Messages

151

Team Avalanche / Re: North Mako Reactor Bridge (Q-Gears)

« on: 2015-01-28 16:49:17 »

To be honest, if you have applied scaling and the object is UV-unwrapped correctly, I don't see why you end up with this stretching problem. You could try to send me the .blend file so that I can investigate.
Otherwise, if you want to get into proper texturing, please check out cgtextures.com, which is my main source of textures (the free registration gives you access to most of the stuff).

152

Team Avalanche / Re: [HD Remake] Startmap Debug Room (Q-Gears)

« on: 2015-01-28 16:39:46 »

Found at: http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Debug_Room_%28Final_Fantasy_VII%29
By the way, if you want the same lighting incidence on all "buttons", use a Sun type of light.

153

Team Avalanche / Re: North Mako Reactor Bridge (Q-Gears)

« on: 2015-01-27 18:49:40 »

One possible cause of such stretching, after UV-unwrapping, might be because of unapplied scaling. If that's the case, select your object, then in the toolbar of the 3d viewport select: Object > Apply > Scale. Let me know if that works.

EDIT: By the way, looking at your node setup: I do not advise mixing diffuse shaders in this this fashion. I think it is more suitable to mix colors (with Color nodes), which you use as an input to your diffuse shader.

154

Team Avalanche / Re: [HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums

« on: 2015-01-25 16:19:40 »

Just letting you know: some unexpected delays on the mds5_1 layers. Basically, the renders I made for the extra layers were not showing the volumetric scattering effect, so I have to re-render all these things. I should have tested that earlier. Pretty much 5 days of rendering down the drain 

EDIT: Found a workaround, so it wasn't all for nothing. Currently into adding post-processing effects (beams of light, light glows/glares, etc.). Hopefully I can have it finished by the end of the week.

155

Team Avalanche / Re: [HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums

« on: 2015-01-21 23:55:03 »

Quick update:

I'm into making the renders of mds5_1, which is taking a long time since it's the largest and most complicated scene by a long shot. The biggest chunk is done, though - I'd say that I'm through 70% of the rendering job, but I'll still have to cut the layers and arrange them.
In the meantime: I actually wasn't too happy with the way I made the crepuscular rays for eals_1, so I remade that layer. The files in the repo have been updated. Below is the result:

I hope that looks better to you.

156

Completely Unrelated / Re: 3D model search engine

« on: 2015-01-20 15:01:09 »

http://www.blendswap.com/
http://www.turbosquid.com/

157

Team Avalanche / Re: [HD Remake] Sector 6 Slums

« on: 2015-01-19 16:35:11 »

Hi folks,

If someone out there has a minimum of skills with an image processing software (Photoshop, Gimp, etc.), we could use some help regarding a particular scene, given that Ulpian went MIA.
The thing is: Ulpian made a final render of the "broken road" scene mds6_1 and uploaded it on the repo, but as it is the scene is not playable. The job in question would involve taking this render, and (painstakingly and painfully) re-create the layers. I see a lot of Magic Wand involved in this
Thanks in advance to anyone who volunteers!

158

Team Avalanche / Re: [HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums

« on: 2015-01-19 14:58:03 »

You might say it's 95% completed - the modelling and texturing is essentially done, but I need to make them playable. The remaining work to do is to make all final renders (currently rendering mds5_1, estimated total rendering time: 6 days! and I'll have to re-render the layers...), and do the job of layering which sometimes can be a pain (it took me a week to get ealin_2 correctly).

159

Team Avalanche / Re: North Mako Reactor Bridge (Q-Gears)

« on: 2015-01-18 17:48:09 »

From my experience, I don't think there's an easy way to avoid texture stretching if you do not UV-unwrap. However, UV-unwrapping does not constrain the way you mesh something. Often, you can UV-unwrap, then add modifiers (subsurf, for instance), and the texture is still applied as you would like. As worst, you may have to redo your UV-unwrap.
When I was a beginner, I tended to avoid UV-unwrapping because I didn't know how to get the seams properly. It takes a bit of practice, but after a fashion your eye is trained for it. More importantly, in 99% of the cases, that's the way to go for obtaining the desired results. The sooner you can get into UV-unwrapping, the better. Try and practice, it may seem intimidating at first but it's actually not that big of a deal, especially if you start with UV-unwrapping box-shaped or cylinder-shaped objects. 

160

Team Avalanche / Re: North Mako Reactor Bridge (Q-Gears)

« on: 2015-01-18 16:30:34 »

With reference to the node editor, by default noise textures are mapped along what would correspond to the "Gererated" texture coordinate. Often, this "stretching" occurs because of this. You have two solutions:
- You can UV-unwrap the texture, add a "Texture coordinate" node, and connect the "UV" output of the Texture Coordinate node to the input of your node texture (this is what I regularly do). The surface you were showing in your images is about the simplest thing to UV unwrap, because it's a flat surface which requires no seam.
- If you keep the default mapping, what you can do is add in a "Mapping"  node (Under "Converter"), and plug the output of your mapping node to the input of your noise texture. You can then control the "stretching" of your texture using the "Scaling" parameters in your Mapping node. Conversely, you can use this node if you want to deliberately compress or stretch a texture along a certain direction, or even rotate a texture by a certain angle.

As a side node: SpooX must have some material for nrthmk, maybe he could save you some modelling time (although he works with 3ds). 


EDIT: After double-checking I realized that I did not see your image correctly. Let me revise my earlier comments:

The projection of your noise texture along the "Generated" mapping is made in relationship with the dimensions of the objects. The stretching occurs since one dimension (the thickness) is much smaller than the other two.
- For UV-unwrapping, you need to place some seams. However, this case is rather easy: you can place seams along the top and bottom surfaces, plus all vertical edges.
- If you go for the "Mapping" solution, you may need to assign 2 materials to the object, leave the top surface material as is and do the Mapping correction on the material you assign to the thickness of the bridge.

161

Team Avalanche / Re: [HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums

« on: 2015-01-18 05:08:11 »

This means wall market is next?

No, it's the big plaza of the Sector 5 slums with a cluster of shops in the middle, and the rusting bus turned into a weapon shop. And all related indoor scenes. In other words, mds5_1, 5min1, 5min_2, mds5_i, mds5_dk, mds5_i, and mds5_m.
I do not intend to model the Wall Market afterwards.

162

Team Avalanche / Re: [HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums

« on: 2015-01-17 18:59:24 »

Ok, here's a rendition of the eals_1 scene, I hope you'll enjoy.

163

Team Avalanche / Re: [HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums

« on: 2015-01-16 15:41:52 »

Hi folks,

I've released eals_1, the files are on the repo. I'll upload a picture tonight to show you how that looks. Again, if someone happens to be interested in trying out the field, while not having access to the repo, you can PM me so that I can email the files to you. 3 notes about that release:
- Given there's no simple way to get the waterfall to work properly, I've released this scene without the waterfall.
- I changed the color of the crepuscular rays (yellow to emulate a winter sun)
- The default character size (512 in Makou Reactor) works well.

That wraps up Elmya and Aerith's house. Now, onto the Sector 5 slum market.

164

Catalogs / Re: 7th Heaven Mod Requests

« on: 2015-01-15 05:08:22 »

Sure. Do you want it combined with Omzy or yarLson fields, or have it a stand alone alongside vanilla textures?

Thanks. Would it be possible to leave the combination choice open?

165

Catalogs / Re: 7th Heaven Mod Requests

« on: 2015-01-14 16:32:41 »

Would you think adding the Team Avalanche Sector 5 high res. fields would be a good idea? I should have that done around end of January-beginning of February.

166

Graphical / Re: Question about background culling

« on: 2015-01-14 15:17:45 »

Note that as far as Blender 3D is concerned, you can place objects in the relevant layers and render them individually, accounting for the indirect light stemming from all the other objects in the scene, and you can also use objects as masks. So in a sense, if the game engine was not so limited because of the tiled reconstruction of the fields, Blender could allow you to do that.

167

Graphical / Re: Question about background culling

« on: 2015-01-14 06:51:52 »

To be sincere, I'm not really sure what you wanted to test here. Could you please explain in detail what you were trying to do? I think I got a little confused. If you were trying to add extra layers of objects with complete freedom over what you can place in the foreground or not, indeed that's not possible. Or at least, not until we get another game engine.

168

Team Avalanche / Re: [HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums

« on: 2015-01-13 17:02:36 »

Thanks paul. The problem is also discussed on the forum thread about Aali's driver. One of the problem is that these odd animations (now that I think about it, thank goodness the flow of the sewer scenes were not relying on that!) are handled by changing color values on an 8-bit color palette, and there's a problem with these palettes:

there's no hardware from this millenium that supports paletted textures

One solution may be to recreate such color palettes - although ultimately they'll be in 8-bit colors, so I'm not sure if such a solution might be decent-looking in the end. I tried to convert a test .png into such a color palette (my antique version of Paintshop can do that), which prompted a brand new error message when loading that scene in the game "Error: Wrong color". I may be onto something, I'll make a test where I set the colors of the png to match the rgb values listed in the script and see what happens.

In the meantime, I think the best for me is to release eals_1 without the waterfall at all (and even prevent it from loading the original palettes), I think the scene looks good as it is. Adding the waterfall would be extra bonus when we actually have the means to do so.

169

Aali's Custom FF7/FF8 Driver / Re: Custom graphics driver for FF7/FF8 [v0.8.1b]

« on: 2015-01-11 16:28:09 »

Well... as forecast by yarLson, it turns out that I'm currently facing the issue of the dynamic alpha textures - as a matter of fact I was trying to finalize the very example this problem: eals_1, outside Aerith's house, with the waterfall animation.
I see that the last posts on the issue dates back from July, does anyone have any update on the subject? Thanks.

170

Team Avalanche / Re: [HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums

« on: 2015-01-11 16:08:58 »

Oh. I'll do a bit more reading about this then, although you seem to say there's currently no workaround. I did manage to make the static transparent layers work, though. I have them in my release of ealin_1 and ealin_12. However, for it to work, the layer I have to import into Palmer is not processed with respect to its alpha value, the transparency is actually given by the level of black (in a way, I simply have to overlay my transparent layer over a black background to get it to work). But that doesn't seem to work for this case (most likely because this is a case of handling dynamic alpha values, not static).

171

Graphical / Re: Question about background culling

« on: 2015-01-11 15:59:13 »

As far as I understand, the game handles depth as follows:
The scene is actually decomposed into several layers, which you can obtain with Palmer. Palmer allows you to import your own modified images , which can then be processed and tiled for them to be handled by the game engine - they are scrambled and look like this:



Now, in the game, the character walks on the walkmesh. Depending on which triangle of the walkmesh the character walks on, some tiles are displayed or remain hidden, and can be displayed over the character. Palmer does not give depth values, it rather gives "what object should be on what layer", and at the moment the way these layers are pre-cut and tiled is a constraint (we can't design layers the way we would like, so here's a strong limitation on how much you can create). If you're interested in the possibility of removing this constraint, I think our best lead is what the folks at the q-gears forum is doing (working on an alternate game engine, actually) - but I don't see that happening in the near future.

172

Team Avalanche / Re: [HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums

« on: 2015-01-11 05:51:38 »

Hey guys,

I was working on finalizing eals_1, but it looks like there are some problems and I could certainly use some help - namely, if you have some insight about how field background animations are handled, it would be useful. The problem in this scene is about the animation of the waterfall, in the back.
So, here are the details:
- When eals_1 has the layers decomposed in Palmer, it looks like there are 3 images related to the waterfall animation (eals_1_0_00065664, eals_1_0_00065665, and eals_1_0_00065666). These images look about the same, I am guessing the waterfall animation should be made some sort of loop in alpha value between these layers (or something of the sort). Now, when importing the images in Palmer and asking Palmer to write the modpath textures, Palmer outputs 5 files (eals_1_00_00, eals_1_01_00, eals_1_02_00, eals_1_15_00, eals_1_16_00).
- However, when loading the scene, an error message is displayed: "Glitch: missed palette write to external texture field: eals_1/eals_1_15". As a consequence, the image of the waterfall is static, there is no animation.
- I wondered if the glitch was caused by an incorrect file name (because eals_1_15 seems "missing", while the image file is actually named eals_1_15_00). So I renamed the last two files as eals_1_15 and eals_16, respectively.
- When loading the scene, the error message is no longer there, and the waterfall is animated. BUT: it is actually the original waterfall animation images which are displayed, NOT the modified images from modpath.

So... is there a way to fix this issue? As things stand, either we get a crappy low-resolution animated waterfall, or a high res waterfall which would remain still (along with the Glitch message).
Any help would be greatly appreciated. If you think the question may be better asked elsewhere, please advise  - Maybe Omzy or yarLson would know).

173

Graphical / Re: Question about background culling

« on: 2015-01-11 05:50:22 »

Hello everyone, I was attempting to load a Final Fantasy VII scene into webGL.
The thing is that I didn't want to load directly data extracted from the game because I wanted to find a method not to remake the game, I wanted also to make a way to extend it or create similar content using Blender, and the easiest way possible.

I've been able to recreate an scene out of a background picture,  as seen in my blog post:

http://namelivia.com/final-fantasy-vii-scene-reconstruction-using-blender/

And I was pretty optimistic. From a picture I got an automatic method to reconstruct the camera, and then creating the walkmesh it's pretty easy with a very basic Blender knowledge.
Then, I have been able to load and display the scene into a webpage, and also to display some models on top of it. Keyboard input and collision management is also successfully implemented.
http://namelivia.com/importing-the-reconstructed-final-fantasy-vii-scene-into-three-js/

Now I'm facing the problem of background culling, this is the problem of knowing when the character is in front or behind, for example a table that is placed in the background image. I've been reading a lot about, and in most of the articles it says that I need a depth map. But this means that I have to remodel the whole background and that was the point I was trying to avoid.

I wanted to ask here since you are more experienced in Final Fantasy VII tech issues like me, how to attack this problem and if there is a way to determine the depth of certain background parts without modelling the whole thing.

For now I will be trying this approach:
http://www.blenderguru.com/tutorials/camera-mapping-tutorial-v2/

Thank you!

As a whole: please check the Team Avalanche subforum. That's what we've been doing for a few years, now! We also have the tools to retrieve the walkmesh and camera data. As Kaldarasha's mentioned, the making of layers is made via Palmer, we have a detailed tutorial about the process. I'd be happy to give you further details - you're welcome to post on Team Avalanche or just PM me.

174

Team Avalanche / Re: [HD Remake] Mideel WIP

« on: 2015-01-08 23:54:01 »

Thanks for the update!

175

Team Avalanche / Re: [HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums

« on: 2015-01-08 16:02:07 »

Will notes about the sizes be in the final release? I'd like to make all the corrections you recommended, But i won't be playing until Beacause is fixed.

Of course    My aim is to get the "best possible experience" with the tools available, and tuning the character size is an important part of it, so the notes on the character sizes will be mentioned (or written in a Readme.txt or something).