Hard Light Productions Forums

Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => FS2 Open Coding - The Source Code Project (SCP) => Topic started by: Styxx on July 27, 2004, 08:41:14 am

Title: Texture Blending
Post by: Styxx on July 27, 2004, 08:41:14 am

Ok, I don't know if anyone already suggested this, so please excuse me if it has already been discussed... But, considering we have a lot of new texturing modes (glow, spec, env), what would be the likelyhood of adding Texture Blending to the mix? This would basically work by having, say, three or four textures for a mesh, where one of the textures specifies the intensity of the others for blending. This is basically the best way to do terrain rendering, but it would also be really good to allow a more seamless integration of tiled maps. The same technique could be used for Detail Maps, something I know Bobboau was already experimenting with...

The only real difficuly here would be to add another mapping channel to the mesh, as I don't know how that could be integrated to the POF data structure, or to the converters.

Comments? And you guys who actually know the code, how hard would this be? And I guess there's one specifically for Kazan too: how hard would it be to add the new mapping channel to the converter? I don't know how Truespace works with these things.

Title: Texture Blending
Post by: Flipside on July 27, 2004, 08:45:36 am

I can see a .fot file format appearing at this rate (Freespace Open Texture) ;)

That'd be quite handy, but then theres the pain of converting it back and forth etc :(

As for texture blending, I'll leave that into the hands of better brains than mine ;)

Edit : That brings another thought... for another thread though ;)

Title: Texture Blending
Post by: Styxx on July 27, 2004, 08:47:23 am

I'm willing to do some work on a MAX to POF converter (or an intermediate format that can be used by PCS). Right now it would have to be an intermediate format because I can only work with Maxscript, but I'll try to find some time to look into the MAX plugin SDK.

Title: Texture Blending
Post by: Goober5000 on July 27, 2004, 08:49:17 am

Quote

Originally posted by Styxx
I'm willing to do some work on a MAX to POF converter (or an intermediate format that can be used by PCS). Right now it would have to be an intermediate format because I can only work with Maxscript, but I'll try to find some time to look into the MAX plugin SDK.

That would be pretty cool. :)

Title: Texture Blending
Post by: Flipside on July 27, 2004, 08:51:36 am

Hmmmmmm... That'd be awesome! I wonder if DaveB could help you there at all? iirc the original Freespace ship creation tool used by :V: was a 3DS plugin they had written themselves?

Title: Texture Blending
Post by: Styxx on July 27, 2004, 09:00:56 am

I don't think Dave can help out on that, if they could release the plugins they would have done so when the code was made public.

Title: Texture Blending
Post by: Bobboau on July 27, 2004, 09:18:56 am

I have often wondered why they didn't
and we do use texture blending, but it's more on glowmaps than anything else, spec mapping would require a lot of specal caseing

Title: Texture Blending
Post by: Styxx on July 27, 2004, 09:43:39 am

Yes, but what I mean is have a separate map, using a separate channel, to define the intensity of blending of two (or more) textures which themselves use the same mapping channel. So you can blend between two tiled textures, for example.