Unreal Texture UT site and S3TC releases

[brdempsey69]

^So MergeTool will also maintain the GUID of the original packages and keep the net compatibility, I take it.

I found MergeDXT to also keep net compatibility of custom packages.

BTW, Raven, thanks for this MergeDXT GUI, it's very user friendly and worked like a charm.

 

[Diehard]

(Diehard, I hope it is OK to link to that page. If not, let me know and I'll edit out the link)

You can do anything with the site as you see fit, its there for people to use.

If you look at Epic's version of the texture, you can see that the general colour balance on the S3TC version is significantly different from that of the original. Even worse, the added detail in the texture really emphasises the repetition of the pattern over a large surface (like, say, a floor).

And, you have no idea how difficult that is, accidentelly i have been working on those textures last night, all evening. And i concluded that the new texture i am creating might emphasise it even slightly more :/ . There is little you can do about it, other than reducing the contrast, which will ruin the detailed looks. And the more detail, the more paterns can be ephasised unfortunatelly. Effectivelly you have to make it more bored and uninteresting to get rid of the repeat, which kinda counters the effect S3TC tries to achieve.

If for some reason S3TC are not enabled (or can not be displayed) the low-res version is displayed. So yes - it will work in UED.

Yep, i forgot to mentin that, though there are people that also achived in getting the full S3TC to work in UEd. And as sidenote, i do disadvise using the UTRP textures for editing, since its to much uncharted territory.

It's still unclear to me whenever it is true S3TC or not, but result is still damn good .

I still doubt that too, but it would mean that they are added uncompressed full 24bit. Which means the quality is higher than S3TC, but it also means that the effectiveness S3TC has, lacks here. So its quality versus compression/effectiveness.

ASIDE: Diehard, which NASA site are you getting the very high resolution images from? The last time I went looking for some images (admittedly, of Jupiter and from an earlier probe), I couldn't even find 1024x1024 images.

I have to dig for that, but each half year i go look for higher resolution stuff, but sometimes the most obvious things are difficult to find. Theres several NASA/ESA related sites that offer super duper high resolution files (300/800 Mb files) but for planets you gotta look very hard. Up to this day after several years of searching i never found the moon larger than 1024(if it was that large) :/
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[Diehard]

Ill just asume this will work lol.

I packed the links into a zipfile: CelestialLinks.zip


And if you click on the link, you still have to do some searching, its too difficult to give an explanation where to go. And i must have much more and maybe better links, but couldnt find them right now. But its also stuff i will add to the site in time, under resources. Let me know if this works.
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[GreatEmerald]

Ah, I remember, it was a nebula that I saw on Wikipedia. However, it seems it's gone now... Though there are still a lot of good pictures at Wikipedia Commons:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2003-32-GravitationalLens.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Nebula

And ahh, found it!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Orion_Nebula_-_Hubble_2006_mosaic_18000.jpg
Whopping 18000x18000.

 

[IronMonkey]

Ill just asume this will work lol.

I packed the links into a zipfile: CelestialLinks.zip


And if you click on the link, you still have to do some searching, its too difficult to give an explanation where to go. And i must have much more and maybe better links, but couldnt find them right now. But its also stuff i will add to the site in time, under resources. Let me know if this works.
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This is excellent - thanks very much. I finally found a BIG Jupiter.

 

[Diehard]

And the floor you were talking about, this is an advanced beta model of the new floor:



dmFlor2c
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[IronMonkey]

There is little you can do about it, other than reducing the contrast, which will ruin the detailed looks.

That is sort of the direction that I'm heading in - that and mucking about with the colour balance (to make it blander )

I don't want to over-emphasise the problem. Most of the time, the original texture is showing banding anyway. A lot of the time, in-game, one is far too busy dying horribly to worry about the occasional problems.

The S3TC eye-candy factor works most of the time but like many a magic trick (and UTRP is magic!), it does not bear too close an examination.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that maybe I'm worrying too much about this because I can see it in the editor. Players (other than, perhaps, mappers) will not notice it too much.

Here's what I mean:

UT texture:
[screenshot]http://www.zen37847.zen.co.uk/screenshots/dmFlor2c.png[/screenshot]
S3TC texture:
[screenshot]http://www.zen37847.zen.co.uk/screenshots/dmFlor2c_UTRP.png[/screenshot]

 

[IronMonkey]

And the floor you were talking about, this is an advanced beta model of the new floor:

Insta-posted!

And here is what it looks like (much better). There is still some repetition but the colour being much closer to the original obscures a lot of that.

[screenshot]http://www.zen37847.zen.co.uk/screenshots/InMap_dmFlor2c_Beta01_Large.png[/screenshot]


Thank you very much.

 

[Diehard]

In that last screenshot, did you use the texture i posted here in the last example ?

In any case, yeah, i always look at the coloration from the original texture and never at an Epic made S3TC version, because often they are far off from the original design. So overal coloration should be pretty accurate (lol at least i may hope so )
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[IronMonkey]

In that last screenshot, did you use the texture i posted here in the last example ?

Yes.
The full sequence is Original, Epic S3TC, Diehard S3TC.

In any case, yeah, i always look at the coloration from the original texture and never at an Epic made S3TC version, because often they are far off from the original design. So overal coloration should be pretty accurate (lol at least i may hope so )

Well, I'm happy with the overall colour of the new texture!

 

[Diehard]

Ill see if i can upload the PSD file tomorrow, when i finish on that part of the Floor group. In that way you can use the full uncompressed(undamaged) version.
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[Diehard]

In the meantime DecayedS passed the 200 Mb (206 Mb to be precise) last night.

If you need the final versions of those floors you can grab them in this raw link IronMonkey:

DecayedS/Floor
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[IronMonkey]

Thanks.

 

[brdempsey69]

Yes, definitely, thanks for uploading the .PSD files. This is a great opportunity to make custom packages for anyone that wants to do it.

 

[Diehard]

Yes, definitely, thanks for uploading the .PSD files. This is a great opportunity to make custom packages for anyone that wants to do it.

Yeah its just a pitty i lack the time to add all PSD files to the site, at this moment aprox 2.2 gigabyte of PSD files are there, but in total i estimate i got some 5+ gigabyte worth of PSD files still at home. And little by little i try upload and add them to the Texture Database, but unfortunatelly it takes alot of time to add them (collecting them, packing them with the EULA, linking them, upload them, etc).
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[Diehard]

And in the meantime i have been working on the package, and i am about to finish another small group. DecayedS is actually a pretty boring package and not really enjoyable work, but there are a few cool and colorfull textures, and this is a new version of oné of those:







Its not entirelly finished but 95% done. I gotta say it was alot of work and took me all evening. Almost the entire texture is painted, so no Photoshop effects were used, except to create the shadowcasting.
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[Skillz]

If you would like a mirror for these files, let me know. I'll put them on ut-files.com.

 

[Diehard]

If you would like a mirror for these files, let me know. I'll put them on ut-files.com.

The site doesnt need mirrors, but to make www.ut-files.com complete, you could add them to the downloads. Nothing wrong with that, not everybody knows Unreal Texture and might miss out on the textures. So the more downloadsites the more people are being reached
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[Diehard]

And in the meantime i finished up with another texture in the same serie:


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[Zur]

Following my previous post, I had a look and discovered that 3DBuzz has taken down their video training magazines for the original UT. I've asked if it's possible to have those videos available in streaming format. In the meantime, I found some information on the wiki but it's far from complete. What needs to be done is to export the uv maps of the game characters so the texture can be divided properly. This will make it possible to make some hi-res textures used with models. If you can achieve this, I'd be more than happy to cook up a mutator that swaps weapons and characters with their hi-res versions.

http://www.wiki.beyondunreal.com/Legacy:Lightwave/UV_Mapping