Modeling Help

[ISS_Enterprise_D]

I love Aad Moerman's models like many peopl do. However, I've always had one nitpick about them that I could never put my feelings aside about. All of Aad's models seem to be lit up in a sense that when a map has no lighting effects, the entire ship is still visible. The recent Cloud-Class used a kitbash of Aad's models but it lacked said lighting up.

Can anyone who uses MS3D tell me how to get rid of this extra lighting? It would help me like the ships a lot more, and they'd make a much more frequent appearance in my pics.

 

[SciFiFan]

You need to check the ambiance setting on the texture. It should be set to black. I had the same problem when I started modeling but, Majestic help me correct that.

Select your Materials tab in MS3D. Below the window that shows the texture you see four buttons. Click on Ambient and then select the color to black.

Edit: You need to make certain you do this for each material you have.

 

[thunderfoot]

I too, have always felt everyone's models are just a tad too bright. Part of this is the lighting in the maps themselves. You may have noticed the maps I've released are very much darker than most. Maps have three settings for light. The first, ambient, is accessed thru the map Editor ans is easily adjustable. Press CTRL-R to get the overall settings once in Editor mode. Click on the ambient button in the lower left corner and reset the RGB fields in the next window which comes up. I use a range of about 10 to 45 for these and it goes a long long way towards reducing the neon glow of some models. The Directional Lights are the other two settings. I use two only. One for the light source itself and one more for the shadows. Having three or more directional lights is not recommended since every single pixel has to be lit(and drawn this way) by all three. This is a serious lag inducer.

"Lag is bad and must be avoided."

I know little about material settings on the model itself. There are about four or five versions of MS3D running about and there are a few other modelling programs which others use as well. Not to mention hex editors to manipulate the code itself. What others have said previously should work.

What I do know about are textures. Nearly everyone sets the textures up on their models far, far too brightly. Texture manipulation is much easier to do than model manipulation and if one saves the original textures separately, it is much easier to recover from a fatal boo boo. Use any graphics app which allows one to manipulate textures to open the texture. When a texture has alpha channels(2 other names for these - lightmaps or masks), look for a function which allows one to reverse the alphas so that entire texture is highlighted. Once one has done this, look for a function called "adjust gamma" or something very similar. Gamma determines how "bright" the texture is. Turning this down makes the model darker. Go easy here. Too much and you'll remove some of the details. Typically, I adjust the gamma downwards by 10 - 20%. This is usually sufficient. Do not forget to reverse the alphas back to their original settings. Alpha channels tell the game engine which parts of the ship are transparent enough to let the light through. If one leaves them reversed after adjusting the gamma, then we are telling the game engine everything is transparent except the portholes and warp grilles

Turning the gamma down brings out the shadows on a texture. Shadows are required for any two dimensional object to appear three dimensional. Look in the Half Race Mod and compare the textures in there with the textures in any original release of Maj's PRP Colonials. The textures in HRM are darker, but more of the details are visible. Turning the gamma down too far will blank the details and one will wind up with a black ship against a dark background. Not really what we are after here. You'll need to adjust these to your tastes but a good place to start with Aad's models is to turn down the gamma to about 0.85 or so. I have nearly all of his Rommie and Klink ships and this works pretty good for me. I've not used any of his Fed ships, but based on what I've seen and used of his work, I'd suggest turning the gamma down to about 0.75 to 0.8. Starfleet ships tend to glow a little more anyway due to the lightness of the color palette used to make their textures.

 

[ISS_Enterprise_D]

I just might look into your advice in the future Thunder. I know that some bright textures tend to hide some details, so that might become mandatory for the texts.

And thanks SciFiFan for your help. Aad's models will be much better now!!

 

[Jetfreak]

Seems like everything that needs saying has been said.

I can only add this:
If you have Milkshape and if you can import SOD’s, make sure the following settings are applied.

Go the Materials tab and set these values for each part of the mesh:
Ambient – Black
Diffuse - White
Specular - Black
Emissive – Black

If you also want phong lighting, rename the mesh values so it would look like this:

!phong_(mesh name here)_!alpha

 

[Majestic]

!phong_(mesh name here)_!alpha

You can also use _!default instead of _!alpha and _!ambient will give the model ambient.

Phong, allows weapon colours to reflect off the hull. I use it all the time myself.

Also any of these values can be at the front of behind the material name. Just make sure that the _ are facing the material name and that the ! is always in front of the value.

 

[Dan1025]

Agreed, any model I release always has its materials set so it goes completely black when there's no light, and so that weapons reflect off the hull, it's just another way of improving the quality of how models look ingame