Advice needed for creating textures

Legend_Boss

I am wanting to create my own textures. I know that the image has to be in a dds format and have a companion .material file.

I have some questions for the .material file:
1. What are all the different "Surface"? Metal is one, I assume this is for the sound affect for when walking on them.
2. what are the following: albedoMap; specularMap; normalMap; opacityMap?
3. The "shader" part. What are the different shade options. What is best to have for this part?

SamusDroid

I suggest looking in similar material files to what you want, that's really how you learn ns2 is by looking at what has already been done.

Soul_Rider

Lol at your disagree. If you think every question you ever have can be answered by someone else, you might struggle with NS2.

To try and assist you, I've answered what I can for you.

1 - I don't know all the surfaces. All the textures and models I have ever added to my mods have used the default Metal. To show you how to learn something about NS2, I did what everyone else has had to do and learn for themselves.

I looked in the model compile files.

Here is a list of options:

Metal
Rock
Organic

Rock is used for mud and rocks etc, organic is used for everything alien and the marine players, Metal for everything on the marine team and just about everything else, including tree bark.

These are the only surfaces used on models and textures in NS2.

2 - Albedo - Texture, Specular - shine/reflections, Normal - bump map, opacity - opacity. These are standard texture terms, if you don't recognise these, you might want to do some reading about textures and what each does/how to create them etc before embarking on trying to make new textures for NS2. Otherwise you will just get frustrated when your efforts don't look right.

3 - You can use the shaders that come with the game, or you can write your own, the choice is yours.

What is best depends on what the texture is for. You want a shader that does something relevant to your texture. Since I don't know what your texture is, the best thing to do would be to look at a material file which is for a material that does something similar to your texture, and use that.

For shaders, if you don't want to create your own, which again requires you to learn a shader scripting language, aliens and their buildings use:

"models/alien/alien.surface_shader"
or
"models/alien/alien_alpha.surface_shader" (Alpha for 'see-through')

Marines & their buildings use use:
shader = "models/marine/marine.surface_shader"

Other things use different shaders, but as I said, this is easiest to find out by looking in relevant files.

For you information, it took me 10 minutes to gain this information, and 15 minutes to write this stupid post.

This stupid post is 8 hours after your original question, which means 7 hours and 50 minutes ago you could have known all this yourself if you'd bothered to spend 10 minutes reading the files.

I'll help you this once, to show you how easy it is to find answers to your own questions, and I will always offer to help when you get stuck on something, but if you expect anyone here to spoonfeed you, I'm sorry, that is not the way the world works.

Legend_Boss

I'm just going to say thanks for the info which has clarified a lot for me (and possibly other ppl who ever want a starting point to create texture) and refrain from remarking on the unecessary and stupid statments you make.

Boss out.

SamusDroid

*Searches*
http://forums.unknownworlds.com/discussion/130575/ns2-material-guide-choosing-a-shader/p1

Nominous

Also, I believe the emissive texture (_illum naming convention) dictates which areas of the diffuse texture glow or emit light. I recommend using Windows Texture Viewer to quickly view .dds files and Notepad++ to open .material files. Check out the Polycount wiki for a ton of great info and tutorials.

A problem you might run into is trying to figure out which parts of the model are located where in a texture, especially if you didn't lay out the UVs yourself or if you're not familiar with the model. To alleviate some confusion, you can overlay a UV template on top of the texture you're retexturing, which lets you see the model's edges. In order to do so, you must open the model in 3ds Max and render the UV template. Make sure to set the width and height to the same resolution as the texture before rendering. Open the template in Photoshop, set its blend mode to screen, and move its layer on top of the texture's.

Some things I've been playing around with are Photoshop's 3D features, which let you paint directly on models in 3D. In order to do so, you must export an .obj file of the model from 3ds Max and setup the materials in Photoshop to point to existing textures. The biggest drawback to this method is the brush lag even if your PC is powerful and you set the Drawing Mode to Basic, so I can't recommend it even though it's possible to do. It's pretty neat to be able to import models into Photoshop, though. I've heard that 3D Coat is a much better alternative to Photoshop for 3D texturing if anyone's interested in it. Polypainting in ZBrush is another option that I'm a fan of, but painting on layers is buggy.

BeigeAlert

albedomap is the "color" of your texture. How it looks in diffuse lighting.
normalmap is a tangent-based representation of finer details in your model. You cannot make this by simply painting in the texture -- you need a 3d program to make it.
specularmap is a map showing how much direct reflections will be visible on your model. Pure white makes for really "shiny" bits, and pure black makes for no shinyness at all.
note that the alpha channel of the specularmap is the glossy map. This determines how hard or soft your reflections are. Ie black means it's completely blurry, and white means it's completely sharp. You'll want to be somewhere in the middle.

Model.surface_shader means you get an albedomap, normalmap, specularmap (with roughness in alpha)
Level.surface_shader means you get an albedomap (with greyscale specular in alpha channel), and a normal map. Glossiness is a fixed value in the shader. Note that in this shader, the specular is multiplied by the albedo, so you get metallic-looking reflections. If you want to make a non-metal reflection, use a different shader.

EDIT: Also, don't save DDS files yourself. Save them as PSD, or TGA, and let Builder take care of it.

Nominous

@BeigeAlert Painting normal maps by hand seems to be a difficult process, but it's a viable option. It's made much easier using nDo2, which is great for adding fine detail without having to model it in the high poly.

BeigeAlert

Nominous wrote: »

@BeigeAlert Painting normal maps by hand seems to be a difficult process, but it's a viable option. It's made much easier using nDo2, which is great for adding fine detail without having to model it in the high poly.

That really only applies for flat materials, or details for an existing normal map. I was mainly talking about the normal map that's used to make a low-poly model appear high-poly, not just drawing a normal map for a flat texture.