UFO:Alien Invasion

Development => Artwork => Topic started by: Sepelio on April 05, 2010, 11:58:16 pm

Title: Texture specifications
Post by: Sepelio on April 05, 2010, 11:58:16 pm
Hey folks, I've been learning to make textures recently and have managed to make a few that are fairly decent I think.

I'd like to contribute them but I don't know what sort of specifications you guys are looking for in textures. Do you have a size you would like them to be in? How about gloss/bump/normal maps?

Also might be an idea to specify the above somewhere on the forum...

Cheers.
Title: Re: Texture specifications
Post by: Legendman3 on April 06, 2010, 12:25:03 am
What is the higgest quality we have on the game?(Im talking to the admins)
Title: Re: Texture specifications
Post by: MCR on April 06, 2010, 12:30:00 am
Hey !

You can find this information in the wiki.

The textures should have sizes that have the power of 2, e.g. 512x256 or 512x1024 or 1024x1024. The higher the quality & resolution the better. We can always scale them down. The format should be png. You should provide normalmaps if possible. The normalmaps will automatically be used in the game when having the same name like the texture but with _nm attached.

The link for more information is here:
http://ufoai.ninex.info/wiki/index.php/Artwork

Cheers, too.
Title: Re: Texture specifications
Post by: Legendman3 on April 06, 2010, 12:31:33 am
My bug screenshots have higher quality than that lol.
Title: Re: Texture specifications
Post by: MCR on April 06, 2010, 12:32:04 am
What is the higgest quality we have on the game?(Im talking to the admins)

 ???
Title: Re: Texture specifications
Post by: Legendman3 on April 06, 2010, 12:33:07 am
e.g. 512x256 or 512x1024 or 1024x1024.

I meant this
Title: Re: Texture specifications
Post by: Sepelio on April 06, 2010, 03:39:33 am
No gloss maps then? How about glow maps?
Title: Re: Texture specifications
Post by: H-Hour on April 06, 2010, 10:37:06 am
Hi Sepelio, a couple questions/answers:

1. What are your textures for? Maps I assume? The texture size is really a matter of getting the most bang for your buck. If it's a texture that's likely to be used large on a wall/floor or something, give it a bigger size. If it's going to go on something smaller (little mechanical things and other objects that won't be too large), give it a smaller size. As a general rule of thumb, other than special textures I'd never really use less than 256x256, and almost everything is not higher than 512x512. If you want any advice on this, you can attach them to the forum and I'll recommend some good sizes. Or you can send me a PM and I'll pass you my email address.

2. The game only supports a normal map, and there's a particular way they need to be done. Check out this wiki article for making normalmaps (http://ufoai.ninex.info/wiki/index.php/Artwork#Normalmaps). You can specify more things about your texture (shine, bump height, etc.) through the material definitions (http://ufoai.ninex.info/wiki/index.php/Mapping/Materialsystem).

3. The devs will tell you we can always resize textures, but if you're putting noise/dirt/wear into it, this is often finely tuned to the size of the texture. IMHO, resizing often disrupts the style and quality (in ways other than a simple reduction in size). That's why it's good to get the right size. But this is hard if you're not actually creating a texture for a specific application. Which brings me to the final point -- with textures you're already halfway there. Why not try your hand putting those textures to brushes in Radiant? You know best what how you intend those textures to be used. An RMA tile can be small and more manageable.

4. If you can, please always provide the source files for the textures as well, whether that's Gimp, Photoshop or something else. This way we can make changes later if needed, and this is especially useful if the textures aren't already created for a specific application.
Title: Re: Texture specifications
Post by: H-Hour on April 06, 2010, 10:42:33 am
What is the higgest quality we have on the game?(Im talking to the admins)

I'm not an admin, but to my knowledge there isn't a maximum set. It's all about balancing the load on the game with the impact of a particular texture, judging whether more pixels will make a significant visual impact to be worth the reductions you'll have to make elsewhere.
Title: Re: Texture specifications
Post by: Legendman3 on April 06, 2010, 12:46:05 pm
H-Hour my question was already answered. Go to Sepolios question now
Title: Re: Texture specifications
Post by: Mattn on April 06, 2010, 05:13:46 pm
one general rule is: submit source images in high resolutions - 1024 and above - downscaling them will produce better looking textures than upscaling them.

we have a specular map encoded in our bsp lightmap data but no extra gloss map support.
Title: Re: Texture specifications
Post by: Sepelio on April 06, 2010, 06:45:20 pm
What I'll do is just give you guys my GIMP source files and the normal maps I've already generated so you can use them as needed.

They are map textures and were made primarily for Xonotic/Nexuiz. Making textures and using shaders has been my project of the month so these are basically the best results I've had so far.

Anyway I'll upload them someplace in a wee bit once I've sorted them.

Most of the textures are fine, there are a few gloss maps in there as well as a guide to the spec maps. The wall textures are not very good yet. One of them was procedurally generated using Kandid. The floor and metal ones should be fine. The stone textures are adapted from some I found on OpenGameArt.org and generated normal maps for. Come to think of it they may need resized. I'll do some of this just now before I upload them so you guys have more to work with.
Title: Re: Texture specifications
Post by: Mattn on April 06, 2010, 08:03:41 pm
nexuiz? so they are all gpled?
Title: Re: Texture specifications
Post by: Sepelio on April 06, 2010, 09:39:09 pm
Yes indeed although more for Xonotic now. I'm going to try and finish a good sized set of textures first I think before I release. Shouldn't take me too long I've been whacking these things out recently.
Title: Re: Texture specifications
Post by: Mattn on April 07, 2010, 07:57:43 am
very nice - thank you very much
Title: Re: Texture specifications
Post by: Sepelio on April 16, 2010, 01:18:24 am
Alright here we are. This file contains all the complete textures as well as the source files.

http://omploader.org/vNDV5aQ/septex1_UFOAI.zip

I don't know if all of them will be usable for you guys but as the source files are there you can adapt them as needed. They were initially intended for Xonotic as I said before and some of them really require use of the gloss maps to look 'good'. Still, good luck!

Mappers: Remember to scale them when they are in use! 0.1 and 0.25 seems to work nicely in Nexuiz but I dont know how that will look here. Play about with it.
Title: Re: Texture specifications
Post by: Mattn on April 16, 2010, 08:51:35 am
thanks - i've for now only commited the gimp source files - as we are currently trying to remove jpg textures and replace them with some lossless format. also our normalmaps have the height encoded in the alpha channel for parallax mapping (see here (http://ufoai.ninex.info/wiki/index.php/Artwork#Normalmaps))
Title: Re: Texture specifications
Post by: H-Hour on April 16, 2010, 11:04:10 am
The black and white tile one, how did you generate the background texture? Is it from an open source sample and if so can you point me to where you got it? I'm getting a bit tired of all of my resource photos.

Also, that's a really nice shape you got on the screws. Mind if I pull the screw out for some of my own textures in the future?
Title: Re: Texture specifications
Post by: Sepelio on April 16, 2010, 06:45:04 pm
The background textures are largely generated procedurally from noise in GIMP.

The screws were made using a program called Kandid and then edited in GIMP. Kandid is pretty awesome. Its fun just to see what it comes up with. Used it for the liquid textures as well.
http://kandid.sourceforge.net/

Feel free to use any bits of the textures for anything at all.
Title: Re: Texture specifications
Post by: MCR on April 16, 2010, 08:05:28 pm
Thanx for the link, Sepelio.
This Kandid software seems to be pretty amazing.
Do not really know how to control the outputs yet, but this seems to generate some really cool gfx...
Nice.
Title: Re: Texture specifications
Post by: Sepelio on April 16, 2010, 08:46:18 pm
Well with Kandid basically its genetic. You generate your first batch of images then find two that look interesting or like whatever you are looking for and then cross them over.

I find the most useful algorithms for it are:
Voroni diagram: transparent colours
Scalar expressions
Vector expressions

For instance the screws are a scalar expression. I got the round shape from that and then just cut it in half with the eraser in GIMP.
Title: Re: Texture specifications
Post by: Mattn on April 16, 2010, 09:02:19 pm
http://icculus.org/twilight/darkplaces/files/lhfire20070412.zip

if someone is searching for image generation for particles ^^

this is a scriptable tool from LordHavoc that is generating nice animated particle effects (and other stuff)