mikebart

I think it would make alot of sense to use it on a large vehicle like a ship or sub, but not sure its possible to get it looking as good as the supershader, as there isnt an environment map stage, as far as I know.

Thanks for the comments all, glad to hear someone say the vegetation is performing well Defunkt, i was a bit worried. I dont get that error wipman, sounds like its to do with the island intro, is anyone else getting this?

thanks foxhound. thats fine icebreaker look foreward to seeing what you come up with. tpw, thanks, gum trees are definitly on the cards

it was a fiddly job placing the rock ledges, I wish there was a more automated way to place them, basically ive put a red line on the top and bottom edges of the mesh to be used as a guide, if you can see the red line then the rock ledge isnt sealed against the terrain and needs adjusting. It would be great if we could place rock ledges like roads, it wouldnt take long to make up the different segments, although im not sure it would work.

hey guys sorry for the delay, I've just edited the front page with links to the new version of Mana Island NZ, mb_veg and mb_rocks, enjoy :) http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=104825&highlight=manaisland

nice job BB!

check the .log file it should give you some information about gone whats wrong

ahh, makes sense thanks SA

yeah i dont really know if its required for every texture map for things to work properly, but its a good habit to get into, even just for the sake of tidy house keeping inside your 'data' folder. http://community.bistudio.com/wiki/ArmA:_Texture_Naming_Rules you'll see here that theres a few different types of normal maps, so the naming convention might be required for these to work accordingly

could be because you have an alpha channel in one of you're _co.paa's, try converting it to .tga, open it in photoshop or gimp, then save it as 24bit .tga. Take note of the size of the .tga before you save over it from photoshop or gimp, once saved without the alpha channel it should be about 3/4 the size in KB's.

I might be wrong, but I think what T_D is talking about is that there is a limit to how much you can tile your UV's over a model, binarization detects that you've over tiled your UVs and attempts to cut them up bringing them into a smaller UV space, but as the .log says results can be unacurate. so to fix this problem, you might need to re-map your model and split up your UVs more so that it fits into a smaller UV space (still tiling over some space though), this might require a few cuts to be made across your model.

Im just wrapping things up for a final release at the moment so hopefully next week if all goes well Heres a short preview, I discovered camera scripting and thought i'd make a short video, enjoy! C23GX_fmh7c edit: fixed link, thanks AnimalMother92:thumb:

weird, so it seems to be happening during binarization? could you provide more info like; when you export from max are you exporting as .obj or .3ds?, does the mesh have multiple UV channels?, is the mesh completely in tri's? if you've imported the model into O2 with quads, try converting it to tri's in max, export as .obj and reimport, this fixed a problem once for me, but it was different to the one you're having, might help though.

im sure that wont be a problem as im having trouble getting the ai to use the paths :(

Im making some rock ledges for cover/obtsacles and want to be able to place them in the world without removing all clutter in their area, just so that they blend in a bit better with their surroundings. But it seams that by adding a roadway to the model, all clutter directly below/above the roadway gets removed. any ideas of a solution for this?

Thanks for the reply Synide, but no luck with 'geometry=no' in the geo lod. Cheers for the extra info on the pond object bushlurker, do you guys have any idea of what it is that makes the pond object force clutter to be rendered? i've had a pretty good look at the object, rvmats and its config but nothing really stands out that says 'force clutter', perhaps its an random bug? Just going to test out some AI pathing (at the moment the AI wont go near them) and then they should be good to go.. You're welcome to set them up for you're terrain once they're released if you want to use them, ill include an mlod, just swap out a few textures with ones from your terrain and apply a sample from your sat_lco and you're all set :)

thanks for the reply bushlurker, so you're saying the pond object forces clutter to be rendered over the road?, ill have a look into that, maybe create a dummy object to place around the ledges. yeah, I've just been experimenting with a few ideas regarding rock ledges and possibly cliffs, Basically im using the mana island terrain textures in a multi material, and then using a sample taken from the sat_lco of roughly the area they've been placed and puting that sample in the _mc (macro texture), then with some further tweaking e.g, specular levels, etc, the results are pretty close to what you get on the terrain. The multimaterial and the terrainx material are very similar in how they work, As another possible solution to the topic problem, I think that I could use that same sat_lco sample to tint grass/clutter if I were to put it directly onto the models and use a tree shader, much in the same way that the clutter is tinted by the sat_lco.

Nice work, thanks shezan:)

Ill ask around about it and look into making a config for placing the objects in the editor stephsen. Im not too sure how to do this properly with trees. I can make them placable in the editor via a config, but as far as I know they have to be classed as a house, so they wont behave like trees, they wont be affected by wind and will be destroyed the same way as a building (dropping into the ground with lots of dust) at least that the only way i've known to do it in the past. I guess this wont be a problem as long as they're imported into a terrain in visitor and included in the terrain.pew. This seems to be the way things are heading, with the ability to place objects and arrange them in the editor, then import them into visitor thanks to shezans work on World Tools.

I think I could get seriously hooked into this quite easily, so i think ill stay clear of it. Its such a simple idea but i can see how it could become very addictive, apparently the creator banks $350k a day!

just a guess, but you might have inverted faces in your UV's, try opening the UVs for edit and then "select/select inverted faces", if it selects anything at all then you have to flip them for them to receive a texture bake on those UV's. Sorry I cant remember how to actually flip them though (gulp)

Thanks SQB-SMA, pretty much all the issues you've mentioned there will be fixed in the next release, i've added 3 extra lods to the trees so you dont notice that popping between the the hard edged and soft edged alphas so much, and the problems with the tussock are fixed too.

I had some problems with this too strait after copying the extracted bin.pbo over to p:\, but it seemed to work when I restarted my PC.

thanks for the info T_D, I just tried it out and it worked :), I've just used the _mc map I rendered for the 'tree' shader (A2) and modified it a bit (made it _MCA) for the 'treeAdv' shader, so it might not be exactly the right thing (or same as OA trees), but I've found that it can be used in pretty much the same way as the 'tree' shader for colour variation. Its a great improvement on the older shader, I'd love to see what chenaurus trees could look like using it. I think that enough info could be extracted from the existing A2 _MC maps and converted to _MCA, I dont think it would be too big a task. left: 'tree', right 'treeAdv' You can really see the difference in clarity in the alpha that the 'treeAdv' has over the 'tree' shader, im hoping it will be useful for making leafless deciduous winter trees, something I've found the 'tree' shader doesnt cope well with because you just end up with a bunch of gappy twigs as you can see above. left: 'tree', right 'treeAdv' The .rvmats have quite different values for the 2 trees, I just used BIS settings (forgotten which one) for the 'treeAdv' .rvmat and i think it was a bit of a fluke that it came out looking alright considering how different my texture maps are.

hi, im attempting to use the new tree shaders for OA, but not having much luck. I have the TreeAdv and TreeAdvTrunk shaders working correctly in bulldozer (using arma2ao.exe) and they look great, but when I binarize them to run them in the game i get these errors: <model = "p:\mikebart\mb_veg\mb_trees_adv\mb_t_ulmus_large.p3d"> mikebart\mb_veg\mb_trees_adv\data\mb_t_ulmus_large_trunk_adv.rvmat.pixelShaderID: Unknown enum value TreeAdvTrunk mikebart\mb_veg\mb_trees_adv\data\mb_t_ulmus_large_trunk_adv.rvmat.vertexShaderID: Unknown enum value TreeAdvTrunk mikebart\mb_veg\mb_trees_adv\data\mb_t_ulmus_large_1_adv.rvmat.pixelShaderID: Unknown enum value TreeAdv mikebart\mb_veg\mb_trees_adv\data\mb_t_ulmus_large_1_adv.rvmat.vertexShaderID: Unknown enum value TreeAdv and then they appear as bright pink flashing objects in game. Does anyone know a way around this?, or do we need a BI tool's update to get these new shaders to work?