Multiple res lods and uv mapping of buildings

[sama 67]

Hello

I have questions in regards to using multimaterial method for buildings and uv maps.I use blender .

1.I model a building and uv map it in blender

2.I use the uv map to paint my mask etc.all good

3.I open up in OB and create a second uv set and stretch out the correct uv set 0 to tile textures to look good.All is well

4.Now i can copy over that 1st res lod and remove half the faces(with the touch faces button)to create the next res lod and it will remain textured nicely.

Now doing this degeneration of res lods in OB is horribly tedious and makes my eyes bleed.

So i thought i would do step 3,export to blender,which i find easier, and do the following res lods in there,and then reimport into Ob all good.But i find OB and blender to not like all this exporting/reimporting and get all sort of errors like no textures,lods duplicating etc. a mess.

What method do you use?

[7Y-Loki 10]

Good day,

I use blender too and yeah, they don't seem to like each other too much.. If I were you I would assign the UVs and make the LODs all in Blender.

However I never use Blender for texturing at all. I make selections in blender where I want different materials and textures to be applied, and just save the uv layout, one for a large selection or many selections in one uv, doesn't matter.

Then import the uv layput into photpshop/gimp, and color it.

Then in OB, when I have the object imported, I select the named selections and with "E" I assign its corresponding uv layout in paa format and material rvmat.

When importing/exporting into blender and object builder, it likes to reset the location of textures,rvmats and proxies to P, when locations should be directly your mod folder. Meaning:

The locations should be "My_mod/data/texture.001.paa" and a3/data/proxies/whatever..." and importing exporting out to blender and back into OB changes these to "P:/My_mod/data/texture..."That P may be giving you problems, so always check whenever you import back into OB.

Under tools there's an option, hmm Mass texture renaming or something of the sort, that can help you rename all your textures' paths easily.

[x3kj 1247]

why do you want to do step 3 in OB? Is there no way to create second UV sets in blender? That would surprise me...

[sama 67]

Yes you can make more uv sets in blender but I don't think I could get the scaling correct so easily without trial and error. Tho i have only just realized I can select parts of the object via the uv map in OB and delete them this way.This makes it easy to copy over res lods and delete pieces.Tho I'm sure the devs don't do it this way ,and they do it as you say,all in there external modelling software.

[Macser 776]

Are you exporting/importing to a particular format other than P3D? Why the need for so much trial and error? What you see in the viewport inside Blender is what you get in the viewer for O2/OB. You can apply a tiling texture to faces and scale the UVs any way you like while seeing it in real-time in the viewport.

 

Depending on the construction of your mesh you can easily dissolve edges/verts without collapsing the borders. On top of that you can also decimate without losing the Uv coordinates for lower res lods. And you're right. It's highly unlikely the developers use something like Object builder for anything other than very small adjustments, if at all. And with good reason. It's very limited.

[sama 67]

As with MULTIrvmats there is no single complete  face texture applied as a uv set,will blender with the arma toolbox read MULTIrvmats and show the textures in its viewport?.I realize you can apply the MULTIrvmat to faces in blender but thought it was only for path assigning,and not actually viewing, for some reason.Sorry if all my terminology is incorrect .

[Macser 776]

It will show the textures plugged into a material. But it's only reliable with diffuse/colour maps. The tangent basis is different for normal maps, and the channel setup for SMDI is different too. So they won't display correctly. It may be possible to use cycles to invert/ mask channels. But it's not something I've done. :)

 

The main plus point to using something like Blender is the modeling and uv tools. Which are far more flexible and well featured than O2/OB. Even if you can't see some textures you'll still be able to verify they are well mapped to the faces. 

 

As for creating lower resolution lods, the first 2 or 3 at least are probably best done by hand. Mostly because they could still be close enough to see any big changes in the topology. After that the decimate modifier will do a decent job reducing polycount, while trying to maintain UVs and the general silhouette.