

With pathtracing and PBR, creating interesting lighting and composing a scene is generally easier to do.

I still remember the days of ye olde UE where you had to calculate lighting over night just to find it looking slightly off and having to tweak it before a final light compile that might take days at worst.

[severe flare]

Ur bio is rly intriguing tbh, if it’s not any trouble could you talk a bit abt the games u worked on?

[wind briar]

You say ye olde but I can't count the amount of times I had to do this even with UE4 projects hah

[dry shoal]

Yep, it'll certainly be a challenge. I can't promise that it'll be true to the original for a few reasons. One of course being that the technology is vastly different in ways that can't really be compensated for, and the other is simply that lights were thrown around willy nilly in places that make no sense. But that also means I'm going to have to take creative liberties to add physical light sources that were not there before. So literally adding fixtures into the scene so it's lit properly

[modern isle]

Last gig was working with Unknown Worlds Entertainment (the subnautica lads) on Natural Selection 2 and in a more limited capacity Moonbreaker. I can elaborate more tomorrow since I'm already in bed and was about to sleep.

[modern isle]

GPU lightmass was such a godsend, too bad it had all those bugs and came so late :(

[wind briar]

Yeaah never managed to get it to a functional level for production due to timelines sadly

[modern isle]

It would've been fine if it was fit for preview purposes, but that lightmass used an entirely different method of calculation which gave it a different look. Making the somewhat real time ish preview pointless

And then lumen happened, too baD YOU CAN'T BAKE THAT EITHER. WOULD'VE BEEN A REALLY NICE FEATURE EPIC.... REALLY NICE INDEED.

[wind briar]

Lumen is driving me more and more insane by the minute I swear

There's something so disheartening about seeing a 120 FPS scene just tank down to 50 haha

[dry shoal]

Question about that, for mostly static environments is there a reason they can't do something akin to "realtime" baking? As in lower sample counts that make a lightmap that sits in VRAM that updates at longer intervals to save performance

The finals does something sorta like this with their probe based RTGI. If you use the lowest RT setting, the quality is the same it just takes more time for the lighting to be accurate (as accurate as probes can be)

[wind briar]

They just don't want to

Lumen also works on a TON of screenbase fakery

[dry shoal]

That would explain why the quality sometimes feels like it's way oversold

[wind briar]

Don't get me wrong, for being a realtime thing it's very impressive

[dry shoal]

It's great for the overall image but any details are iffy

[wind briar]

But so far I haven't seen anyone make any use of it except for epic in a way that performs well and looks good

Lumens screenspace fakery is veeeeeeeeeery obvious though

Especially if you're making a game that isn't a continuous first person camera

Like if you ever make a camera swap or the camera moves a bit too fast, BAM! The lighting gets all kinds of fucked

[late jetty]

I think that’s why it’s taken Fortnite forever to make first person

They announced it awhile ago, but I’m sure they’re running into that problem

They probably will only allow you to swap cameras in the main menus

[naive robin]

Still have to do that for lighting design since radiosity is cpu limited.

[naive robin]

Really good baked lighting, like valve’s, takes a lot of bounces. Way too many for realtime.

[naive robin]

Also you have to adaptively subdivide the mesh to get nice shadow edges which is a process.

[dry shoal]

before and after. Texture still pending

another pov

for those of you here who also go to the #asset-creation channel I apologize for all the repeats lmao

I just get excited when I finish stuff

here's a random shot just for this channel lol

okay I'm calling it a night

[hardy quail]

Did u bake normals?

Also, you can bake the old RC dc15 texture onto your new model and upscale it from there

[river tendon]

Creating a new mesh from scratch makes it hard to match the original UV mapping. Since he created a more detailed model instead of using texture to fake the detail, it's better to create the texture using a PBR texture creation program. That makes it easier to create imperfect textures like dirt, rust, and scratches, etc...

[modern isle]

correct, the original non-pbr texture is also lacking in resolution and doesn't fit any of the requirements for a physically based material.

upscaling won't help this as the AI can't just infer minuet detail that just isn't visible in the texture.

[wind briar]

That would be quite possibly the worst way of making a texture

[static mason]

Considering the age of that texture there would be tonnes of issues

[hardy quail]

Not entirely

Its a decent way to get an accurate match quickly

[static mason]

What is the size of the original?

[hardy quail]

While you work on better textures

[modern isle]

that's not a good idea, you're better off just keeping the original mesh with the original texture next to the new model as a reference

[static mason]

If it is really low res upscaling can only resolve so much, then it is artifact heaven

[modern isle]

instead of doing this weird roundabout janky thing

[hardy quail]

Obviously

The main issue i guess i didnt really account for is extra geometry and i also forgot that typically itd be the high poly to the low poly and not the other way around

[modern isle]

besides you'd have to project the original texture via the original mesh onto the new model which will cause all sorts of visual artifacting. Oh and you have to spend (waste) time uv unwrapping the new work in progress model first before you can apply the texture to it.

[hardy quail]

Anyways, i would suggest baking normals at some point for all those bevels n shit

[hardy quail]

Baling the texture to it would bake it to whatever UV you havr

As i said tho, yall are right

It was a bad idea

[modern isle]

that's like the very last step you do after you're done modelling and unwrapping the low poly mesh. But even that shouldn't be really needed because remix has different scaling performance costs of faces.

[hardy quail]

at some point
Thats true but when working with something as intensive as RT i personally try to save as many frames as i can, things like bevels dont add much when modelled instead of normal map, but they add a bunch of faces, he still has to do the low poly and all that though so ig this shouldnt even be much of a consideration yet

[modern isle]

I am fully aware, I've been a technical artist with focus on performance and optimization for a long time now. Should remix get micromesh or virtual geometry support then this is going to be a complete non issue anyway

[hardy quail]

potentially, im not too familiar with those sorts of systems, im just a modder so all of my techniques are... dated to say the least, and every game ive played that claims to use ultra mega LOD systems for max performace usually performs worse than games using traditional ways.

Of course youd know more about the technical aspects than i would though

[modern isle]

in traditionally rendered games (rasterized) there is a need for LOD chains because the cost of a polygon that's the size or smaller than a pixel is very high, so much so that going overboard with this can even pummel modern engines easily. This comes down to how a polygon is shaded as each vertex + the face get calculated and since it's just the size of a single pixel, that same pixel gets calculated 4 times.
Remix being a pathtracer doesn't work the same way and the cost is different.

#asset-creation message

[wind briar]

Just, no

[hardy quail]

yes thats true, as i said im not very familiar with remix, between work and other projects i havnt had the time to really get as much into it as id like to, eventually i want to get started with the SWBF2 side of things, but ive been keeping an eye on this RC stuff because the guy doing it has made some very nice progress

[hardy quail]

read ahead i mentioned that i didnt think too much into that statement, i was wrong 😅 i forgot it doesnt work the same the other way around

when bringing EA meshes down to SWBF2 (classic) i usually use that texture baking trick to have the same textures on a reduced/remodelled mesh to save on time and to look decent

[wind briar]

Geometry is typically cheaper than texture memory, so if you can get away with smaller textures that's better, having to bake tiny bevels requires a decent amount of resolution in order to avoid obvious pixelization

So for something like this I'd argue it's much better to just use proper geo rather than baking it

Although it's important to work with weighted vertex workflows rather than SubD, as that will quickly get too expensive

[hardy quail]

yes and he also brought this up here

and as i said im not too familiar with le remix so i didnt know that itd be cheaper

[wind briar]

It's honestly the case for the entire industry at this point

Textures and shaders are the biggests costs in graphics at the moment

[modern isle]

pretty much

[burnt light]

it'd be interesting to see Nvidia's AI based texture compression in Remix

it could be a lot more efficient

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-uses-neural-network-for-innovative-texture-compression-method

[hardy quail]

the battlefront released in 2015 (and battlefield 1) so far has been my biggest ally when it comes to defending rasterization and proper optimization, runs amazingly and looks just as good, lately from what ive seen newer games have been releasing that look and perform worse than previous games that looked better (to me)
I can only say what i see as the end user for a lot of these games, and thats why im a little curious to learn a bit more on how things work

On the other there was a SWBF3 remake done in UE4 using the same assets they used in 2008 and he couldnt get it to go above 80fps on even the most modern hardware, so i guess my point is when used right rasterization can yield great results that balance graphics and performance, but without the right experience can lead to issues

i had a train of thought with that and honestly i lost it so im just gonna leave it at that but anyways i guess my point is that yall were right about the texture baking stuff, definitely isnt the best solution

[modern isle]

that's true, it would be more efficient on the filesize, but the processing time is much larger. Effectively a tradeoff between performance and size

[burnt light]

that's true. i imagine that acceleration with tensor cores could alleviate the majority of it, and given that Remix is intended for those cards it should work nicely

[wind briar]

For context both me and Rune actively work in the industry and so we can be pretty anal about this kind of stuff 😛

Just don't want false information about workflows going around ( Setting up good workflows is litterally part of my job )

[modern isle]

And I unfortunately was the lad who had to tell artists that we can't just slap 8k textures on everything. When working on a project you set a performance target. Think of it like a budget, you can spend it on some things, but you'll never be able to afford all of them. If you do and go over budget, say goodbye to your performance.

[wind briar]

Mr Hunt down the Freeman guy disagrees!

[modern isle]

Cost in base pass, shaders, vertex deformation, light calculation, post processing, level streaming and the like have different areas that they tax. For example a heavy pixelshader can be fine, if you build around it. Similar thing goes for asset streaming, the cost is I/O on the drive and moving data to/from ram and vram. UE4 was notorious for traversal stutter because it would overload the I/O and drop frames when many things at once were moved into vram.

[dry shoal]

Don't really need to since it's already nice and smooth already. I'll have to check but I think it's using a reasonable number of tris by remix standards

[hardy quail]

yeah, from what they said you should be good

[hardy quail]

according to this. triangles would be cheaper than the texture resolution needed to show those bevels anyway

[dry shoal]

This would be a nightmare I'd rather make the material from scratch, I'm using the generic colors + manual PBR values as the placeholder for now 🙂

[hardy quail]

yes i know, the verdict of the conversation was ignore my ass 😳

im stuck in an old mindset

[dry shoal]

Lol no worries

[burnt light]

btw here are the loading times

[dry shoal]

Now that I have the mesh just about done, I'm gonim gonna aim to have a texture for it complete by the end of this weekend. I need to speed up my work, and I think this well be a good lesson in that. I go for perfectionist as if the model is going to be judged on its own rather than it being a piece of the bigger picture

This means I'll have two weapons completed. The thermal detonator and DC15s. What remains is finishing the DC17m + sniper variant, the E-11 (droid blaster), Geonosian pike, and the other weird Geonosian weapon you get in the fourth map

[modern isle]

yeah, that's a factor of 2.3 at best and 3.9 at worst.

[dry shoal]

I intend to cook shortly

[static mason]

actively cooking

[formal cypress]

https://tenor.com/view/monster-hunter-palico-cat-food-cooking-gif-18632876

[dry shoal]

still proud of this

[dry shoal]

the creation of a new weapon model begins

[dusk trail]

I tried to get some render refs from GC but the guy got busy and never got around to it

[dry shoal]

I appreciate the attempt

I think I learned my lesson with the dc-15s, I should to work faster even if it compromises how far/accurate I could go. As long as it's pretty close and has a solid texture I should be okay. DC17m will probably be the exception

[late jetty]

NICEEE!! It looks awesome

I'm a few hours into the campaign, I still can't believe I've never heard of the game until seeing this thread lol

I wish I was doing a a rolling capture along with my playthrough

[dry shoal]

I'm gonna be honest I played it for a few hours as a kid without knowing what the hell I was doing

now that I'm older playing it again, the game is fuckin sweet

once I realized Remix could pull some magic with it, it was already settled. Then this project was born

[late jetty]

It's so good, but they made these things Dark Soul bosses, and there's so many

[dry shoal]

funnily enough that guy is gonna be one of my next big modeling projects. It'll be my first ever character mesh so I hope I can do it well

so look forward to seeing a very pristine SBD model with some sick PBR materials

[late jetty]

Nice! Good luck with it, can't wait to see

[dry shoal]

How neat

I wish I remembered the context of what the original scenes looked like for reference lol

[sick egret]

say i just wanted to play with rtx rn how could i get my game to look like that?

[dry shoal]

^ill warn, it's far from the ideal experience due to lack of PBR materials. If you still want to then by all means

[late jetty]

Check pins, the instructions to get it going are there

[dry shoal]

Just know it's slightlyyyt out of date

Skurty here has the latest playable rtx.conf on hand. I'm out atm

[late jetty]

badaboom, drop this in the GameData/System/ folder during install

[dry shoal]

First iteration of DC15s PBR texture is in-game. Progress continues on the super battle droid model

@wind briar general question about the super battle droid. When it comes time for me to connect the pieces together, should I be applying the subd -> attaching them by hand? Or should I attach them first then use a subd on the overall model

Bonus question: the gun texture looks quite plain once it's in-game. Any tips on how to make it look better? Without going super hard recreating all the details

[dry shoal]

Actually that could be answered by @modern isle too

(farming all the @ tags )

[wind briar]

Uuuuuuuuuuh what

Why would you merge the pieces together

It's a highpoly

[dry shoal]

I'm confused

I think I'm misunderstanding the process to making a final product for an animated mesh

[wind briar]

Right, currently you're building a highpoly

Here, you don't have to give two shits about polycount or deformation

Because you're not animating the highpoly

You're going to retopo this AGAIN, once the highpoly is done

That retopo will be your final in-game mesh

The HP is for baking normals and AO and stuff for texturing

Given that a robot is usually separated into pieces, it makes more sense to model the HP that way too

[dry shoal]

That would probably be nicely handled by an addon I have that gives excellent results remeshing into a perfect quad layout. It would be even more reliable if I ran it per-piece. Then I use those as the low poly, bake, then I connect it all together?

[wind briar]

That sounds incredibly illegal and makes me want to commit toasterwater

But also no you really don't need to connect everything through verts

It was efficient to do so back in the day due to spooky vert counts

[dry shoal]

Wait so I can leave shit disconnected?

[wind briar]

Yes?

[dry shoal]

I thought that wasn't a thing with animated meshes

This changes everything

[wind briar]

Do you think we model eyeballs as part of the headmesh?

[dry shoal]

U make a good point though I figured that could be seperate since it doesn't deform with the surrounding geo

Idk this is all extremely new territory for me. Only done static meshes before now

[wind briar]

https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/b2-battle-droid-3027293cfb694a7589aa9384543b566b

The topology on this mesh is horrendous

But if you enable wireframe mode, you can see that the parts are clearly separated

Well you have to consider what actually deforms on a battledroid

Does the abs area bend?

Because everything else on it doesn't deform at all, nothing on it bends

It's not flesh, it's metal right

[dry shoal]

Right, my only concern is that the original rigging/animations might have some deformation rather than it being 100% mechanical

I'd have to take another look at it in the UE2 editor to check

[wind briar]

Ah yeah I wouldn't know since I haven't seen the mesh, but I'd be surprised if they weren't mechanically done

Since it's both easier to rig and animate

[dry shoal]

Makes sense. Glad I made the call to do a droid before the clones then

(also yeah the topology there is a mess wth I could do better)

[wind briar]

😭

@dry shoalhttps://www.deviantart.com/sab64/art/MMD-Model-B2-series-Super-Battle-Droid-Download-863139663

Someone snagged the Battlefront 2 model and converted it to MMD bullshit

Could be worth peeking at for reference

[dry shoal]

Link gives a 403 error

[wind briar]

https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/super-battle-droid-1020f8a28369453a9df552bbeb51c9ac

Okay here then! This one has quite nice topology!

[dry shoal]

Wait new question popped up the SBD you fight in the game is always the damaged one from what I gather, but there is a fully constructed version used as a static mesh prop in some of the levels. Is it inherently better to do the full version -> break down or the broken version -> build on top of it

[wind briar]

I would make the full version, but make sure that the pieces that break off are separated pieces so you can create a damaged version afterwards

[dry shoal]

Yep, that was the plan if I did it. Much appreciated

So far so good I think, just can't fuck it up later. The screenshots above look solid for what I have so far?

[wind briar]

But don't forget to include a vertex grunkel in the deformation buffer or you'll see de3z issues.

[dry shoal]

Forgot to include this one which is pre-subd

[dry shoal]

The de3z made it too obvious

[wind briar]

Damnit

[dry shoal]

Tbf I did consider it for a moment

[wind briar]

Uuuh it looks decent although you really need to add some sharp supports in there

These forms are too smooth

[dry shoal]

That's true, I'll have to play with that a bit. Is that something I should do now or in the final steps?

[wind briar]

Deffo now

[dry shoal]

Trying to speed up my workflow since I have a habit of spending too long on individual things

[dry shoal]

Roger

[wind briar]

As for the weapon texture

It looks like it's all just one material

And why is the uh, handle on the bottom so polygonal?

@dry shoal

You need to add a layer of edgewear and scratches

Do this by creating a curvature mask and adding some noise on top of it

YOu could also really do with some AO masked dirt

[modern isle]

Wait, do you not model the internal organs too?

[wind briar]

You wouldn't believe the amount of anuses I've modelled

[modern isle]

You need to reduce the uniform splatter grunge on the roughness, and then bring in some edge chipping via curvature mixed with a grunge to break up uniformity, cram some dirt into those corners via AO and grunge, some oil on ... usually oiled parts, some finish wearing away from handling (usually gets flatter and more dull for metals, or flat and glossy-ish for plastics)

[modern isle]

V RISING DEVELOPER EXPOSED. VAMPIRES DO POOP DESPITE NOT EATING!

[wind briar]

AAAH SHIT!

[dry shoal]

If you were doing this, what's your ideal way of adding things like dirt? Do you straight up use a dirt stock material or do you make a custom multi channel element and use the dirt mask + edge/AO mask

[modern isle]

depends on the type of dirt, generally just a simple cloud noise turned dirt color with a gradient map, or just a normal solid color dirt. HOWEVER, I always layer two different dirt layers on top with different colors. Brown and Grey-ish Blue are my go to.

[modern isle]

do you still have my wear material I posted a while ago?

[dry shoal]

I probably do, I'll look for it

I already made some improvements

scratches are smaller, more scattered

[modern isle]

something you should consider is "how is this object handled by a human, where do they grip and which parts are exposed and easily scuffed. Which parts are hard to clean with a simple wipe, and thus where would dirt accumulate naturally.

[dry shoal]

played with the edge chipping thing you mentioned. The handle looks nicely worn

also have nice wear highlights on the optic

darkened it overall

[modern isle]

it's getting there

something I like to do for scratches is have them completely masked in cavities by duplicating the mask builder and setting the curvature to just show cavities and subtracting that from the mask below it. Or multiplying by just the edges

just peep at the wear material to see the setups I use

[dry shoal]

honestly my head is spinning

like I understand it but when it comes to putting it into use it's like

brain fried

the whole stacking of masks and whatnot

[modern isle]

👆

you can press S while having a layer or mask selected to solo it so you can see exactly what it contributes

[dry shoal]

I opened it but I don't see it in my package library unless I'm blind

[modern isle]

place the Rune Wear.IMP file in %userprofile%\Documents\InstaMAT\Library\LayerMaterials

[dry shoal]

nvm I don't have that file then

this is the one I have

found it

added your layer group with a tweaked color, this is how it looks

[modern isle]

I notice one of your base materials (not the wear) has the height set to 0

[dry shoal]

might be this

[modern isle]

yes, expand the height one

[modern isle]

blergh why doesn't this material have a height

[dry shoal]

I'm surprised I can't manually set one

could make a new material I guess

[modern isle]

just create a new multi channel layer, put it at the very bottom of the stack and set height to 50% grey

[dry shoal]

does that affect what's above it?

[modern isle]

everything else can be disabled by turning down opacity to 0%

Yes, it fixes the missing height from messing with the other layers.

bottom of the list = first

so it sets a base height

[dry shoal]

looks no different disabled or enabled

[modern isle]

because you did it wrong

look at my screenshot

and compare to your height

[dry shoal]

got it

[modern isle]

you made the height pure black, with 50% opacity :P

[dry shoal]

this looks noticeably better already

off vs on

[modern isle]

it makes the dirt and especially grease behave properly since they rely on the height

[dry shoal]

I feel like main thing now is my metal looks almost like stone

[modern isle]

probably from the dust

[dry shoal]

about that, I already disabled it lol

[modern isle]

make the metal a bit more shiny (darker roughness) to compensate

[naive robin]

Would suggest using the cavity and AO map to mask your scratches

[dry shoal]

reduced roughness

[modern isle]

that's what I suggested earlier and my wear material does only scratch on edges 🤔

[naive robin]

I like to multiply the AO with some grunge for dirt

[modern isle]

mah dirt does do that

[naive robin]

Oh I’m not familiar with your with dirt

[naive robin]

I’d increase the roughness of your layers above the metal ones so they stand out

[modern isle]

It's a decent baseline to start tweaking with.

[dry shoal]

scratches masked with edges + slight AO

[modern isle]

snazzy

[naive robin]

Progress

[dry shoal]

Can I be done yet

[modern isle]

once you finish the other materials on that gun, yes.

So far you only made the metal doodelidoos

[dry shoal]

this weapon is only metal doodelidoos

the whole thing is one material outside the screws/bolts

[modern isle]

the grip is supposed to be plastic or bakelite

some metals are different too

[dry shoal]

the grip is gonna be covered by the hand of the clone

[modern isle]

ah I see, a futzer

[dry shoal]

whats a futzer

[modern isle]

ah it's originally a term to describe point and click players who do intentionally not do the thing they're supposed to do. They mess about, they futz.

[dry shoal]

am I a futzer

[naive robin]

Try turning off that global grunge and slowly build up more grime with more layers and maps.

[dry shoal]

there is no global grunge, I got rid of it. I have a few duplicated wear layers with changes in seed/intensity

[naive robin]

Whatever this is coming from it’s kinda overwhelming the other layers

[modern isle]

might be the grease

[dry shoal]

the darker spots everywhere?

that's the metal meterial itself

so I should change that huh

[wind briar]

Just reminded me that I started an E-11 like.. back in 2012? XD

[naive robin]

Yea start with a super simple metal

Especially if the materials aren’t smart and have influence from the baked maps.

[modern isle]

something to keep in mind is that in many cases your base should be fairly pristine with just a tiny bit of variation in it, you're using the layers to build up more detail and wear down the surfaces

[dry shoal]

this looking better then? made it a super dark low saturation blue for a sort of gunmetal look

[naive robin]

Try this gray for the metal.

[dry shoal]

lol

[wind briar]

Are you fucking with the normals on edges?

STuff looks balloon inflated

[naive robin]

Gunmetal look is more about the roughness and metallic more so than the color.

[dry shoal]

adjusted the roughness to 87%

[dry shoal]

what are you referring to?

[wind briar]

This looks fucked

[naive robin]

Are you apply any height adjustments?

Looks like curvature being multiplied by a static height

[dry shoal]

yeah, rune told me to use 50% height on the metal

so the layers above would interact properly

[naive robin]

What’s subtracting from the base height

[dry shoal]

I noticed but u have no idea just how much I'm ready to be done with this so I'll be if I need to fix it

[dry shoal]

looks like I had one layer set to divide, maybe that was it

looks less balloon now though still not perfect

[naive robin]

What layer is it?

[dry shoal]

it was wear 2

adjusted the saturation slightly of the metal, looks better imo

i need to takea break or im gonna toaster bath in roblox

but if there's anything you guys wanna share I'll look into it next time I'm working on it

just nothing that requires me to redo everything please

[wind briar]

Have you baked anything for this or is it just straight up a hard edged mesh?

[dry shoal]

very small bevels but not baked

[dry shoal]

looks like I got that covered

[static mason]

Kinda keen to model one of the weapons if someone lets me and sends me the old mode

model

Can't rig it though

Or something from the game. A droid? some character?

I am not a very good artist though and probs won't do them justice

[dry shoal]

Do you have an example of some stuff you've done? I believe you're the one who worked on the car right?

[static mason]

Yeah amongst a few cars I am also working on

[dry shoal]

[static mason]

Also working on a HALO assualt rifle (one in my own style and one in the HALO CE style)
Here is a proof of concept model of the "my style one"

[dry shoal]

I figure since cars have lots of fancy smooth surfaces, would you like to give a static mesh vehicle a shot? Doesn't need rigging or anything like that but it's a unique curvy shape

Wtf that's super clean

[static mason]

Do I make the cut lol? 🥺

[dry shoal]

Absolutely lol

You seem to be a good deal better than me so

[static mason]

Feel free to send something (Our style one has a bit of DOOM, UT look imho)

[dry shoal]

Let me look for a few things and you can feel free to pick which you wanna work on, sound fair?

[static mason]

chees

cheers

[dry shoal]

One sec

[static mason]

Feel free to DM me

[dry shoal]

I try to keep stuff here generally bc it's all in one place 🙂 This was the vehicle mesh I mentioned. Very unique shape. This link (below) has the best quality reference I could find, and I'll supply the original mesh ofc should this be the one you wanna go for

lemme find some more stuff

https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/star-wars-nantex-class-geonosian-fighter-385bf152f3f74535aa484baaf969faf9

[static mason]

looks simple enough

[dry shoal]

here's a few other things if you find any of them more interesting. First is the E-5 droid blaster, used by NPCs and is a static mesh so no need for rigging or anything. Second is the melee weapon used by the Geonosian enemies which you'll deal with frequently in this first section of the game I'm covering. Battledroid, self explanatory. I'll figure out the rigging stuff. Then there's the DC15s which is the player's sidearm they have at all times. Model doesn't seem especially tricky so if you like modeling guns, this is one that's fairly important. If you're a masochist there's also the Geonosian elite beam weapon you get in the 3rd or 4th level the animation has a ton of weird mechanical stuff going on so it would need to be split up in more than a few ways

@static mason

take your pick, I'll throw you a .fbx from the original game files. Remix captured versions are a bit of a mess

don't worry about texturing btw if you don't want to, I'm cool with doing it

[static mason]

I might do a battledroid and the E5 Droid blaster

[dry shoal]

cool let me grab the files

[static mason]

For now

😛

[dry shoal]

fun times for sure

@static mason want me to add in the textures for both?

for the droid in particular I wanna stay closer to SWRC's design, dunno how much it differs beyond the textures though lol

[static mason]

Oh yeah that would be helpful

[static mason]

We read rtx as something else and now we don't know what to say

[static mason]

Who

it's on ||dix|| my dislexia proved effective

We read it as that at first

I have dyslexia as well I just use tts

Who is we btw I don't read it as that

[burnt light]

they have multiple personalities

[static mason]

Ah

[burnt light]

read their profile

[static mason]

Just be wary the "multiple personality" is not a term used in the DSM anymore

[static mason]

My phone is shit I can't read profiles

One sec I'll show

just wanted to point that out

[burnt light]

yes, but it is quite literally in your case multiple personalities, right? the whole "system" thing

[dry shoal]

here you go figured it'd be easiest to use a blender file. Includes the blaster + droid mesh, both have their textures applied

[static mason]

system? Dms?

Well DID means the system has multiple headmates, alters, whatever each person with it feels free to call them. THey are not personalities, rather they have their own personality, ettc...

Well putting it really simply, not going into it too much to not derail

I'm just gonna say aight cuz I understand none of that

Yeah just don't want it to be the topic in the channel

[dry shoal]

essentially multiple people in one body right? in a sense

[dry shoal]

sorry about that

[static mason]

Yep that is correct

THey can have different ages, gender, personality, etc....

[dry shoal]

psychology really is a fascinating thing

[static mason]

Yeah

[dry shoal]

got you the file above btw 👍 dunno if you saw

[dry shoal]

slowly but surely progress continues

[static mason]

aiming for this kinda detail
https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/star-wars-e5-blaster-rifle-b758a58d473849feb76541521db7bf07

[late jetty]

holy smokes! can't believe how fast you're learning blender already - what videos did you watch to get started?

[static mason]

starting the blockout. If we can get the highpoly good without subdiv we would be happy

[dry shoal]

For reference the head and backpack can be replaced through remix, so you're free to go pretty detailed on those then use the tri savings for the rest of the model's detail. In UE2 the max is about 25K tris before there's instability on import. Maybe a tad higher

So 25K tris for the body itself. You can treat the head and backpack separately from that

[dry shoal]

Looking forward to it might have to redo my clone blaster model so I can keep up

[dry shoal]

Well I've been doing it for about 6 months now lol. But to be frank what I'm working on atm could be done with days of experience at most, provided you're relatively focused whereas I hopped all over the place. As for videos, there's a small handful of YouTubers who I've almost exclusively learned from in terms of tutorials and whatnot

The blender bros:

• Josh Gambrell: https://youtube.com/@joshgambrell
• Ponte Ryuurui: https://youtube.com/@ponteryuurui

^these guys have a ton of YouTube videos but also offer more structured courses on their site. Many are paid, but their "beginners guide to hard surface" is free and assumes 0 prior knowledge.

• Artisans of Vaul: https://youtube.com/@artisansofvaul

^uses blender mostly for 3D printing but most of his videos apply perfectly to normal 3D modeling, and he covers lots of add-ons that can have big and small impacts on workflow. I'd recommend avoiding add-ons early on though

• Aryan: https://youtube.com/@arijanrace

^shorter videos, shares tons of tricks that help a ton early on for anything that requires a bit of finesse. I enjoy his presentation since he's very off the cuff and casual, 0 bullshit. Almost like a jock who makes his living off blender (which he does). He has lots of content on the business side of things to get the bag, but I don't watch those personally since I'm not interested

• Mars3D: https://youtube.com/@onmars3d

^he has really awesome and easy to digest content, learned UV mapping in particular from him. Fairly soft spoken (somewhat soothing?) but to the point for teaching purposes. He also sometimes shares bonus tips at the end of his videos which will likely apply to you at some point or another so it's super helpful to know ahead of time

PS: I have a feeling you'd really enjoy modeling

[late jetty]

NICEEE, thanks for the info! I'm gunna do a deep dive on all of it. Making custom assets from scratch looks really fun, having a model to essentially replicate/model after seems like the perfect learning opportunity.

[dry shoal]

It's definitely super fulfilling, no doubt about that. I'd recommend starting with normal hard surface modeling since it's a hell of a lot simpler with less abstraction required compared to fancy smooth/organic modeling

Talking simple things like weapon mags, medkits, tables, etc

Each one will teach you a little thing that will come in handy later

[dry shoal]

restarted tge SBD. This time I'm using the Battlefront 2 EA mesh to get a retopo'd base mesh

[static mason]

There is some tweaking that will be done later to fix any of verts. doubt the flow will stay this way

Cause....it is not good

in our opinion at least

We mean it is the highpoly tho

[dry shoal]

Exactly, so don't worry about it. In terms of detail it looks awesome so far, great job

Hope I can even come close to that with my super battle droid

[dry shoal]

Btw what's the trick for those little indents you have curving around the head?

[static mason]

It is not too bad. There are a few areas that need a bit of tweaking woth shading, but it is good so far

[dry shoal]

on which parts if you don't mind sharing?

[static mason]

Not sure if it is just blenders lighting though

[dry shoal]

I think it is for the top piece and the shoulder (I have shadows on in this shot) but the corner of the chest is absolutely a shading error. Will work on it

[dry shoal]

WIP - right is old

[severe flare]

God the one on the right actually hurts to look at

Bevels were just too hardware intensive I suppose

[wind briar]

It's actually an extremely well crafted mesh, combined with its texture it was great stuff for the time

Whoever the artist is, I salute thee

[hardy quail]

^ remember its a UE2 game on the original xbox, for the time the game looked great imo

[dry shoal]

Yep. And I happen to agree, with the lighting and smoothing used back then it looks pretty great in-game. The B1 battle droids are much more scuffed looking. I'll see if I can grab a screenshot somewhere

[wind briar]

Battlefront also had to render tonnes of them at once

Less budget

[dry shoal]

technically it's not the game lighting but yeah, he's looking much nicer with the technical limitations of the time

[burnt light]

i remember being amazed by this game in ~2007, when i first discovered it

it still looked awesome to me then

optimizations by game devs of that time never cease to amaze me

[dry shoal]

indeed. And now it's time to push beyond the limits they worked through

crossing my fingers on this SBD model turning out nicely. I know it'll be a huge burst of motivation if it does

[dry shoal]

got the full OG model to compare with

[hardy quail]

Lookin good

[static mason]

Have to push one of the neck pieces back

[static mason]

Us using floaters cause we are lazy. Oh well we are only making a normal map

Unless you all want a bit more geo?

in the low poly we might add some depth to the areas with bolts and push the floaters back a bit

Then again they can be raised via a heightmap we believe?

[dry shoal]

Currently the intention is to import a new model into the game engine proper, since Remix can't replace deforming meshes. However these new models can be pushed much further than what UE2 games usually did, up to ~25K tris is totally doable. So the ideal setup is to have a high poly to bake onto a game ready mesh of ~25K tris at the most

The results from the high poly baking would be applied through Remix of course, so we can get the PBR goodness

[dry shoal]

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/877221629481074711/1257018994196480142/image.png?ex=6682e1aa&is=6681902a&hm=57c2193dc4c317167edbd81fd54407094a0e4f7bddea8a5d39418b158cda5094&

[dry shoal]

started the arm over, looking a good deal cleaner now

I'm probably around halfway done

pre-polishing that is

forgot the comaprison to the original

[dusk trail]

Damn I've been missing a lot

[dry shoal]

doing my very first character model 🙂

[dusk trail]

Not even I have done that

Shit I still gotta finish the drop create mesh

[dry shoal]

take your time, really there's no rush. Progress has slowed down dramatically while I've worked on this so it's not like I'm missing out lol

[dusk trail]

That may be but I said I'd do it, and I at least try to keep my word

If I can

I'll see about getting to it later this week, I'll be fairly busy with work

Also waiting on my new VR kit will be here soon so I gotta have some fun with that

[hardy quail]

Will you be doing the eyehole

[dry shoal]

I'm undecided on that since it's inaccurate to the real SBD design. But I probably will add it since it's used for gameplay purposes (shows the weak spot)

[hardy quail]

Accuracy to the movies and accuracy to the game itself is an important difference

If you are to remaster a game, its alot better to match that games art style, art style is a big part of any game

[dry shoal]

Generally I agree, and that's why the B1 Battle Droid is aiming to match the original game's unique design. Only reason this could've been an exception is because it's a very small deviation in the grand scheme of things

[hardy quail]

But more important than youd think, as you mentioned its the first pointer to see where the weak point is

[dry shoal]

There's also the complicated note that I intend to work on two Remix projects related to Republic Commando. Mine which intends to push as far as I can reasonably go covering Geonosis, and after a RC Remastered adaptation in Remix which is certainly going to use the accurate original design. So a part of the calculation would be differences between both projects

[hardy quail]

sounds like you will burn yourself out

[dry shoal]

Don't worry, I'm dumb but not dumb enough to do both at the same time. I would help on RCR after this limited in scope project is complete

As for burning myself out don't worry, already been through a couple of those but I'm stubborn so I never really stop outright

That saiddd if you happened to want to contribute to the project with your skills I would not be opposed

[hardy quail]

i can do some props here and there 😳

post in that chat shit that needs to be done and i can do stuff as i see fit if youd like

[dry shoal]

That would be awesome. What are some things you've worked on just so I have a rough idea. Also for reference, static meshes have a virtually unlimited tri budget due to differences in performance scaling with pathtracing. So it's possible you wouldn't even need to bake a HP -> LP

I add the virtually in there bc ofc 50K tris on a little thing is still excessive even if the headroom is there to do it just fine lol

[hardy quail]

this was the last thing i worked on, fusion cutter from SWBF2

[analog wedge]

Anti-eye gang

[hardy quail]

i work on alot of shit low -high poly, im even helping with a half life 1 mod 😳

i am absolute best at hard surface

[dry shoal]

so detailed

It'll be a while till I'm home to find some ideas. Something tells me it's a better idea for you to work on some stuff I was hoping to try out myself lol

But I'll have to see what I got

[hardy quail]

just lmk 😌

[dry shoal]

Will do. Out of curiosity have you done anything with vehicles/weapon models

[hardy quail]

a bit, i can do vehicles but at the moment id like to stick to smaller environment shit because i do have quite a bit on my plate

[dry shoal]

Roger that boss will keep that in mind. Small scale = good

I think there's some props like terminals that are reused a good bit + are seen up close so you can push the geometric detail/surface smoothness as far as you want really. I'll have to verify

[dry shoal]

Busy day yesterday so couldn't get those props sorted, aim to do so today

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1196836285545971712/1257912375068069898/image.png?ex=668621b1&is=6684d031&hm=39e639f616d216b81b35626744af228bdd9a2e58ee64861651341e4833471db1&

But I made some progress on the SBD

[dusk trail]

[dry shoal]

I couldn't really get the pelvis right to match the BF2EA one so I just kinda did my own. In the original model it's just a solid thin circle lol

Really looking forward to trying this out in-game. I hope I can make the most of it

[dusk trail]

Lol

Whatever works

And as long as it has the faceplate that can be destroyed and removed

Really all that matters imo

[dry shoal]

The inner chest cavity isn't modeled out yet but it should be relatively easy to do. I have edge loops in all the right spots to remove the front and the head pieces are separate models

[dusk trail]

[dry shoal]

According to advice I got, I shouldn't try modeling the circuitry inside

Instead just using a texture with displacement

[dry shoal]

Why Shrek oops

[modern isle]

https://tenor.com/view/youre-right-breaking-bad-walter-white-gif-5292336

[dry shoal]

That's what I'm gonna go through with but in my head I can't imagine it not looking kinda shit

[modern isle]

Want me to make a tech circuitry one for you?

[dry shoal]

tempting. I was able to do it with that one floor texture but given this needs to be significantly more detailed vs a slightly shaded pattern...

[static mason]

Do you remember the British accent they gave these thing in one of the episodes of the show

[dry shoal]

It's been a long ass time since I've seen anything Star Wars related that weren't the films, my memory is very hazy

[hardy quail]

You could add a bit more depth by adding a couple larger tubes/cables

[modern isle]

I have an idea that auto can easily implement, but I'll have to make the texture first

[dry shoal]

This was my initial idea. Add little bits here and there, put a texture underneath to fill out the space

Rune has helped me a bunch before so I'm gonna see whatever he's cooking first

[dusk trail]

[naive robin]

Interesting

[dry shoal]

Preem content

[naive robin]

Ya didn’t look hard enough for the Star Wars episode 2 art book, there’s a great one

[dry shoal]

I have the attention span of a Chihuahua and I'm thinking about 10 different things at once for this project

Hence why I said it would be awesome to have someone to split things with lol

But we live in a society so I must push on

[hardy quail]

you got any props for me 😳

also that SBD is looking superb

[wind briar]

Stooooooop using this bloooody shadeeeer aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh

[static mason]

That is the default one no?

[wind briar]

It's some edge highlighting thing

[dry shoal]

I think you're mistaken, you might be seeing the normal specular

Wait no I think you're right. I have to change my defaults, I don't set it intentionally. In fact I'm constantly turning it off

[wind briar]

Absolutely not, normal specular is not that consistent

[dry shoal]

dw, fixed it this time

[hardy quail]

Cavity?

Whats wrong with it

[wind briar]

Cavity is the exact oposite of that XD

It's a matcap that highlights edges in an abnormal way

[hardy quail]

Cavity, on blender at least, highlights the edges