Star Wars: Republic Commando RTX

[dawn zinc]

Never mind I got it

[dry shoal]

[dawn zinc]

Just had to re open the animation window

[dry shoal]

oh yeah that lol

some odd bugs

[dawn zinc]

Okay I think I'll need to export it as the right file format first

[dry shoal]

.psk is the correct format

helmet's not far off of being ready to polish. The back is good I just have backface culling enabled

[dawn zinc]

Nice!

Okay I think it worked

Weird, am I missing some sort of export option from blender?

[dry shoal]

WHAT FORMAT

ARE YOU USING

[dawn zinc]

Unreal PSK

[dry shoal]

I'm guessing you did weight painting

Maybe it could be related to vertex groups? I'm gonna ask

[dawn zinc]

I did do weight painting

Even when I import the RC clone back in I still get this

[dry shoal]

Try restarting cteditor with the new model

It'll give a prompt to save the package when you hit X

[dawn zinc]

Also FYI in case it's important, I am getting a gltf out of umodel

[dry shoal]

Welp

You'll wanna export in .psk from umodel

If it's working in blender though that should make using a new armature not too bad id think?

Since it'll be the right pose and scale

[dawn zinc]

Okay let me try that

Do you know how to cycle the viewed mesh in umodel?

For example now I'm seeing the commando

[dry shoal]

that is the LOD0

it looks bad bc the texture, the mesh is fine

[dawn zinc]

Right but I'm trying to grab the clone trooper

[dry shoal]

ohhh

page up and down

it's 2 back from the commando

[dawn zinc]

Awesome thanks

LOL the scale difference between the formats

That's probably it

[dry shoal]

scale of the bones shouldn't matter but yeah, that's what I meant by UE2 using cm while blender uses m

everything is 100x size

[dawn zinc]

Yeah lol

[dry shoal]

oh that also means you'll have to export at that scale when you're done

[dawn zinc]

So if I scale this up that should work?

[dry shoal]

what you already have? I don't think so because the plugin says the bones are incorrectly oriented

with gltf

so that wouldn't address it

[dawn zinc]

Oof I think that means I need to reskin it

[dry shoal]

you'll have to weight paint again if that's what you mean

at least I think so

[dawn zinc]

https://tenor.com/view/star-wars-look-hurt-grief-gif-16294662

[dry shoal]

there might be a way to reuse the existing weight painting but I don't have enough experience to say for sure

there's a data transfer feature that does try to apply the weighting from one mesh to another of the same topology

might find it with a google search and save yourself trouble

[dawn zinc]

I'll do some digging

[dry shoal]

sorry for forgetting about the psk export bit. I didn't even think about it bc I was so used to it

but yeah, .psk is what you want to export as if you want the proper skeleton

[dawn zinc]

That's not your fault, I should have asked

It's a one button fix in Maya

https://tenor.com/view/gigachad-chad-gif-20773266

[dry shoal]

holy

[dawn zinc]

Thank goodness that almost ruined my day haha

[dry shoal]

we're so back

now we see what we got

[dawn zinc]

https://tenor.com/view/ej-blak-hackerboy-ej-blak-hack-enter-the-mainframe-hack-the-mainframe-gif-22262494

https://tenor.com/view/thereitis-zoolander-magnum-hansel-gif-22298247

[dry shoal]

looks like a nightmare with the different UV but who cares lol

grab a capture and get that PBR applied my friend

(also shoot a dm to share when it's convenient 👍 )

[dawn zinc]

Would it be a bad idea to import this over the LODs as well?

Unless that's what redigest LODs is supposed to do but that didn't seem to do anything

[dry shoal]

it's supposed to make UE2 generate it's own LODs based on this new one

which I'd recommend doing

[dawn zinc]

Also, looks like it's still using the old material

[dry shoal]

because you haven't applied the BF2EA textures yet

[dawn zinc]

Perhaps it's this?

[dry shoal]

no need, you can manually adjust LOD transition distances

[dry shoal]

hmm potentially

I think you might also have to be set to LOD0 to do it? it's been a while

[dawn zinc]

I did that

Sorry to barrage you from two fronts lol, how do I swap the clone to a new material? The helmet, gloves, and body should each have their own material but it's all using the base clone material

[dry shoal]

I think you need to manually set the number of skins the mesh has in that properties panel

so you'd set it to 3, then the UV should work

someone else had the issue importing their custom commando which had two textures

so you might need to get a new capture as well to account for it. If you use the same capture name it'll overwrite

once you do that you just keep doing a dropdown in remix's hierarchy tree and eventually it splits by material so you can apply each

[dawn zinc]

In this area?

[dry shoal]

I believe so

[dawn zinc]

Do I just name the materials whatever?

[dry shoal]

yeah I don't think the name matters

I checked another discord where the same issue was ran into but they resolved it over VC so the solution isn't there

[dawn zinc]

It's weird, I can't rename the materials. Only add new ones named "none"

[dry shoal]

maybe it's not the name of the material slot and it uses the name of the texture

so you'd want to add the textures there to fill in the slots I guess?

my head's spinning ngl lol

[dawn zinc]

I appreciate your help, don't let me add to your headache. I'll dig around and see if I can find a solution

[dry shoal]

@dawn zinc

from the unreal engine 2 documentation

[dawn zinc]

Sweet, thank you so much

[dry shoal]

https://docs.unrealengine.com/udk/Two/AnimBrowserReference.html#Skin

[dawn zinc]

Just noticed the material names got messed up when fixing the rig, I'll have to adjust that

[dry shoal]

makes sense I think

[dry shoal]

ignoring the blank UV, the deformation on the fingers looks so much nicer, my god

[dawn zinc]

Thank you, there might be some clipping or skinning errors but I can always iterate as we find opportunities to improve

[dry shoal]

with PBR materials applied

[dawn zinc]

Let's go

[dry shoal]

@dawn zinc threw in my model replacement for the dc15s 🙂

modeled and textured by yours truly

redid the shots

[dawn zinc]

Nice that looks awesome

[dry shoal]

like you said, this could look amazing when all's said and done

tons of potential

I'm not the most proud of it but I think it's sufficiently good enough given it's an NPC weapon

the glove normals look nice

gonna call it a night

productive day for certain

[dawn zinc]

Get some rest man, good work today. Thanks for helping set up the trooper

[dry shoal]

you bet. Also eventually I think it'll make sense to set up a github repository. I already have one for personal use but it would make a lot of our changes/additions seamless between our setups

that's for another time though

[dawn zinc]

Really quick before you head off, what was your rule of thumb for if a model could be swapped in remix vs in UE?

[dry shoal]

You have to use the geometry hash debug view. It's in the rendering tab of the overlay

If an object stays a solid color, it can be replaced through Remix

And I mean the geometry. Textures can always be replaced

It's pretty safe to assume that if it deforms -> not replaceable. Particle effects are also typically unstable (not replaceable), and BSP geometry is also unstable. But only the first playable mission is using BSP, the next few use static meshes for everything making them significantly easier to improve

One thing I've done is recorded a sequence with the debug view active that I can refer back to later. It's pretty helpful

[dawn zinc]

Okay I'll take a look at that. Thank you very much for the info

[dry shoal]

You got it boss. Take it easy

[dawn zinc]

Sleep well!

[static mason]

!!!

[dawn zinc]

Update on prologue. More model swaps happening. Ignore the main commandos textures being broken, I'll be fixing that tonight

[severe flare]

Is there any concern regarding the animations being designed for the more cartoonish 2005 models and therefore not meshing well with a more photorealistic upgrade? Can anything even be done about it?

[dawn zinc]

It would be nice to have better animations but that is outside of my skillset and I think would be a massive undertaking on top of remastering everything else

But I do agree with you. The animation is very old feeling

[mossy void]

Don't use it if it's a concern

[dawn zinc]

Got the commando base models in and one set of viewarms. Currently they lack their custom paint (that needs to be made), and for some reason the static commando models aren't using all of the textures they were given. But otherwise progress!

[dry shoal]

Wow, the helmet scene looks like it came straight out of the Unreal Engine recreation that blew up on YouTube some time ago

And you have the HUD arms set up looks like? That can be reused easily I bet

[static mason]

Looks Trooper enough

😛

[hardy quail]

Looking good, visors are beautiful

[dawn zinc]

I’m going to take a deeper look at the normal maps today. Have a feeling something might not be working fully right

[dry shoal]

You mean the normals that are being applied through Remix? Something feels off to me as well. Works fine for my custom made materials however

[dawn zinc]

Yeah. I have a feeling it’s how frostbite does normals or something

I’ve ported these models to Unity for other projects and gotten the normals to work so it will just be a matter of pulling different levers until it looks right lol

But yeah certain surfaces should read flat but they feel curved

The models feel “goopy”

[dry shoal]

I know exactly what you mean. That said normals are supposed to be a standardized format right? Either openGL or DX

Wouldn't Frostbite have to stick within those specifications?

[dawn zinc]

I believe so

So it might be a matter of flipping the green channel and testing

[dry shoal]

Roger

I'm gonna try and get some tiling materials for Kamino btw

In my head I'm thinking the simulator room and the ending outdoor sequence would be the most immediately impactful

[dawn zinc]

I'm going to pull the clone trooper into marmoset and see what clicks, that should help me figure out what's going on

[dry shoal]

@modern isle in the final scene of the intro sequence it's this big outdoor area with rain right. Does it make sense to create puddles as parts of the tiling material? I've never done "water" as part of a material

Basically a natural-ish spread of water with high reflectivity

Or would it look like ass

[modern isle]

It'll be fine. Use the water materialeffect node in InstaMat, make sure to make the entire surface more glossy and wet (also increase saturation and lower brightness of the albedo)

You can just sprinkle some meshes onto larger flat areas to break up obvious tiling.

[dry shoal]

Increase saturation and lower richness where the puddle would be?

[dawn zinc]

Some visual reference. I would avoid individual puddles since it is a large, flat, metallic surface with lots of water on top

[dry shoal]

That too. That would probably let me do a flip ook with little splashes right

[modern isle]

If it's raining then the entire surface would be wet, with puddles accumulating via the water effect.

[dry shoal]

Hmm good point

[dawn zinc]

and also since it's raining constantly. I imagine if it were dry and then the rain just started you'd get puddles

But given how much it rains there the surface would be entirely covered

I also should take a look at editing the skybox to make it more blue like the films, and add more light to that finale scene. I'm realizing how lit it is in the films vs what I have in remix

[modern isle]

Oh it's an artificial surface, yeah then just darken albedo, increase saturation slightly, lower roughness (clamp to 0.02 on the lower bounds) and then see if you need to adjust metallics

[dry shoal]

Looking at the paneling here this looks like a good fit for flood fill I bet

Most of the middle of each panel would be darker, more reflective for the wet look. Outer edges slightly more dry

[dawn zinc]

What is also likely the case with what Dice did here, is they might have a shader specifically for wet surfaces that works outside the bounds of a PBR strict material

[modern isle]

No need for flooding, if your non wet version has a proper heightmap you can just get the crevices and expand them via invert and bevel, give em a good ol blur and then overlay blend a grunge texture

That would give you a soft-ish mask that blends towards the edges of a panel.

[dry shoal]

writing all this down

[dawn zinc]

The way I would cheat it is by making a "dry" version of the floor with PBR materials, and then a duplicate piece of the geometry offset with transparency and low roughness, with the normal map plugged in. You'd have your floor geo, and your water geo

Hard to tell if the floor is as metallic as the walls but if it is then that's how I would do it to make it look like wet metal

In any other game engine at least, not sure how remix would handle that

[dry shoal]

Remix is ass so that's not a reliable method

[modern isle]

I get the idea, but I'd avoid translucency for something like that because it's not the most performant and will be a bit finicky to tweak since you have to deal with the limitations of the shader

[dawn zinc]

Does the shader have a clearcoat function?

[modern isle]

😬

[dawn zinc]

Like clear coat on car paint, since that's the same idea

[dry shoal]

Ok now it's going over my head I'll leave it to y'all

[dawn zinc]

It's just the waxy glossy finish you see on cars. Notice how it's metallic with two separate glosses

[modern isle]

Unless they added it, don't think so. There is iridescence though so your oil slicks are covered.

There's no dual normals either :/

[dawn zinc]

Well dang. I'm sure we can figure something out

Clearcoat would be a huge addition, though niche

[modern isle]

I'd just go with a proper wet PBR material for the surface. It'll look decent enough even if there's no clearcoat or dual specular mode.

[dawn zinc]

The metal looks pretty dull so we can probably get away with just going the PBR route

[modern isle]

Splashes could be done via decal (btw was there a toolkit update at some point to add this as an exposed option?), you could do a geo shell but the IOR will get messy at steep angles no matter what you do.

[dawn zinc]

Like it kind of just turns into diffuse with high gloss

[modern isle]

Ay, that should work.

[dawn zinc]

How much flexibility do we have with replacing the sky? Are we limited to swapping the sky texture of the game or can we introduce our own sky lighting in remix?

https://hdri-haven.com

This site is amazing for sky textures, would be nice to use something high fidelity from here

[dry shoal]

I'd have to double check on Remix's side, but I know for certain we can replace the texture in-game

There's a little sky dome on each map. Replace that texture with a nice high res one without compression and it'll probably work out

You can adjust the brightness of the sky using the runtime overlay

[modern isle]

the way I did it in UT99 was not rendering a native sky at all and using a giant skysphere (it's technically not the best idea because AABB checking will always be true), but the sky can be set to let directional lights through without issue.

[dry shoal]

By the last bit you mean that using the proper sky function means you don't have to jerry rig a sphere light to look like a distant light?

[modern isle]

correct, I can just use directional lights as expected.

[dawn zinc]

Interesting, I'll have to try that then

That sky lighting will be huge for the finale in prologue

[dry shoal]

Since we can't really avoid base game modding I think it makes sense to throw in a super high res texture for the proper skydome. I since we aren't replacing other textures in the vanilla game I don't think RAM limits will be a concern. Only how much high res it'll handle

[dawn zinc]

And also helpful in extreme prejudice when they're in flight

[dry shoal]

Could just use a distant light and make it dim for atmosphere

[dawn zinc]

I'm going to try @modern isle 's suggestion first and toss in a giant sphere in remix with the HDR texture

[modern isle]

keep in mind that if you use a skysphere model on the gameside that it WILL occlude lights by default

[dawn zinc]

https://hdri-haven.com/hdri/dark-overast-sky-dome

Boom

Highly recommend you bookmark this site, it's amazing

[modern isle]

ay, HDRI-haven is good stuff

[dry shoal]

But the game already uses skydomes. You just need to replace the textures then tag it as a sky within the Remix runtime

[modern isle]

make sure to set the skybox to use a translucent material shader.
IOR 1.0
Emission enabled, place texture as emissive color and tweak emissive intensity (I used 0.04 for a night sky)

[modern isle]

the sky is opaque by default

so it will block light

[dawn zinc]

https://tenor.com/view/write-that-down-taking-notes-school-universities-university-gif-17937210

[dry shoal]

When you tag a texture as the sky in Remix it won't occlude though. If you replace the texture on the game side then it would be the ideal setup I feel like

I thought the distant light is specifically meant to ignore sky textures when marked as such

[modern isle]

how do you replace a sky tagged texture in the toolkit?

[dawn zinc]

@modern isle Do you have any ideas on how to resolve the rain FX? Right now our options seem to be to turn it off entirely or have it render out of order, neither of which are ideal

[dry shoal]

Not in the toolkit, within Unreal Engine 2

[dawn zinc]

Also I worry that if you swap it in UE that you might not get an HDR effect

[modern isle]

correct

[dawn zinc]

That's just a hunch, though

[dry shoal]

You can force an HDR effect using the Remix runtime

[dawn zinc]

But you would be converting SDR to HDR

[modern isle]

Why not do it proper?

[dawn zinc]

Unless you swap that textxure again in remix with the full HDR version

[dry shoal]

Does Remix have real HDR support for skydomes?

[modern isle]

yes

remix supports 16 bit textures out of the box

[dry shoal]

So they have that... But didn't make an option to override the sky textures...

[dawn zinc]

LOL well I guess there's your answer

[dry shoal]

I already know how to fix it. Untag it as UI in your runtime overlay and take a capture. Then use the alpha blending test set to color for the rain to show properly

[modern isle]

https://docs.unrealengine.com/udk/Two/UnrealTexturing.html no support for 16-bit

[dry shoal]

Admittedly I know jack about HDRIs so you're probably spot on

Shouldnt be too hard to get a good sky texture for kamino

[modern isle]

Sky benefits greatly from having a high dynamic range to minimize color banding and also to have more contrast between bright and dark parts

[dawn zinc]

Oh okay, I think I read this before and forgot lol. I'll try that

https://hdri-haven.com/hdri/cumulus-afternoon-sky-dome

For Geonosis, just recolor it to match

[dry shoal]

Makes a lot of sense. Same concept as emissives in general right?

[modern isle]

yeah just adding the patented breaking bad mexico filter should make this geonosis enough

[modern isle]

yes, the color banding can get really gnarly with sky textures, especially if they have a soft gradient it will look awful

[dry shoal]

Can confirm, the default sky looks like total ass

🙂

[static mason]

new swrc leaks

[dawn zinc]

I can't believe they canceled Republic Commando 2 before the first game even launched

Some new higher up guy at Lucasarts came in and torched so many projects

[dawn zinc]

Strange, the normals look fine in marmoset

I wonder if skipping the ingestion process is what's doing it on my end. I'm just dragging and dropping them into the folder

[dry shoal]

NOOOOOO DONT DO THAT

WITH NORMAL MAPS REMIX CONVERTS EACH TYPE TO AN OCTOHEDRAL NORMAL MAP OR WHATEVER THE 3RD TYPE IS CALLED

So you need to injest for it to work

[dawn zinc]

https://tenor.com/view/japan-suit-car-anime-cartoon-gif-7931159

LOL my bad

I'll fix that today

[dry shoal]

Injest = good 👍

Also when you finalize a mod to package and share it'll only pull what's been injested

[dawn zinc]

Okay good to know

Thanks

[dry shoal]

Follow-up on something I brought up a hot minute ago, Greg Knight, lead concept artist for Republic Commando finally responded to me

[dawn zinc]

Wow no way, his work rocks

What did you initially reach out to him for?

[dry shoal]

If he could share concept art/design principles/anything of that nature to make it easier to interpret the intended look of various assets for recreating them in higher fidelity

[dawn zinc]

Okay I think I've found the culprit

For the normals

Oh nice that's a good idea

[dry shoal]

As for his response, said he appreciated my interest and said working on the game was one of the highlights of his career. He was willing to share the concept art but unfortunately LucasFilm has full rights to his artwork made for the game. Every piece of concept art he's posted himself came from LucasArts publishing them themselves for all to see. So he can't even use his own art for his portfolio

[dawn zinc]

It's tough with companies. There is a lot of my professional work I can't show at risk of being sued or fired, and I know anything Star Wars related would be even worse

So the reason the meshes look gooey is because their hard edges are not being preserved

So the normal map thinks it's working with a mesh with hard edges, but isn't, so we aren't getting the edge crispness that is to be expected

Does UE not support hard edges?

[dry shoal]

Oh my god I know what we need to do

[dawn zinc]

What the mesh should look like, without any normals applied, vs above

[dry shoal]

Literally this. UE2 just smooths everything like it has caveman brain. The only way to get hard edges is by splitting verts where there are sharp angles. I can do this really easily if you wanted me to

[dawn zinc]

Interesting

[dry shoal]

I get it in general, the wild part for me is that the game is 20 years old

[dawn zinc]

I'll take a crack at that really quick

[hardy quail]

Apply an edge splitting modifer in blender

[dawn zinc]

I don't use blender but there's probably simple way to do it in maya

[dry shoal]

I didn't even know that was a thing. I was just going to select all sharp edges -> right click -> split lol

Btw isn't this technique referred to as split normals? The game is full of em

[hardy quail]

Yeah split normals

[dry shoal]

I'm learning

by the way how's that light coming along

[hardy quail]

Im on vacation rn but ill be home sometime today, sorry its taken me so long work gets in my way 😔😔😔 its like half complete ill send screenshots later

[dusk trail]

On vacation too, why I haven't done anything in awhile

[dry shoal]

Lol y'all are okay, I'm just messing around

[dusk trail]

@dry shoal What was it I was doing again?

[dry shoal]

The drop crate thingy

Metallic, shows up all over the arena with ammo drops

I remember you getting annoyed because it wasn't symmetrical lol

[dusk trail]

Oh yeah right right

Lmao

I'll work on finish that when I get home next week

[dry shoal]

the amount of unfinished models I have

[dusk trail]

Fr lol it be that way

[dry shoal]

Cool, no rush

Honestly I think the biggest thing is I need to take the L on doing everything. I'm trying to model general props, character models, first person weapon models, rock formations, and trying to create procedural textures and texture all my 3D assets. All at once

I think the meta is just to do general hard surface + environment texturing. I don't get enough practice at any singular thing

[dawn zinc]

Without normals, looks a lot better. Should look great with normals

[dry shoal]

Literally night and day, I don't even need to see a comparison to know

@dawn zinc I've gotten warning that edge splitting isn't the appropriate way as you want verts to still be welded I guess. I'm asking more about it

[dawn zinc]

Hmm, okay. Let me know what you find

[dry shoal]

@dawn zinc this is what I got

[dawn zinc]

That sounds really complicated lol

Going to just try split edges first because that's a one click solution

Also any clue why the meshes I'm adding in remix appear black? They look normal in-game

[dry shoal]

backfaces. Go to the xform in the heirarchy of the added helmet meshes. Then add a negative in front of the X axis' 1.0 scale

see if that fixes it

[dawn zinc]

Okay that worked, but I have a couple follow up questions

1: Why is it that no matter what textures I plug into the material on the helmet, it won't change? I don't have this problem with the helmet that's on the main commandos

2: Is there any way to bring back the original mesh that I replaced over so that I can realign after fixing the scaling?

Actually the helmets on the conveyer aren't receiving the proper materials either, hmm

Maybe I need to do another capture

[dry shoal]

nothing looks out of place here, dunno why it wouldn't work. Could try toggling "double sided" and see if it's doing something wacky

[dawn zinc]

Double sided won't toggle for anything in here

Also I see the restore asset button my bad

[dry shoal]

it only works for new assets, not original ones from the capture

[dawn zinc]

Notice how nothing is plugged into albedo, really weird

Nothing I change in those settings affects this mesh

Actually it's affecting the original material and not using the new one

For some reason it's pulling the original clone material instead of letting me edit the material on this new instanced thing

Oh I am genuinely stupid I figured it out. Disregard

[dry shoal]

What happened?

Oh yeah you removed the override

[dawn zinc]

Even though I was clicking on the new helmet, I wasn't selecting that actual helmet's material

I had to go one further thing down in the drop box

[dry shoal]

Ah gotcha

[dry shoal]

Multi materials, what are ya gonna do

[dawn zinc]

Yeah so I can confirm after splitting the edges and importing the normals through the ingestor that everything looks as intended now

[dry shoal]

proof?

[dawn zinc]

I'll take a video in a little bit

Are you able to get far into extreme prejudice without crashing?

[dry shoal]

On the current build of remix were both using? No. I need to get a working setup again

There's been some regression that makes the game unstable and is related to input

And I reported it quite a while ago when the issue first happened

and it sure would be nice if it got fixed given this is one of the most actively worked on remix projects

[dawn zinc]

Is it just extreme prejudice or is it all missions?

[dry shoal]

It's a remix regression entirely. You can't play more than like a minute proper without crashing

I think I know of a stable build setup, when I confirm I'll hook you up

[dawn zinc]

That's a shame, hopefully that gets fixed soon. Otherwise the whole thing is a bit pointless lol

At least with prologue in RC you can get through the whole thing before it crashes

And the intro for extreme prejudice

[dry shoal]

we can use an older version of remix in the meantime that we know work

[dawn zinc]

Clock out of work > immediately work on RC

[dry shoal]

I'm working on textures rn lol

[dawn zinc]

Currently getting the helmetless clone trooper in

Then I need to do a new version of the helmeted version that's all on one material so the clone advisor doesn't break

[dry shoal]

this took me far longer than I'd like to admit

but now I can use this mesh as a heightmap

[dawn zinc]

Oh nice so you're modeling from the original texture?

[dry shoal]

yep. took the original and lined it up pretty closely. Added the bolts, and after the screenshot added a background. Then I brought it into instaMAT. Using a render depth node I can set an orthographic view and make a heightmap using a 3D model

[dawn zinc]

Any reason the skybox I added turns orange at a distance?

[dawn zinc]

Nice

@modern isle Any ideas? Did you run into this?

Here are some of the updates from today. For some reason the commandos crotches are glowing lol, and there is the issue where the sky is orange

I notice in general that remix is adding an orange haze, I don't mind the haze but it would be nice if I can control the color. Unless there's a light that's causing that to happen

Also @dry shoal would you mind posting the settings you have for the blaster bolt material please

[dry shoal]

it's not set up in my current project. I plan on using the API anyways which I have the files for but didn't implement on this install

[dawn zinc]

Ah I see, okay

[dry shoal]

tldr for the blaster bolts is I have the stuff I need to make to make it virtually "finalized" in terms of functionality, so don't worry too much about it. You can set it up as an emissive but other than that I got it covered 👍

[dawn zinc]

Sounds good, thank you for that

Follow up question: how did you place an anchor in the level to add objects/lights to? I need to add the sky dome to something like that so it doesn't only appear at the end sequence

[dry shoal]

that's via a renderer mod. Another thing I have but don't have implemented because of Remix's current version bugs it would be great if those were fixed @ nvidia

basically I've worked with a couple original game modders to finesse some stuff together for the ideal remix setup. With the renderer adjustments, every single level has its own unique triangle up in the sky

so we always have an anchor mesh

[dawn zinc]

I see, that's smart

[dry shoal]

#showcase message

just check this out

the API's got cool stuff waiting to see the light of day. This is currently AFAIK the only actively developed project that has used the API

[dawn zinc]

That's sweet. That's not possible with what I currently have in the toolset?

[dry shoal]

nope. Not possible at all with the current tools. Only doable with the API

[dawn zinc]

Because the current build is so unstable?

Ah

[dry shoal]

nothing to do with stability, just functionality

[dawn zinc]

How long has that been out of comission?

[dry shoal]

a few weeks it's been unreliable. Works for some people but not others and we never figured out why

but I do know it's input related as performance drops off a cliff when actually doing stuff. Noticeable most in extreme prejudice

I stand still in an active combat area -> locked 120fps. I use WASD to go in circles -> 40s-50s with massive stutters

then crashes a minute or two later

Tbh you came in at a rough time in terms of Remix's current support for SWRC. It has some of the most potential of any Remix-compatible game, but due to these obscure issues in the last X many builds it's hard to make meaningful progress

[dawn zinc]

Strange, how often is the API updated? Is there anything we can do on our end or do we have to wait?

Figured out the fog

It’s the transmittance color on the volumetric lighting

[modern isle]

*Injoke

[modern isle]

story of my life, there's one project I can't even talk about even tho I worked on it.

[modern isle]

Is there a color texture or just the emissive texture, iirc you only need the latter.

[dawn zinc]

Even if the emissive is white, it was turning orange

But it looks like the default fog volume is slightly orange in color

So I tweaked it it to be more neutral and cool in color and now it looks as intended

[modern isle]

I suggest looking at the skydome and unplugging any extra textures outside of the emissive too.

[dawn zinc]

I did

Pure white emissive, no texture, it was orange in the final result

Sky looks so much better now

Anyone know what these big panels are in the captures I take?

[cobalt jacinth]

They’re the secondary render targets used for post processing.
You can set FrameFXDisabled=True in System.ini to get rid of them.
The downside is that you lose the distortion and fading effects in the intro

[dawn zinc]

Ah okay,. thanks for the info

So @dry shoal , when I have the rain particle disabled, it ends up blocking light when looking at certain angles. Is there any way around this?

[dawn zinc]

Got a sky dome working for the finale

[modern isle]

Looking good 😎

[dry shoal]

Sorry I think I worded it poorly. It's base remix that has the major issues right now. As for the API, problem is it only supports x64 applications officially. The x86 support comes via a fork from the community (shout-out to Xoxor). But a good chunk of the bridge fork versions (that contain x86 API support) suffer from the major issues of the main remix builds

[dry shoal]

Probably something to do with framefx that Leon mentioned

I've actually never noticed that before. That could explain why sometimes the light there didn't work right

Not an issue if a light source is added via the toolkit though

Given you're getting as much done as you are on Kamino I'm gonna shift some more of my efforts towards Kamino's assets

[sweet kindle]

dunno if its within the scope of this project, but if you ever need any custom mocap/general animation work i'd love to help/work with yall. same if you need just another generalist to help with scene setups/lighting scenes or testing etc.

[dry shoal]

Man y'all have no idea, I'd be willing to spend years on this project if I had the team/resources necessary to make what would be not far off of proper remake territory by mixing UE2 modding with Remix's pathtracing + API features

There's more potential to pull off such a feat with this game than many others from that era

But I also gotta keep it reasonable, at least until I can prove to myself that I could go all in

[dry shoal]

Republic Commando definitely has some chunky animations that make it very clearly of that era. @dawn zinc has experience with character rigging/weight painting, so technically we have the skillsets needed to do more complex and smoother character animations. Dunno about you guys, but I totally think new animations could be looked at in some cases. Especially first person animations with stuff like the DC17m reload. It looks very static as-is

Really it depends on what you're able to reasonably do Sev and if trooper would be willing to do all new rigging for some skeletal meshes in a UE2 game lol

Right now my aim is to cover up through Geonosis. The number of animations aren't too out there but it's probably safe to assume that if we were to do new animations, that we should pick and choose what would bring the most value

[sweet kindle]

i am primarily a character animator, but i do have some experience with view model animation as well. - would need to figure out the best practices and workflow for getting animations in the game etc. (not familiar with UE2 or the RC toolkit.) - seems like a sweet project, been following it for a bit. would love to help any way i can when ever i have the time.

btw those new models look awesome.

yeah, alot of the animations especially during some of the cinematics with clone troopers, like during the intro suit up sequence are pretty choppy.

[dawn zinc]

@dry shoal Idk what I did but the rain is now fully gone, along with the lighting errors. In that last video it looks as intended, though it would be so cool to have the rain. I wonder if we can add in our own in remix

[modern isle]

Just don't succumb to scope creep. Know what you want to achieve with your demo and lock that in, else you'll risk spiralling out.

[modern isle]

I'd love to have some basic particle system support in remix, but for that scene in the intro I reckon a mesh with a flipbook material will have suffice.

[dawn zinc]

Hmm okay. I’ll see if I can whip up something

[dry shoal]

We absolutely can get the rain working. But a part of me wonders if we could do something stupid and have rain meshes instead of transparent particles

Like these tiny droplet meshes that are translucent so they have refraction or some shit

[dry shoal]

Yep, very wary of that. But my scope came from how limited I was at the time. As more people have expressed interest in helping, the mod could be pushed to be more ambitious in some key ways. That said I think in terms of how much content is covered in the game should be 100% locked in for the time being, and that's still the case. Up to Geonosis. Adding Kashyyk and the Republic Assault ship thing are their own massive undertakings

[dry shoal]

Gotcha, for reference this would have to be done entirely within Unreal Engine 2 as Remix has no capability of changing animations. UE2 has a lot of documentation online, so if I find stuff related to animating I can throw it your way so you can see what's up

[sweet kindle]

cool that'd be helpful

we more concerned about gameplay or cinematic/scripted animations?

[dry shoal]

Scripted makes the most sense I think. After all those are the moments that are entirely visual without much distraction

I just thought about the scene going down the elevator deeper into the droid factory a few levels in. One of delta squad helps with the equipment of another while the briefing hologram is playing and it definitely looks 2005 lol. That scene has the potential to be a huge showpiece so having that little interaction look nicer would be very noticeable

Just spitballing though. I'd want to look over the content that I'm covering to see where the most impact could be made

[modern isle]

just keep in mind that bone influence is limited if I remember correctly.

[sweet kindle]

sweet, yeah be cool to see that done up with all the new models. and if the rigs are eventually setup better, it'll def look better.

[sweet kindle]

ah, how limited we talking? - how complex is the current rig also, havent seen it

[modern isle]

https://docs.unrealengine.com/udk/Two/SkeletalSetup.html

https://docs.unrealengine.com/udk/Two/SkelAnim2.html

[sweet kindle]

hm, dont think it'll be a massive issue

and there is a way to extract the existing animations?

[severe flare]

history in the making

[severe flare]

holy fuckn shit

[severe flare]

seriously if u can in someway help out that'd honestly be a game-changer

[sweet kindle]

he, "Game changer". i see what ya did there lol

[dry shoal]

Very easily. There's software called umodel that lets you pull assets from Unreal games and it works with SWRC. If you pull a skeletal mesh in one of the two formats (I forget which tbh) it'll bring the animations alongside it

[sweet kindle]

sweet.

[dry shoal]

I do wanna clarify something important here though, these are currently placeholder character models

They're from BF2EA and are a stand-in until custom models are finished. We wanna fully avoid as much grey area as possible and having custom models gives the project more of its own identity yk

[sweet kindle]

fair. im apart of several fan projects. making the assets rather than ports adds credibility and a unique art and swing to it.

and the legal stuff too lol, best to avoid

[dry shoal]

Exactly lol

Do you have any examples of your animation work that you wouldn't mind sharing?

[sweet kindle]

unfortunately not currently that i can show off. maybe i can find some old stuff to show later. (not at my pc rn) but alot of my stuff is unfortunately private rn.

[dry shoal]

Don't sweat it, was just curious

Since we're gonna be using custom models I'll show what our two closest to completion character models are

Lemme dig for em

[sweet kindle]

kk

[dry shoal]

@sweet kindle the B1 Battle Droid and B2 Super Battle Droid

B1 shot has a comparison with the original as you can see

[sweet kindle]

lol that is one crusty 2005 model

looks great

[dry shoal]

I'm no animator but I'm guessing droids are quite easy due to the limited articulation

[sweet kindle]

fair, tbh i think the droids are the only characters where i think most of the original animations would work just because they have that early 00' stiff snappy feel

[dry shoal]

B1 at a more flattering angle

[dry shoal]

I was asking for your perspective as animator lol

Yes most of the animations are good, some are great even

At the very least if anything was gonna be re-rigged it wouldn't be the droids. The worst animations I can think of are mainly the melee animations

[sweet kindle]

srry i said fair instead of true, lol. kinda tired, didnt sleep well. yeah you are right that limited range of motion for the droids from less bones makes it easier to the robotic kinda feel for any animations we do

i forget what the melee animations look like. they pretty bad?

[cobalt jacinth]

Oh yes new animations would be awesome in some cuscenes. Especially in the one where you stand in line to get your helmet. The clones in front of you are all in their combat stance because there's no regular walk and stand animations.
I tried to fix that years ago but didn't make it look much better lol: https://youtu.be/-O_QMCywIPA?feature=shared&t=50

[past escarp]

Honestly, replacing particles with actual meshes can do wonders for performance. In a game I am toying around with, I modded the game to use a dummy mesh in place of particles for the lasers and then was able to replace the dummy mesh with an actual mesh in the toolkit and even with having lights added to the lasers (the base game didn't have them cast light for some odd reason), performance was hugely improved just from that alone.

[past escarp]

Although I don't know if replacing them with a bunch of translucent droplets would improve performance in the same way. Would be mighty pretty, though.

[dry shoal]

@sweet kindle well there's one idea from Leon that I didn't even consider. The most basic animations of the clones in the intro are used and it looks pretty awkward now that I'm thinking about it

For reference Leon's one of the most experienced modders in the SWRC scene, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised he tried his hand at it himself in the last lol

[sweet kindle]

lol that blender layout. old school

[dry shoal]

Since they'd be 3D meshes they wouldn't be alpha tested like the original particles. Alpha testing is what causes the big perf hits

Well shit now that there's more people interested in helping out I should get a stable build going since the latest remix builds r not good with some regressions just for RC which is lovely

[sweet kindle]

have you considered setting up a dedicated github so everyone working on it has an up to date build with all the current content and remix stuff etc.? ppl working on it could also push new content when stuff gets finished - would make organization and everyone being on the same page way easier. just an idea

[dry shoal]

Yes, mentioned it the other day actually. Only thing is we need to also share the same game directory I'm pretty sure

Because the Remix toolkit gets mad if it's missing previously accessed scene captures

I already have a GitHub set up for personal use but I can make a new one and expand on it. If I set it up perfectly then in theory we should all have the latest versions of the exact same mod project that we could then view in-game any time

I have fairly limited experience with GitHub so I'm not fully familiar with the setup and possibilities

[cobalt jacinth]

Back then making animations was a pain in the ass lol. You had to use a very old Blender version (2.49) to import the models and animations from the game. Then open the blend file in the latest Blender version (2.79) and export the animations from there. Then import them in UE2 runtime, extract them with umodel and finally import in RC 😄
Now that fortunately isn't necessary anymore.

[cobalt jacinth]

We have a SWRC-Modding group in GitHub that isn't super active. Could create a private repository in there and invite everyone who wants to participate. But you can also create a new one whatever is more convenient

[dry shoal]

I think a private repository under the modding group would be great. At the end of the day some SWRC modders are helping out and I wouldn't have gotten this far without that community anyways. So I'm down to have it there

Only thing is structure/organization. I don't know how specific you can get with GitHub's synced files. For example syncing the RTX.conf seems like a no brainer since any improvements people add will apply to everyone else generally

The rtx-remix folder under system would be ideal so we could share captures as well, and ofc a remix toolkit project directory which can go anywhere. I personally have a file structure for it under documents\GitHub\RemixDev for example. But I'd want to start new to be more organized anyways

In terms of potential concerns, having the project folder synced means all injested assets will be synced too. Given the project will be using modern texture resolutions have multiple texture maps each for PBR, I'm unsure how large file sizes could get

[cobalt jacinth]

Well git isn't really the right tool for binary assets since text files are the intended use case. You can have binary files in the repository of course but the size will blow up when new versions are added.
And github also has some file size limits: https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/working-with-files/managing-large-files/about-git-large-file-storage
So for configuration files and anything text based git is fine but textures and other large binary files need another solution.

[dry shoal]

I might be misunderstanding the link, looks like 2GB is the max for a single file, is that right? I wouldn't ever expect that to be concern. But yes you're right that that's gotta be a better way for art assets

[modern isle]

does git even support file locking?

[dry shoal]

I'm just learning as I go

[dawn zinc]

Yeah having more stability would be amazing. I got about two minutes into the second mission on Geonosis and it looked neat straight out of the box

Like even the HUD for the sniper rifle highlighting the new commando models just works

Excited to work more on prologue tonight. I'm going to see if the environment assets from BF2 might be usable for Kamino

[dry shoal]

Imo it's not worth grabbing environment assets. Characters make sense because they're few but massively impact the overall feel

[dawn zinc]

I think certian ones can be helpful, like the big buildings on Kamino. I forget what they're called

Or rocks on Geonosis

I'd also like to see if I can get the BF2 gunship working since that's pretty front and center for many scenes

[dry shoal]

I'm willing to use them as references for sure but I've all but decided this project will use 0 ripped assets in the end product

I want everything to be custom made or using open licensed models online where it might necessary

[dry shoal]

not perfect yet but the clone helmet is coming along well

[dawn zinc]

I understand. For my personal iteration on this I'll be sticking to existing assets where possible. But any contributions I make outside of that I will gladly give to be used by anyone here

The Kaminoans will probably be first up on the list of custom characters I make since that would be a low lift

Then baby clones

[dawn zinc]

Time to polish some lighting

[hardy quail]

can we add this in rtx

[sweet kindle]

🤣

[dry shoal]

For this that didn't already know, I'm sharing some of my assets with another group working on an exclusively UE2 based remaster of the game. I recreated GeoLightFxt some time ago but it never got implemented. They used one of their existing textures and applied it
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/877221629481074711/1278741018124226633/D61D0BDD-8C90-449F-BA8D-60409290F0C8.png?ex=66d1e7e0&is=66d09660&hm=d28ef2cd299066fdf1cf02c15e49a3625386457f25b9cd676132f4d3cbb4a3ab&

I'm likely going to use a different texture, particularly in the emissive parts. But in terms of the geometry I think it looks pretty awesome

Btw I have my eye on a more formal-syle hard surface modeling course. Costs money ($50) but I really think I need something like that to get more confident with my modeling and expand further with what I'm able to make

YouTube tutorials are kind of horrible

So if I get it and stick with it, hopefully in a couple weeks I'll be much more reliable at making what I wanna make

[dawn zinc]

https://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/?gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjwuMC2BhA7EiwAmJKRrHLylRcVLNdPN6gFUBF3zH4JPe9VJk-UMeZuPAwlpPA823S2AL3n3hoClBgQAvD_BwE

This is where I went to school, they also have tons of online tutorials you can buy

[dry shoal]

Wow this looks super fascinating. Seeing they're from people working in-industry also inspires more confidence. It seems like these require at least a base level of familiarity with the software used and the fundamentals down to get more unique results

The course I was looking at is a sort of hard surface kickstart which assumes no initial knowledge and can be done in two or so weeks. But this seems like something I could expand to after getting those fundamentals locked in

[dawn zinc]

They have courses for all levels, you can find beginner hard surface ones somewhere on there. I don't know if they have any for blender though, might be for Maya

But thought I'd share in case you find something useful

I've wanted to teach there for a long time but it's a huge time sync that I don't know if I'm ready to commit to lol

[dry shoal]

Yeah I saw lots with Maya, and the courses I'd be interested in that do use blender (like making a hero gun model from FacePunch's lead weapon designer) require multiple pieces of software that I don't currently have access to

[dawn zinc]

https://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/tutorials/creating-a-hero-weapon-for-games

[dry shoal]

Lol

[dawn zinc]

Found you a Blender tutorial for all experience levels

[dry shoal]

That's the exact one I mentioned just now

[dawn zinc]

LOL my bad

[dry shoal]

Like I said that's something I'd love but there's many parts to it beyond blender which is the only thing stopping me

[dawn zinc]

Marmoset is pretty amazing, it goes on sale a couple times a year and is one of those programs where you buy it once and you get it forever. That one is pretty essential

Painter you can buy a month of for $20

I'll have to buy a month of painter to paint the commandos

[dry shoal]

I have two alternatives with instaMAT and ArmorPaint. But because they're both relatively niche compared to the heavy hitters there aren't lots of tutorials out there on em

I'm definitely down to get more of the software for these workflows as I progress in skill level. It's my hope that I can transition with learning the skills I have with this project to looking at game dev for a potential career

[dawn zinc]

You definitely can, all of this stuff can be in a portfolio you can use to either apply for work in the industry or use to get in a school to boost your skillset

You're way further along than I was when I got started at that school. You'd laugh if you saw my starting portfolio lol

[dry shoal]

I'd say I got a strong start thanks to the artists in this server who encouraged me to try my hand at it. When I first began this project I was gonna use AI PBR upscaling and largely call it a day. Now it's much more ambitious than that

But you can only get so far with asking for advice from time to time. Which is why I think setting in everything formally is the way to go at this point. My bar for quality is relatively high so I need to be able to do it consistently

[dry shoal]

It would certainly be killer to share an RTX Off vs RTX On video where much of the work seen is my own 🙂

[dawn zinc]

Yeah, you can definitely get to a good level with decent tutorials. If you want to do this as a career someday, I would highly encourage you find a school and dedicate your time to it full-time. It requires lots and lots of hours of practice

[dry shoal]

I'll admit I'm shying away from full time schooling since long term structured education is something I've struggled with in my day. There's also the bit where I'd like to take these skills to make my own game. It's a big risk but without going into specifics, how I have things set up now in my life kinda makes for the ideal conditions to attempt such a thing

[dawn zinc]

I feel that. I'd love to run my own studio someday as well

I just don't know enough of any particular game engine to be able to implement ideas effectively lol, all I know is art

[dry shoal]

That'd be sweet but making a full business and hiring is a big leap beyond what I have in mind I'm sure you've seen a number of largely one-man projects that have made it big due to having a type of game that doesnt quite exist elsewhere

[dry shoal]

Funnily enough I already have a full course acquired for the Godot engine since I was planning on learning game development earlier on, but life happens so that got delayed

In fact they're in the middle of retooling all of their courses to a new and more intuitive format (imagine a tutorial built into a game engine) that's been rolling out piece by piece. Gives me time to work on this project lol

https://x.com/NathanGDQuest/status/1817464508316778997?t=wtSIPJMkxIpT0_6qGVmqlw&s=19

GDQuest (@NathanGDQuest) on X

People have dream games they wanna make. This was my dream project.

Twitter · Jul 28, 2024, 7:38 AM

An example of that tutorial system I was referring to

[modern isle]

wdym niche.... substance has been around for like a decade while instamat came out in january. Ofc there will be more resources for the older product.

[dry shoal]

https://x.com/NathanGDQuest/status/1782080585889910900?t=bzjGmlh58Ph7n-t3vL9xuw&s=19

GDQuest (@NathanGDQuest) on X

3D interactive tutorials, in Godot!

Twitter · Apr 21, 2024, 4:14 PM

[dry shoal]

Well yes that's what would make them niche. They haven't been widely adopted such that there are plenty of resources online for them

It's not a fault of the software of course

[dawn zinc]

I think he meant instamat is niche

Honestly though, it would behoove you to learn painter even if on a free trial. $20 for a month isn't so bad, either

And I'd be happy to show you the ropes

It's industry standard at this point

Plus the quality of tutorials you’ll find on painter will probably end up being more helpful

[modern isle]

The majority of painter tutorials I find easily applicable to instamat too, but that's just me.

[dry shoal]

I think you're totally right about that, I'm just worried I'll get confused by small differences adding up. I haven't tried using a substance tutorial for instaMAT yet so I should definitely give it a try before I say for certain. I actually quite like instaMAT anyways + free

Wait I think I mixed them up. Isn't there designer and painter?

Designer being a procedural node based system like what I know from instaMAT, while painter is more about applying the materials to assets?

[modern isle]

Yeah, designer is the proc graph, painter is... the painting part with the layer stack

[dry shoal]

Painting is scary

[dawn zinc]

Yeah designer is more for building the materials that you will paint with in painter

Painting is easy man. It’s not that bad

It’s mostly driven by masking

Just work layer by layer

I do 90% of my texture painting with mouse and keyboard lol, painter makes it pretty simple

[modern isle]

No, my wrath is scary. Painting isn't :P

[dry shoal]

See, I'm so drawing-challenged that the idea of painting in a 3D space sounds very difficult

So all of my assets texturing so far has been 100% procedural in nature. Edge masks, volumes, gradients

[dawn zinc]

Don’t get hung up on the thought of painting. The vast majority of the work is layering tiling masks and moving sliders

Yeah I mean that’s most of it honestly

Usually actual layer painting is the very last step and I don’t always do it

And again, it’s painting within a mask, so it’s very easy

[dry shoal]

Very well then

Maybe I'll do the most barebones basics of material assignments then use masked brushes to manually draw on scattered dirt/scratches/etc

I'll even pull out the ol Wacom tablet

[modern isle]

I don't think i ever used my tablet with painter

Pretty much all the hand painting boiled down to using stamps and decals which is just lining up the thing and left clicking once

[dry shoal]

I'm also very bad at lining up the thing though

It's why I'm desperate to have different details represented as real geometry since that makes it so much simpler

[modern isle]

ctrl + z exists

¯_(ツ)_/¯

do you think I get it perfect first try?

[dry shoal]

Yes

[gleaming sedge]

Auto doesn't wanna learn

Teach me instead

[dawn zinc]

https://tenor.com/view/palpatine-emperor-look-stare-gif-15923185

[gleaming sedge]

Let him rot away with instamat

@dry shoal

[dry shoal]

He's not working on anything related to star wars so it's not worth

[gleaming sedge]

He's lying

I love that one guy

uh

yoda

yeah

[modern isle]

You mean Glub Shitto?

[gleaming sedge]

Gulp shitto

Yes

Or was it glup

[modern isle]

Who knows, star wars names are known to be bonkers

[dry shoal]

@dawn zinc btw about the normal splitting stuff. I've been told the .psk exporter can handle that automatically, but you need to use the "edge split modifier" for it to do its thing

[dawn zinc]

The exporter in blender?

[dry shoal]

Yep

The addon I got for you

[dawn zinc]

So it does that for hard edges?

[dry shoal]

That seems to be the case according to what's being described to me

If you have an edge split modifier, the exporter handles normal splitting where necessary

[dawn zinc]

Oh I forgot to mention, I got the AT-TE, LAAT, and Spider Droids last night. Going to try and swap those in soon

Might do a little more lighting polish on prologue but I think it's in a pretty decent state, I'll check it again tonight and if it looks good I'll post a video

I only realized last night that RC uses a version of the LAAT that you don't really see anywhere else, specifically the side doors. I'll have to figure out how to get that to work properly

[dawn zinc]

https://youtu.be/cKZDOrMSm1g

https://tenor.com/view/monkey-zen-focus-walkman-earbuds-gif-12972884

[dry shoal]

Btw it might be worth making a new SWRC thread since technically we're working on different projects even if some stuff might be shared between em

There's a couple other games with multiple threads, there's precedent for it dw lol

At least for the stuff that's distinctly different since I'm concerned others might mix them up since I've been working on this one for so long

[dusk trail]

What are you doing now?

[dry shoal]

No I mean for trooper, since he's focusing on speed by using existing assets from other games while I want to go with fully custom assets

Like for me the BF2EA models were gonna be placeholders but he just wants to work with those overall

Different approaches but for the same game if that makes sense

[dusk trail]

Oh oh gotcha

Haven't been in chat much so I was a bit confused

I still get notifications any time someone talks here so I keep an eye on it from time to time

And saw you say that

[dry shoal]

Oops lol. I have the chat muted but get unread indicators which I'm physically incapable of ignoring so it's basically the same thing

[dusk trail]

Rip lmao

[dawn zinc]

https://tenor.com/view/din-djarin-goodbye-goodbye-chat-star-wars-gif-25740478

Will do, if my skills are needed in here feel free to ping me

[dry shoal]

Hey feel free to hang around! It's mainly just images/videos that I'm worried might cause some mixing up

I do plan on sharing that material for Kamino too for ya

[dawn zinc]

Oh I'll definitely still be around because I have new questions every time I use this software lol, and everyone here has been very helpful in that regard

And thank you. Like I said before any assets I author will just be up for grabs for anyone to use. It'll probably be the Kaminoans first

[dry shoal]

team work makes the dream work

[gleaming sedge]

Auto pushed him out

Just like that

[dry shoal]

I'll push you dad out after I get with your mom

[gleaming sedge]

I can't recover from this one

[dawn zinc]

https://tenor.com/view/avatar-movie-fall-falling-meme-gif-24396824

[dry shoal]

[dawn zinc]

Sorry I love that gif lol

Is there a naming convention for multiple projects for one game?

[dry shoal]

uhhh that's a great question

I have no idea

LOL

@burnt light you've seen this a couple times right, what do they normally do

[burnt light]

i'm not sure i understand

ah okay

well in the other situations, one was usually called [Game] RTX, and the other was [Game] Remix

or just a totally different name, like Traggey did for SH2

i'd suggest the totally different name route. having one RTX and one Remix is confusing lol

[dry shoal]

well I guess technically there's already a name for this project courtesy of yosuke since he made those logos lol

[burnt light]

ya

[dry shoal]

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1200925027554558034/1274046230791720960/swRCremStyled.png?ex=66d1f704&is=66d0a584&hm=047fc2794035141558564777013266ce8d6e5bc3d2e18e753cc6686bb448ad1f&=&format=webp&quality=lossless&width=1920&height=902

Star Wars: Republic Commando Remixed

Star Wars: Republic Commando [Remixed]

YOU CAN'T DELETE THOSE

???

[burnt light]

nope

Discord being Discord

[dry shoal]

now I look like a moron

[burnt light]

it's okay

we knew anyway 😛

[dawn zinc]

Lol, I'll come up with a different title as to not get the two confused

[burnt light]

could do SWRCPT lol

project names are hard

SWRCPTRTXRemix!

so easy to remember

[dry shoal]

Star Wars Republic Commando RTX Pathtraced Remix Remaster Edition

[dawn zinc]

Is there a way to override an instance of a material? Or will that apply to every instance of that material?

For example, right now the commando helmets all share the same material, but I want to override specific ones for different helmet colors

[visual tendon]

if they all share a hash then no

not within remix

[dawn zinc]

Got it, thank you

[modern isle]

excuse me? We clearly established this as the logo :P https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1200925027554558034/1240738767636009091/SWRC_RTX_a-1.png?ex=66d2bdc6&is=66d16c46&hm=f2a727f97fb5bad58adb8abc2bed845850d5250b16029ecd64d4ba0f77d6a7ce&

🤣

[dry shoal]

You're right, how could I forget

SWRC RTX REmix

[dry shoal]

@sweet kindle https://docs.unrealengine.com/udk/Two/SkeletalSetup.html#Highly Articulated Facial Skeleton

In this they show a character model's face alone having 50 bones

I don't have a frame of reference for the number of bones common in modern skeletal meshes, but if the face alone can do 50 then it's already a big upgrade. RC's bodies have far fewer than 50 bones

[sweet kindle]

thats pretty sweet.

pretty cool the engine is so flexible compared to other really old engines ive done projects on

[dry shoal]

Yeah no kidding. I was surprised when I learned static meshes could scale quite high in tri count. In fact it's recommended in the documentation as the biggest limiting factor is RAM. So any detail that might be in textures would be better to have in geometry where possible. Neither are an issue in my case bc Remix but it's interesting for sure

What other old engines have you done stuff for?

[sweet kindle]

the primary one ive spent a large ammount of time on is with the Halo blam engines, one project im currently on with a 10-14 person team has been in development for about 3 years now. though ive been modding in blam for alot longer than that, Blam especially has very strict limitations on skeletal structure and bone count. every class of character shares a rig. and so any new meshes have to be done exactly like the original devs did it 15-20 years ago.

ive also worked with other engines too but kinda less notable

[dry shoal]

So Halo CE huh. Yeah the animations there were... Not good

[sweet kindle]

not CE, H2-reach

[dry shoal]

Even up to reach is limited?

[sweet kindle]

reach rn is the best its ever been with the workflow mixture of actual full engine dev tools and community plugins for blender that makes alot of stuff incredibly streamlined compared to working with most engines, old or modern. but there are stuff we are working on but havent achieved yet, i think reach has a current limit of something like 150 bones? but according to some of the programmers reach should get up too a larger limit

tbh i think less an engine limitation and more we havent made the tools for it yet. despite having the same tools that bungie used to make the game, alot of features and stuff cant be done in blender yet

[dry shoal]

Interesting. I totally forgot the Halo games were moddable in MCC. I'm curious how much the original renderer of Halo 2 could be pushed with additional geometry

[sweet kindle]

H2 can be pushed extreamly far, the project im on is for halo 2. im mainly a rasterization/lighting programmer/engineer and 3d generalist on the team but that encompasses alot. H2 has never looked better tbh, new dynamic lighting, everything is getting a good facelift, custom cutscenes etc.

[dry shoal]

Well I'll be damned. Anything relating to the original stencil shadows system?

[sweet kindle]

more of a smart shadow mapping system that i redid from the really horrible system they had setup. it looks pretty close to stencil stuff in terms of contrast but obv per pixel will always look better, because H2's stencil buffer was repurposed unless we had source code, its basically improbable that can be done.

most ppl who arnt knowledgable about the subject dont notice or care ive found tbh

[dry shoal]

I'd be super interested to see where that project goes. I'm a sucker for Halo 2 and think the original graphics have a lot of charm to em. I'd love to see them upgraded

But that also has me curious how much the visuals could be stripped back to allow for something like RTX Remix support. That would have to be on the original Vista port though since MCC is DX11

Halo with pathtracing sounds absolutely wild

[sweet kindle]

unfortunatly due to shader 2.0 idk if it will ever be possible but i dream lmao

[dry shoal]

I know it uses shader model 2.0 but I mean modifying the use of shaders such that it's more reliant on fixed function rendering

I'm sure certain visual features could be forced off via modding which could help

[sweet kindle]

wonder if someone where to gut the majority of non geo/effect/required rendering shaders if it might work. idk kinda out of my wheelhouse that stuff.

[dry shoal]

You're telling me lol

#1119109305224929321 message

Seems like someone got it to boot

But never went further than that

That was quite a while ago. I might have to break out the old disc copy I have somewhere to test it out of curiosity

[sweet kindle]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJw04pjR64o&ab_channel=SEV
some fun examples of the new lighting

[dry shoal]

No way, I actually stumbled across this video a couple months back

What a massive upgrade

[sweet kindle]

lol small internet

[dry shoal]

No kidding

[sweet kindle]

im glad most ppl are happy with it. took a few months but im happy to have it finished

[dry shoal]

How much manual implementation does it require across the game? Or does it just work with all the existing light sources

[sweet kindle]

old school. place dynamic lights through out the bsp.

or you can attach to objects, script etc.

doom style kinda

[dry shoal]

That's always fun

Imo one of the coolest things about Remix is it brings people from a whole bunch of modding communities together. I've come across lots of people who have done cool shit in other games

[sweet kindle]

yeah tbh im excited about the RC projects maily due to burn out a bit from halo, and irl work. be nice to work on a different franchise a bit on the side.

but yeah ive seen some ppl here from my team/the halo mod community. cool to see everyone invested in this new tech

[dry shoal]

That's actually a similar thing to a couple others who have helped me out so far. Namely people who've done mods/scripting for SWRC for years seeing what could be done here. It's why this is AFAIK the only actively developed project that utilizes the Remix API. Dunno if you've seen the demo vid of it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsI3NEohqGw

The API allows for closer integration with original game logic. In this instance, Leon (one of the top modders in the SWRC scene) made Remix identify all projectile entities from the original game logic, and pull the assigned color from that entity's properties in UE2 to use for a light source created by Remix

[sweet kindle]

thats sick af

[dry shoal]

Yep, and I hope to push it further. Especially as the more recent Remix builds become more stable and I can work on it more reliably

Remix breaks a lot of effects just due to how the tech works. But using the API we can recreate approximations of the effects working off of game logic

Like the downed state in the original game has this reddish shader across the screen. In theory we could set it up such that Remix's post processing settings make the screen have intense vignetting and a slow blinking red hue, + even have the visor swapped out for a cracked model with light refractions

That's gonna take work and be a good bit into the future, but it's shit that Remix on its own can't do

[sweet kindle]

can remix do particles or fx or does stuff like that have to be done in UE2

[dry shoal]

Highly depends on the effects or particles being mentioned. Things like smoke/fire/debris particles work, but alpha testing is extremely expensive in pathtracing. For performance reasons it would actually be superior to have modeled out debris for instance

And that's stuff that I think could be done with the API or doing some tricks with UE2. If it could be done via the API that would be easier since it's more systemic than hacked together

[sweet kindle]

yeah cause i was thinking about the rain on kamino. was wondering also, what's the general plan with kamino. going for reference with other star wars material or just the PBR rout of keeping the game source art and just making it look better?

[dry shoal]

I'm looking at a mix of both. Originally I thought I'd go with the tile looking floor from one of the shots shared before, but I thought it might look too generic repeated over such a large space. Then I found out Kamino's outdoor open areas aren't like that anyways, so that's when I looked at the original game's material and figured I'd go with a recreation of that

There's also some benefit in that because the original texture implies multiple layers, it'll benefit from a heightmap

And it'll make it real easy to have stuff like water collecting in between the larger metal plates

Meanwhile my latest material for the arena floor on the first Geonosis stage is a mix between the original texture and geonosis's ground in other media

[sweet kindle]

yeah i saw the geonosis material. great texture work, gonna be crazy

[dark lava]

https://tenor.com/view/윙크-awards-artist-reaction-reaction-wink-gif-15949735

[dry shoal]

it's subtle but I made it darker and with more color variation

[dry shoal]

@modern isle was wondering where you recommend I go from here. I got the overall colors down, I have the height and normal looking good with the screws included, what's the play to make it work as a material

this is the scene where it's used, has rain and such

I noticed there's also surface color variation but I don't want to copy what I already have with the "circuitry"-like pattern on my metal flooring material on Geonosis's hanger

[hoary monolith]

shit looks great man

[static mason]

sniffa certified

[gleaming sedge]

Bake it out to textures

[modern isle]

Now it's time to make the base color proper and start with the roughness. I suggest adding grime and dirt to crevices and adding a very subtle splotchy grunge to the base color set to overlay at low opacity.

[modern isle]

oh also something worth noting, if this is covered in rain that the metal underneath still has (some of) its metallic properties and does color the reflection according to it's own color even though it's covered in a dielectic.

[dry shoal]

@sweet kindle I'll likely get a github set up once x86 support becomes official for the Remix API. Right now we've been using a community made fork, but there are some issues and relying on official builds is safer

the API is gonna be a major part of the puzzle in this project to really push how dynamic it'll be compared to other Remix mod projects

[sweet kindle]

Ight sounds like a plan, until then how would you like to handle shared builds and changes or what ever you task me to do.

[dry shoal]

for now it's just kinda loose and sent privately. Like the API dll file that plugs into the game and the scripts I use to get larger Remix scene captures I have just on my PC, with backups on a personal discord server

once things come together more that's when github comes in I think

would you be down to do a test run animating something for UE2?

[dry shoal]

ok I have no clue how this shit works ngl

[sweet kindle]

Yeah. I'm out and about rn but Lil later today I prob can wip something up quickley

[dry shoal]

gonna warn that I'm not familiar with how changing animations works, like not the faintest idea. @cobalt jacinth could probably point in the right direction though

[dry shoal]

new mesh for Kamino, beforeand after

[sweet kindle]

@cobalt jacinth srry for the ping, but could you point me into the right direction as too what tools i need to use to extract meshes and animations and get them into blender?

[cobalt jacinth]

You need umodel to extract them from the ukx packages: https://www.gildor.org/downloads
Then this blender add-on to import and export psk and psa: https://github.com/DarklightGames/io_scene_psk_psa?tab=readme-ov-file

[sweet kindle]

alright, thanks much

for the exporter do i need the unreal package extractor or the UE viewer itself?

[cobalt jacinth]

UEViewer

[dry shoal]

getting it into blender is quite easy

I just don't know what to do from there 🙂

the animations show up in the dope sheet iirc

[sweet kindle]

yeah i got it, working on some stuff rn

[dry shoal]

sweet 👍

[sweet kindle]

to start off, ill clean up a few existing animations and then ill make some actual walk cycles and idles for the intro clones

[dry shoal]

looking forward to it rn I'm adding some more materials to geonosis before I go back to finish one of the kamino pbr textures

[sweet kindle]

some animations like the take downs i dont want to full on redo rather just clean up and adjustments, cause im kinda worried that the timing and stuff might be off from the originals too much.

[dry shoal]

oh yeah bc they have to interact with another model

[sweet kindle]

yea

[dry shoal]

when you say clean up what does that mean in practice? Like make it less choppy-ish?

idk how else to describe it

[sweet kindle]

less choppy, maybe more dynamic poses that mesh with the models and stuff better (arm pads and stuff clipping etc.) - QOL stuff. since alot of scripted animations are timing sensitive im more thinking of adjustments rather than full on changes, for characters interacting with panels or other bipeds

[dry shoal]

sounds neat

[sweet kindle]

but for stuff like some cine animations, idles, cycles etc. ill prob either edit them heavily or straight up make new ones

[dry shoal]

that would be perfect

[sweet kindle]

what ever you fancy at the end of the day ur the project lead

[dry shoal]

I know for idles the one they have now doesn't fit most scenarios I feel like. For the clones I mean

the really hunched over look

if that could be made more neutral so it could apply in more casual contexts while not looking out of place in missions that would be good. Keeping in mind that idle isn't used when in the more high stress situations like combat

it's only when all enemies are dead/there are none present

[cobalt jacinth]

One thing to keep in mind tho is that if you change the ActionBreathe animation you also have to change all of the others because it is the reference pose that they all start from or end in. If you don't change them the characters morph into the pose when starting another animation which looks bad.
Might be a lot of effort but no problem if you're up for it 😄

[dry shoal]

@sweet kindle ^^ seems important lol

[sweet kindle]

yeah, halo is pretty similar. ill keep that in mind

[static mason]

Grok

I wonder, interesting things

[dry shoal]

one day my beloved

one day you will be out there for all to see in-game

@dawn zinc I know you're gonna be using the BF2 model but how willing would you be to rig my SBD for use in-game when I get around to finalizing it for my project

he's itching for action. It's on me that it's not actually done yet

[dry shoal]

Mini update: I'm nearing completion of my first formal modeling course, so after that I'll be able to model again more confidently and get the project live again using GitHub as a base for those involved

[sweet kindle]

been working on some walk cycles etc. and cleaning up and/or going through a few existing animations. nothing in game yet but a few should be good to show at least prob later on today

[dry shoal]

Awesome. It'll probably be good to have those files on GitHub too. I've gone through dozens of game installs so definitely wanna have easy access to it. Depending on the size I'll probably also store the resulting file after the change is made in-engine so it's a simple drag and drop to get it for others

[sweet kindle]

sweet, on the H2 project we have the entire build, and all the data/source files on github. its a good system to keep stuff backed up and everyone on the team is constantly up to date.

btw that super BD is awesome, there any shots of the internals after the plates get knocked off?

[dry shoal]

In that case I can probably leave injested bits of the project there too. Like materials and meshes that have been brought into the Remix project

[dry shoal]

She's not done so unfortunately not. There's a strong base there but there's a good number of things I need to clean up. Only then I'll be able to do stuff with the interior

I've also been advised to do the interior via PBR displacement maps. Modeling out all the circuitry and stuff is possible on a technical level due to Remix's ability to handle stupidly high fidelity meshes, but I don't have the skills required to pull that off in a model destructively. A texture allows me to iterate

[sweet kindle]

fair, and not a bad way of doing it, plus going overboard on super detailed models this early like that is prob a rabbit hole in of itself.

regardless its looking good so far

[static mason]

Woah, nice

Did you model that?

[dry shoal]

Using the BF2EA model as a reference but yes

So I didn't do a whole block out but I did make all those pieces

[static mason]

Nice

[sweet kindle]

been pretty busy. got a blend now with all clone animations on a universal rig for editing that we can retarget to the clone rigs etc. smoothed out and baked physics on alot of existing animations and did up a few others. - when the git is set up and everyone is all working on it in one place, well need to figure out whatt the most important animations to really focus on or at least tweak to be less robotic

[dry shoal]

Good timing. I'm gonna set up a new install of RC along with hopefully a 100% stable remix build setup. Once I have that it'll be the base to work off of that I can share identical files with

I'm gonna try out Remix's new comfyUI stuff to get AI upscaled textures for placeholders since the default bilinear filtering on the old textures is not the most pleasing on the eyes lmao

Emphasis on placeholder, I want 0 AI upscaled anything in the final result of this project

What are you referring to by baked physics btw?

[dry shoal]

I've brought it up before but this is gonna be a real exciting scene to remaster

[dry shoal]

I love how much creepier this weapon looks seeing little pixel perfect shadows on each of the "nails" tapping against the armor

[sweet kindle]

ive found a few tools that allow you to bake momentum, center of mass, secondary motion and weight shifting for character models

[dry shoal]

tools that would work with UE2 you think?

[sweet kindle]

of course, its all key frames.

[dry shoal]

now we're talkin

I got the game in a functional state. Gonna switch the remix bridge version to a newer one that I also know is stable and playtest it before getting everything organized for github

will include my rtx.conf file so all the surface level runtime changes needed for the game are working

[sweet kindle]

sweet, got a few beauty reels from some of my tests these past few days. i think stuff will work out fine tbh

[dry shoal]

so if I understand right it's almost like a physics sim that can then be baked into each keyframe?

[sweet kindle]

yup its specifically for character models too, it also dynamically adjust poses that dont correlate with the characters center of gravity. i can also set frames to be key poses so the start and end frame still matches the original

[dry shoal]

sounds like these new animations are gonna be clean as hell

I'll try and have the github set up before I call it a night. I need your github name so I can invite you when I do

[sweet kindle]

anything touched up should be much smoother at the very least

777Sev777

[dry shoal]

oh yeah this could be used for original animations to get passive benefits on top of the manually adjusted ones

[sweet kindle]

exactly my thoughts

[dry shoal]

I love refreshing myself playing through the droid factory and seeing the potential for lighting

I can already imagine having all these tiny shadows for each hole in the wall, light filtering through the grating above

already got some neat looking shadows just using the generic translated lightsources on the moving droids

[sweet kindle]

just quick mock ups/tests obviously but clones will now in fact walk forward normally now during cinematics lol

[dry shoal]

holy hell this looks great!

I've seen that first animation so many times by now, so the jump is super noticeable

[dry shoal]

https://cdn.discordapp.com/emojis/1117656665970454570.gif?size=60&quality=lossless

you're getting me even more motivated to cook lmao

I hope one day I'll be able to post the kamino intro with all the work put into it and have a similar fidelity to the prerendered fan cinematic but rendering in realtime on a playable version of the game

[sweet kindle]

yeah wolf and cine captures did a great job on that unreal vid

glad to be apart of it though, star wars is special to me. nice change of pace from the other stuff i work on both irl and community wise

[dry shoal]

so I've heard from some of the others who've helped so far 🙂

[sweet kindle]

ModOfTheYear lol

another cool tool i found for foot sliding that you see in mocap and old game animations, so bipeds feet will always be planted properly

[sweet kindle]

for the droid factory we should consider some kinda doom 3/horror vibes. lots of shadows and stuff. lots of cool contrast in such a tense mission

[dry shoal]

oh absolutely. Especially in spots where two super battle droids show up. Shit's tough

gotta look the part

[sweet kindle]

this is gonna be sick. tbh i might be slightly biased. but this might be one of the best remix mods visually so far other than half life and portal with all the assets in and stuff

[dry shoal]

and you've only seen one offs with new assets

once it all comes together it's gonna be wild

real talk though that's huge praise since those are both much larger projects. One by Nvidia and one directly overseen by Nvidia 🙏

[sweet kindle]

i love seeing hobbyist's with the same passion and talent as industry devs making cool stuff, and you learning stuff on the fly is very impressive considering when i started like 7-8 years ago it took me a good 2 years to get really good at anything.

i envy fast learners

[static mason]

Daily check in on auto

Cool shit

Ok cia

[dry shoal]

wouldn't have gotten anywhere without this community. This place bringing in all sorts of people gave me the resources to get kickstarted

[dry shoal]

ok I lied about having the github set up but I do have a 100% confirmed working build that includes SWRCFix, D3D8to9 with the map editor excluded, working Remix DXVK/Bridge versions, and a good baseline configured rtx.conf

will share once the github is going

[modern isle]

Have you tried Cascadeur by chance? It's my current go-to animation tool.

[sweet kindle]

i sometimes use it for clean up, its a cool tool. issue is im not paying for it and so you can only export 300 frames max

[modern isle]

oh right, they offered a free one year indie license for existing free users a while ago.

[sweet kindle]

nah i kept a 2023 version right before they started restricting shit

[modern isle]

yeah, I absolutely hate subscriptions with a passion but at least they offer perpetual licenses, even though they don't advertise it anywhere. You'd have to buy a yearly subscription and just cancel it, your license then turns into a perpetual, only mention of this is in a FAQ.

[sweet kindle]

yeah its bullshit, hate that pro 3d programs outside of for buisness/employee is like 50 bucks a month

[dry shoal]

okay, I got a critical piece from Leon that I was missing the other day

with this we'll have his renderer changes in Remix. Namely having a unique anchor mesh per level that's always rendering. It's gonna be extremely helpful

I'm gonna confirm that's working first and foremost

I also asked Leon to set up a private repository under the SWRC modding github

[dry shoal]

found out I can crank the FOV like crazy, up to 179. This is the resulting capture. Covers 95% of the level in one shot using the extreme FOV + killing antiportalactors

[dark lava]

profit

[dark lava]

couldn't handle myself (fun fact: this image's res is 4940 x 2005)

[sweet kindle]

https://tenor.com/view/goodnight-gif-22352156

[dry shoal]

@sweet kindle the github is live and I've invited you 🙂

[sweet kindle]

🔥

stuff uploaded yet? or is it blank rn

[dry shoal]

blank, adding a readme

[sweet kindle]

kk

[dry shoal]

current plan:

• Verify Leon's renderer changes adding achor tris to each mission is functional.
• Get a drag-and-drop zip file to get the Remix runtime active with starting configuration.
• Changing properties within the level editor to force LOD0 on skeletal meshes for captures
• Set BSP surfaces to unlit to avoid flickering

[sweet kindle]

cool, keep me updated. this will make stuff soooo much easier

[dry shoal]

Yep. I'll be adding the RTX Remix project files from the editor into this directory as well. So there may be a way to link it up to your own install so you can try the new visual changes as they're merged

Leon's renderer changes are important before I start taking captures

left a message with him to verify some information on mods to the base game to enhance remix compatibility. I want to have things set up as cleanly as possible off the get-go

[sweet kindle]

models/UE2 tool changes and additions too?

[dry shoal]

those will likely be stored separately in another folder, which will then be a drag and drop onto your game install to use em

the changes and additions are kept in packages. A simple overwrite should do the trick

[sweet kindle]

https://tenor.com/view/rogerroger-star-wars-gif-24538011

[sweet kindle]

touched up about 8-9 animations so far and made a few from scratch, btw. but all the animations are now on a universal rig. so the theoretical sky should be the limit lol

only annoying thing will be the shoulder pads, if we end up changing the rigging or the vertex groups it would be nice for the arm bones to move the pads too.

[dry shoal]

when you say universal rig, could you clarify that a bit for me?

[sweet kindle]

lol animation crash course, retargeting (moving animation data from one rig to another) and having a rig suitable for adjustments for this type of work (imo) is important. so i retarget the existing animations to another rig, edit or do what i have to do, then move the data back to the RC rig. maybe others have a different workflow but its what seems easy to me

[dry shoal]

roger. And you have the original rig on hand right, just to confirm

[sweet kindle]

yes, ive got the OG rig with all animations etc in one blend, then the UV rig with all the animations in another blend

and ill set up another blend for the edited or what ever animations back on the RC rig

[dry shoal]

[dry shoal]

just spent like 20 minutes enforcing LOD0 on all skeletal meshes and forgot to save the damn files

[sweet kindle]

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/647925294719827997/1146387902016802816/xperia.gif

[dry shoal]

first files have been uploaded to github. Currently contains a backup of the existing animation packages (includes skeletal meshes and their properties like LOD levels) and new clone package which contains a higher quality placeholder mesh

[sweet kindle]

sweet, my RC/remix stuff is kinda hectic. gonna wait till the remix stuff is up so i can reset it up properly

your gonna have to handle all the snapshots, cause im not as versed in remix other than lighting and scene stuff/set dressing

unfortunatly my HLSL background wont be help cause of RTX too lol

[dry shoal]

yeah about that

there's a small chance it could be a gamechanger going off the little I know

you can program shaders for use in RC via the UE2 editor included with the game/SWRCFix

Remix generally struggles with shaders, but in theory if some could be altered in some way it would bring even better compatibility on a deeper level

in other words simplifying the shaders to be as primitive as possible while achieving the same effect. Fixed function would be ideal but I'm guessing that's not in your wheelhouse (nor do I know how it'd work with RC)

RC supports up to shader model 1.4. Remix can translate some of them through, but definitely not all

note that I'm speculating here. Shaders in general are a big pain in the ass with Remix and its ability to let through aspects of the original visuals

[sweet kindle]

well, that might not be an issue to do.

[dry shoal]

awesome. It'll probably take some researching to see what could even be done in that area

@royal sonnet I know you're not familiar with the game itself, but if the shaders could be reprogrammed to be more primitive, is Remix more likely to handle certain effects better?

there are a handful of broken visual effects that have to do with shaders. I doubt all of them could be solved but as a general principle could that be helpful

again for context the game uses up to shader model 1.4

[sweet kindle]

just weary, dunno the structure of RC/UE2 shaders

[dry shoal]

sure no worries. I don't have it locked in that this is gonna be something that could be done

but knowing more context is step 1 right

[sweet kindle]

sure, i specialize in rasterization, lighting and effects programming and engine work

[dry shoal]

jack of all trades over here lol

I envy the wide skillset

[sweet kindle]

animator, HLSL programmer, and 3d generalist 😎

[dry shoal]

[sweet kindle]

yeah working in a variaty of fields is good for resume but really hard to juggle. lmao

[dry shoal]

you're telling me. Can't even speak for the resume part but I was juggling so many different things at once for someone so new to the art side of things in particular

so I'm trying to scale back my personal skillset ambitions to ease myself in more. Namely hard surface modeling and procedural PBR materials

[sweet kindle]

pbr materials my beloved. we've got guys adding pbr to reach soon

[dry shoal]

for example I tried messing with creating more basic textures, in this instance the trail for the thermal detonator was replaced by my own made from scratch texture

the model and PBR materials on the detonator are also from yours truly

original trail for reference lol

[sweet kindle]

legit lookin great

[dry shoal]

really proud of the detonator work in general. Model is nicely detailed, texture is all grimy as you'd hope. And the trail having the white lines tracing behind makes it more visually interesting when thrown in-game

at some point I want to experiment with making a high power emissive for the front LEDs that TD's have. But the more I focus on details like that the less time I have for other more transformative stuff lmao

https://discord.com/channels/1028444667789967381/1053018418078556160 btw you can give yourself a role or two here

[sweet kindle]

i am now sev the purple

fun fact, just to make it clear. my name in fact was not because of the character, but a nickname from back in the early bungie halo days 7 is my fav number, and was the number bungie always used for stuff, so sev is where that comes from

lmao just so i dont sound like a complete star wars dork 😆

[dry shoal]

hey the short and to the point names always go the hardest. Good pick lol

we have one star wars dork here who helped me with the accuracy on some weapons so I didn't model em totally wrong

like that Battlefront 2 EA's weapon ammo/reloading system is super not lore accurate

[royal sonnet]

Umm... I don't actually know what handling we may have for primitive pixel shaders. I know we try to support vertex shaders though.

I'd definitely recommend just doing a quick experiment before ouring much time into it though. You might have some luck if you reduce the shader to just sending a texture and sampling that texture for color?

Tho if the engine is a mix of fixed function and shader driven meshes, you might also be able to get the engine to switch to using fixed function for that drawcall somehow

[dry shoal]

yeah it's a mix. DX8.1 game so lots of fixed function with some fancy stuff via shaders. I don't have the slightest clue on the notable differences between pixel and vertex shaders other than I believe texture blending is done via vertex shaders in the game

[royal sonnet]

vertex shader runs once on each vertex. pixel shader runs once on each pixel as the triangle is drawn to the screen

[dry shoal]

so any moderately fancy effects that get translated though are gonna be vertex shaders? There's a hologram effect that's relatively common and works but intuitively that feels like it'd be a pixel shader

[royal sonnet]

I have no idea. Hologram just means it's partially transparent?

that doesnt' even need a shader, you can do that with fixed function

[dry shoal]

my understanding is it's a shader because it'll apply to any mesh you throw at it. I've also heard it described as one

[dry shoal]

@sweet kindle uploaded the remix runtime install files onto github. Drag and drop should make the game playable with the basics configured. If you have issues let me know, some are expected

[sweet kindle]

sweeet ill check it out in about a half hour, tell ya how it is

[dry shoal]

keep in mind this will be barebones. No new assets/custom lighting setup. The original light sources are translated and there's gonna be culling/some flicker of some objects

it's also expected to not translate all of the visuals through. Like the texture blending used heavily on the first geonosis level is not functional. I'm gonna replace it with new assets anyways so I'm not worried too much about getting as much of the original visuals to go through as possible

TLDR it should work and have new lighting. Not too much else lol. The fun stuff comes when I have the Remix toolkit project set up which is currently just an empty folder

[sweet kindle]

sweet, keep me posted

https://tenor.com/view/ron-swanson-nick-offerman-thumbs-up-right-on-good-job-gif-25371744