Development > Artwork

New Feature: "Glow" textures

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MCR:
I do not agree on this, Mattn  :-[  ;)
Have you seen the pictures of how this tron 2.0 style looks like ?!
I think it looks great.
It is true that we do not have many graphic artists currently active, but we do not need everything glowing like in tron 2.0.
IMHO we should use this just for specialFX, Alientech & other futuristic stuff, but most of the stuff currently on the maps would not glow. Adjusting some textures to make glow-texture-overlays should not be such a hard task with those few high-tech textures we currently have. I am speaking out of experience here, just having created 3000 animation frames ;)
Also these maps should not be to complicated to make IMHO, because as I understand they wouldn't even need to be seamless as long as the glowing is happening somewhere 'inside' of the overlay...

I do not know how it looks with our models though  ::)

I think this would fit to the new animations & we should think about how to best combine all this stuff ;)

& regarding the lacking forces helping this project out I already wrote a feature request, but this is offtopic here ;)

arisian could you please take a look @ the animations I made & tell me how we could combine our workforce  ::)

MCR:
btw, I think one very important feature regarding the battlescape is currently missing - the models do not have shadows, this bugs me a lot, because sometimes they just look like 'copied in'. If you could take a look @ this issue also, arisian, that would be a big hit IMHO...

MCR:
@Mattn: You told me something about 1024 texture slots for the whole game including geoscape. I do not know about those limits, maybe you could elaborate on this, because I think I am running into some kinds of limits with the animation frames already & with additional overlay-textures we would fill our available slots pretty fast...  ::)

arisian:
In terms of "number of textures loaded," it is possible to use an un-used channel of an existing texture to specify glow information (ie. the way I used the alpha channel of the globe textures for nighttime illumination).  Do the standard textures make use of the alpha channel?  Do the normal maps?  If not, we could use one of those channels to specify glow.  We would sacrifice the ability to specify glow color (we would just have to assume that the glow color was whatever color was present in the underlying "standard" texture), but it would mean we wouldn't have to store an extra texture in memory.  The other potential downside of this method is that it requires us to use image file formats that support an alpha channel, and it can make it a pain to work with the images, since you have to separate the color channels from the alpha channel every time you want to edit the image, and then re-combine them when you're done.  Just using extra image files for the "glow" textures is a lot more straightforward and will make like easier for everyone, but it does come at the cost of having to load the extra textures into memory.

MCR:
AFAIK the normalmaps use the alpha channel to store the height information & my animation frames all use the alpha-channel, but just to 'hold the overlays in the correct position' (meaning the alpha channel is more or less empty)...

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