wow the geometry of the models are.... weird ... well the U.V map looks weird but I suppose it works right?

[quote author=Shuqoyqa link=1162237320/0#18 date=1168686703]I see no reason why not, although you can't change the shape of the face, only the colours. You could certainly add all the necessary freckles, moles, scars, white areas in eyebrows etc to make a very close match, and / or do your own make-up, though.

Actually, we need freckles. Good call! Freckle time.[/quote]

well if you wanted the physical mesh to fatter or skinnier you would have to actually mess with the polygon itself. I'm not sure if they allow you to mess with the files though



My questions are:

can I use specular maps, bump maps and normal maps? If so then is there a *obj format version of the mesh we can edit and bring into maya to do the bump maps, etc then bring into the game?

can everyone view the new texture maps?

whats the texture map size? 1024x1024 (probably not that thats really high), 512x512,  256x256, 128x128, or 64x64?

Are we allowed to sell textures to people? I know second life allows their users to do that so I was wondering if you guys allow that here as well




[quote author=Adamski link=1162237320/0#10 date=1163189369]Hello all.

Im trying to make a batman costume, i'm using photoshop, i followed all of the instructions and gave up after 9 hours.

Can anyone give me some advice please?

Is it possible to download it from elsewhere?



Bruce Wayne[/quote]

okay that really depends. It's really easy because they basically gave you the U.V map for the texture (u.v mapping can be a pain). If you're trying to do maybe a character thats looks EXACTLY bruce wayne then that might not be possible. Okay the first reason why it wont work is because the mesh itself. It's doesnt have bat ears, theres no cape either. You would have to edit the mesh itself, (do you know how to model?) and  have to rig the cape. Thats actually alot of work. Yeah I sound like a geek because I'm going to school for this kind of stuff.

you'll probably have to texture a char that doesnt have ears and cape. I can try to help you if you want. Ummm just show me the U.V map and clothing. I'm not going to hand paint the textures because that requires a lot of time.

Ok, I'm trying to get this alpha channel thing figured out.  I think I've got it down, but I can't seem to be able to paste the alpha channel into the Layer Mask no matter what I do. I'm following the instructions but I just can't get it to work.  It keeps pasting into the paint section instead of the mask section.







Any help would be appreciated.

Another question, while I understand the benefits of using a layer mask, why can't I just save as a .png file with transparency?  Since the layers all get merged anyway when exporting as a .png, what's the difference?

Ok, I have tried this every way that I have found posted and for some reason..I can't even get to show up like this in the channels tab...it's solid black and will not paste onto the layer mask.  Also, in alpha channels options...am I supposed to be selecting "masked areas", "selected areas" or what??

[quote author=Shuqoyqa link=1162237320/25#30 date=1177062715]I can do a click-by-click talk-through of making something in that if you want.[/quote]

If you did this I would be very interested Shu. I use paint.net to "slap" my bits together and although I have Gimp it's a bit daunting to me just to look at it.


;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

Note coords of pointer within image are shown bottom-left, black if it's inside the image, grey if it's outside.

In Add mode, click at 407,32 i.e. on the back of the neck just below the top of the collar, and drag the mouse away a short distance. This makes an ellipse in the space covered. Holding Ctrl and continuing to drag makes the ellipse centred on the click, expanding in all directions. Dragging to 459,53 surrounds the back of the collar but none of the blue of the shirt. Releasing there makes that the selection.

I also want the front, and have to get the inner bottom corners just right. The third tool in on the top row (or press F) is the noose selection tool, which free-draws until released then closes with a straight line. Take this and use it in Add mode so the selected back part will remain selected, and suddenly the UV lines are in the way so click the eye symbol next to the UV layer in the Layers window to hide that layer.

Click at 255,72 and drag down and right, then right to 284,80, around the collar and up within the white of the waistcoat to above the shoulder at or about 266,26 and left and down the middle of the neck to 220,72 or so. Release there to get the left side of the collar selected. On the other side, 159,72 to 128,84 and around the top will select the right side of the collar.

There's also a lot of white and shadow and empty space selected. Here's a job for the select-by-colour tool second from right in the top row and the overlap mode (right-hand mode button). The tool looks like a finger pointing at the green between yellow and red. Its options include a threshold for how different a colour can be and still be selected. The collar has highlights, so threshold 0 won't work here. Threshold 16 is plenty for the front, but misses part of the back.

The remedy for this is the rectangular select tool top-left of the tool box area (press R), in Add mode. If the cursor goes over a selected area of colour, it will turn to a four-way arrow, and clicking here will drag the selected area away rather than adding to it. Selected clear areas do not cause this, so I click at 377,30 and drag to 437,37 to get the pale part of the back of the collar. I now have all the blue of the collar and nothing else selected.

In the Layers window I click on Collar to work in that layer. The selection stays the same. I need a green colour. Below the tools in the Gimp window is a group consisting of a large black rectangle on top of a large white rectangle, with small black and white squares below-left and a double arrow above-right. These are the foreground and background colours, a button to revert to black and white and another to switch back and forth between them.

Double-clicking the foreground (black by default) rectangle brings up the Select Foreground Colour window, and isn't it pretty? In the left side is a large square, shading from greyscale at the bottom to pure colour at the top and from black on the left to full brightness on the right. Up the middle is a hue bar, basically a rainbow. On the right are hue, saturation, vividness, red, green and blue bars and a hexidecimal box. So many ways to enter a colour. Each has its uses.

In this case, I want a fairly rich green, and pure green is hue 120, so I put that into the hue number box top-right and the square goes from shades of red to shades of green. The very edges should mostly be avoided. A click on what looks like a good colour for a Peter Pan shirt hits Hue 120 Saturation 93 Vividness 92, also known as R16 G234 B16 or #10ea10. In the main Gimp menu, the foreground colour rectangle goes bright green.

To fill in the selected collar area, I use the pencil tool and a huge brush called Circle (19) and simply draw all over it. It will only draw on the selected areas, so I get my green collar shape.

To put the highlights back in, I use the Dodge & Burn tool, which looks like one of those Creme Brulee things, bottom-right of the tool box. This has two modes, dodge (brighten) and burn (darken), and three targets: shadows, midtones and highlights. For this, I want to dodge highlights. The exposure is how much effect it will have. Use small numbers, like 10 or 20, for most work, and smaller ones like 5 for doing multiple passes to get varied depths in an area.

In this case, Exposure 20 looks good to me. Choose a soft-edged brush. I use Circle Fuzzy (11) for this and make one pass down empty space next to the inner side of each front part and two along the top of the back, one touching the edge of the selected area and one slightly above there. To sharpen the edges I make an extra pass with Circle Fuzzy (05). To get a straight line, click on one end then Ctrl-Z to delete the little blob. Then go to the other end and hold Shift and click again.

This collar also needs a shadow to make it more convincing. This shadow should exist in the open space around it but not be on it. The easy way to get that is to invert the selection with Ctrl-I.

To do a shadow I need black, but my green colour hasn't been saved. The little black arrowhead button bottom-centre of the colour window will copy the current colour into the palette of 12 most recently used. Clicking the OK button will also do this. A colour from the image can be picked up when in pencil or paintbrush mode by Ctrl-clicking on it, but the colours in the image may have been changed with the dodge and burn tool.

Next: the little bit that fills in between top and skirt. This could be separate from the stockings or tights or hose or whatever, but when did you ever see a bare-legged Peter Pan, no matter how hard you stare at the Leading Boy?

Ctrl-O to open another file, this time my 512x512 UFUT_pants.psd from the start of this thread. Most of the textures are 256x256, but if you're copying camouflage or leopard fur in from a sample image you should use 512x512 so the scale stays the same on the avatar.

Position and enlarge as before. Click the Seams layer to select that. This is another two-layer job. Ctrl-K to clear it. One thing to notice about the legs textures: the edges aren't lined up the way they are on torso textures. You can't just draw a line straight across a leg here and expect it to meet up neatly on the avatar. Try it at *,259 to see what I mean. Go by fractions of the length of the blue lines.

One place the straight line does work is at 146, two-fifths of the way down the 132-to-167 on the inner edge and two-fifths of the way down the corresponding 136-to-161 on the outer edge. It's a fairly good place to stop a pair of shorts. Of course, our Leading Boy here isn't wearing shorts!

Where does a miniskirt sit, exactly? This could be hard to check if I can't get into RLC, but I'll go with a guess. Rectangle-select 0,0 to 511,48 and 246,0 to 263,200, use noose to add 200,48 round to 246,115 and 307,48 to 263,115, choose that shirt green and fill selection. That's easy.

Go to the Base Layer. Now, Peter pan's legs tend to be darker, so I could just get a darker shade of green and fill the rest, but legs look even better with some texture to them. This calls for a simple pattern of pixels.

First, I choose four similar shades of rich dark green, #128212, #117b11, #0f700f and #147014. With the pencil tool and the single pixel brush Circle (01), I do one dot of each colour in a tiny square in empty space. Then I get the clone tool, represented by a rubber stamp, second from left on the bottom row, and select Circle (19). The cursor starts out as a crossed-out circle withint that brush outline, and clicking will do nothing. This tool needs its source.

To choose a source, Ctrl-click a pixel. That pixel will be duplicated where you click. Ctrl-click the top-left pixel of the square, then click two below it, just below the bottom-left one. This provides another square. Click two more pixels down to make another two squares. Click to the right of the top-right pixel of the original square to duplicate these four down the side, and repeatedly click-and-drag to expand the area right and down. Once the area gets fairly large, dragging will scroll around wildly.

Rectangle-select a large patch and Ctrl-C Ctrl-V drag Ctrl-V drag Ctrl-V etc, lining up the distinctive pale pixels each time, to fill the layer. With both layers visible, this avoids the narrow partially-clear patch that would appear between the two if Ctrl-I was used.

Hide the UV layer and Save As ... in this case, UFUL_peterpan.png, although it might come back as UFWL judging by recent patches.

Wow  Shuq, great job explaining this.  Im sure this will help alot.

((BIG HUGS))

Well, I had to ask. ;D ;D

Thanks Shu. I'm saving it to read over and over again. (Should have absorbed some of it by the tenth re-read.) ;D

It works for me.

In C:/Program Files/RedLightCenter/RedlightCenter/ find the file myinfo.ini and open it with Notepad, change the appropriate line to:


ClothingLegMap=UFUL_cowgirl_test.png


... and save it, then in RLC go Customise => Don't Change to see it.

How can I include creases to my textures please?

Thanks - I see it now..

Total brain fade...

Thanks,
Bullet

[quote author=Shuqoyqa link=1170239907/0#15 date=1171614237]Also link to my thread: http://bb.redlightcenter...BB.pl?num=1166474747/90 because pages 7, 9 and 10 have some info that may help.

The first thing I'd check is the filetype extension. I got it wrong a few times choosing my texture from the thumbnail, clicking the filename and using ctrl-C ctrl-V to put it into the myinfo line and not adding the .png or .jpg required.

I think the clothes are all .png and the skins are all .jpg, but I could be wrong there. I did do Batgirl as .jpg the first time and it didn't work.

Next would be the directories. I occasionally have to move saved textures from the wrong gender's directory after a heavy download session.

Here are samples of myinfo for Leia:

... normal Shuq look:

... and the nearest equivalent male outfit:

Other things to check ... you might have created myinfo.txt and be editing that?

If you're already in-game when you edit myinfo.ini you need to customise and click "don't change" to load the info from myinfo.ini into your avatar. Customising and clicking "Show Changes" saves the avatar you already had into myinfo.ini

The way the programme was made, the Customise "next" and "previous" buttons cycle through the textures that were issued in the patch, not all the textures in your directory, so ones downloaded from the forum will not appear when you click through. You can only get them via manually editing myinfo.ini, saving that from Notepad and using the "Don't Change" button.

I hope that helps.[/quote]

[quote author=Shuqoyqa link=1170239907/0#17 date=1172214176]Another bump.

Step one: get myinfo.ini open in Notepad.

You can do this either by going through My Computer => C:/ => C:/Program Files/RedLightCenter/RedlightCenter, right-clicking the myinfo.ini file and choosing "Open with ..." and then clicking on
Notepad ...

... or by going to Start => All programs => Applications => Notepad, and ctrl-O (or alt-F O or click File and then Open) to get the "Open file" window up, at the bottom of which are two boxes, one for filename and one for file type. Click the "files of type" box and choose "all files (*.*)", so you can see things other than directories and .txt files, and click through as above to get to the RedlightCenter directory and double-click myinfo.ini (or click it once and press return or click it once and then click the Open button).

Step two: make the necessary changes. Examples of relevant lines can be found in the first post of this thread and in various places in the sticky and in my thread.

Step three: save it. Ctrl-S will do this, or you can click File and click Save.

Step four: if you're not in RLC, start RLC. If you're already in RLC, click the Customise button and then click Don't Change. This will copy the info from myinfo.ini (which you just saved in step three) onto your avatar in your view so you can see whether it worked. If you're happy with it, click Customise again and click Show Changes. This will copy the info from your avatar into myinfo.ini and also change the way your avatar appears to everybody else in RLC.

If someone downloads the textures you're wearing after you do all that, you need to repeat Customise => Show Changes for them to see it.

Sidenote: If you change stuff in Notepad and then want to change your shoes in RLC, do the Customise => Don't Change => Customise as above, then change shoes, then Show Changes. Note that this will not change what's in the Notepad window, so after changing stuff that way you should reload the .ini file. Otherwise you'll keep saving the version with the wrong shoes.[/quote]

I may be posting this in the wrong thread, but it seems related...  if not, just shoot me, after all, I'm a noob.  ;D

In the varied instructions (great job, btw), I've noticed many references to the myinfo.ini

Being a programmer, geek, and generally nefarious person, I've already been into it (even as a greenie), and pretty much had figured it out already.

BUT, here's the question:

Is there a way to do multiple tattoos on a body part?  For example, multiple small tattoos on the front of the torso?  At the moment, the tattoos in question are in individual files, which is fine... but if I duplicate a tag ident line in the myinfo file, with the png files listed one per line, only the first tattoo shows up.

An obvious solution would be to edit (combine) the tattoos together, and use that file.  Which I did, and then realized nobody else could see it.  (Why would they...? I've got the file!)  I was doing this as a noob greenie (yes, I cheated), and hadn't yet figured out submitting textures, and all that fun stuff.

It seems redundant to combine tattoos that exist, then sending the combined file back, if there is a way to display multiple overlays of tattoos.... but then, I may be asking for the moon.

Just stretching the limits, and probably asking for something guaranteed to drive your programmer folks stark raving bonkers...  :