Texture Channels/Maps ?

[nuxil 2]

Hello all modellers..

i have been afa a while.. "away from arma" :p

my pc blew up due to a water leak on my cooling system :(

took me a while to save up for a new gaming pc. "damn bills"

i'll get it in a few days so then it will be arma(2) 24/7

so in mean while i been playing around in an modelling app called cinema 4d "C4D". on my little EEE lappy :)

c4d is a verry nice,easy & powerfull modelling app. uv editing tools like you never seen before, 3d realtime paining on model etc etc,, its just awesome

meh enough brag about c4d :p

back to my problem

my scriping/config skills are good. but when it comes to O2. im a totalnoob :p

Anyway. heres the thing. in C4D i have added 4 channel "Maps" so to speak on each part.

Color -> the base texture for the model

Bump -> adds depth/hight "black depth/white hight"

Diffusion -> adds "Dirt"

Specular -> adds shinyness

i made a little test model i mess around with.. it consists of 4 parts..

meaning i have 16 texture files in total.

i have converted all textures to paa.

now in O2 i load up the model fine. but i can only add the color texture channel to the parts.

how do i add in the 3 remaining channels ? is it even possible ?

or do i need to make the 3 remaining channels as rvmat ?

here is what i do. i select my part. then i press E. the "Face Properties" Window pops up. i see the color channel in ther.. i checked Merge textures and load in the bump channel then hit apply.. now only my bump map is on the part. so im kinda banging my head in the keyboard.

i need some guidens from you guys,

any help is apprechiated

[modemmaik 53]

Bump and Specular are defined by the material. You may check the open bradley project's rvmats for examples (nohq's are bumpmaps, smdi's are specmaps).

I am a bit puzzled about your "Diffusion" texture, because I never used such a separate texture.

BR,

mike

[max power 21]

nohq are high quality normal maps, and smdi are specular maps but they are multi channel. It is important that you convert your bump map to a normal map and then make sure the channel order is correct (since bi uses a non-standard channel order), and that the smdi is set up correctly. As far as I remember, for the smdi map, the red channel is not used, the green channel is specular colour, and the blue channel is specular power. Try opening a couple of BI's normal and smdi maps to get what's what.

[nuxil 2]

Thaks for the help guys. i really got confused about this maps.. but im still woundering about my diffusion map..

i see in arma its called diffuse. in my modelling app its called diffusion. dont sure if they are the same.. diffusion in c4d is only grayscale.

anyway. got vacation now so i got more time to read up on it :)

[max power 21]

A diffuse map is a colour map.

From reading a bit about c4d, a diffusion map seems to be a map that controls the amount of scattered light a surface reflects. A soft, unpolished surface has a higher diffuse reflection level than does a hard, polished surface. This seems to be analogous to the surface roughness in material x for Mental Ray.

These two concepts are complimentary, as a diffuse map controls the colour of the scattering light per pixel, and a diffusion map controls the quantity per pixel, so it would seem.

To be honest, I would get the model out of c4d as soon as possible and work on the texture maps and shaders in o2 and bulldozer ASAP. That way you don't really have to worry about setting up shaders in c4d, as it's an extra step and a waste of time unless you want to do c4d renders of your object.

Edited June 20, 2009 by Max Power

[rocket 9]

You need to ensure that you associate each polygon with:

1. A color map (aka. diffuse) file, the PAA file you mentioned

2. A material (aka shader) file, a RVMAT file that contains the information on processing the texture.

Inside the RMVAT file you define how to use the specular, normal, detail, and more kinds of maps to achieve desired effects. As said above - this should all be done after the model has been imported into O2.

[Solid_s 0]

hahaha

nuxil, bro u got shit figured out here haha. :P lol ....