Help with shader effects.

[BooGiTyBoY]

Anyone have a good tutorial on them? What I'm looking for is using more than one on a skin, kind of like the xenocide one but not at crazy.
What I want to do is put 2 shaders, one with a panning texture in certain spots, and a specular shader for "armor shine"

I have the specular shader (armor shine) one down pat. What I don't know is how to combine it with a panning shader, and also how to correctly do a panning shader. Seems when I import my texture for it and place it on the model, it blows it up to the size of the skin texture and makes it blurry as hell. On the above skin xenocide used small 256x256 textures, and they are crystal clear when panning.

Can anyone point me in the direction of a fairly simple tut for this? Or maybe help me out when I'm online? I usually have my xfire on (boogityboy) and/or Im in our clan irc which is in my siggy.

 

[daloonie]

I can help you when I get home. I just need to remember the interface of UnrealED correct.

 

[BooGiTyBoY]

Thanks Rex, appreciate it

I should be home all day today (pulled a muscle in my back and got sent home from work today... ugh)

I'll have my xfire on and as always Ill be in our clan irc.
If i'm not at my desk (These muscle relaxers might conk me out, hehe) you can leave a message on either and Ill try to contact you when I'm around.

 

[daloonie]

Well the second question is easy. It's not possible. If you look closer Xenocide's panners are also expaded from 256x256 to 1024x1024. I've tried some things to stop them from expanding but I can't get it to work.

Else you can easily combine a panner and a TexEnvMap to one shader. This will cause no ligting effects on to appear on the Selfillumination part. As far as I remember this was the one to create the "glow in the dark effect" with.

UDN has great tuts also http://udn.epicgames.com/Two/ShaderSupport

 

[BooGiTyBoY]

I might just give up on this then...

I have a basic knowledge of UED, but some of those tut's on UDN (hich I already looked at) just confoozle the heck out of me

I emailed Xenocide to see if he could give me some tips but no reply yet. I don't understand how he gets the panning textures to not blur like a mofo, lol.

Here's another thought... does anyone know of a skin that uses maybe just 2 two different shader effects like I'm looking for? I can't follow the xenocide pack for beans... has all the "2 pass" and "3 pass" textures and like 3-4 different combiners and whatnot. I need teh shader noob skin to check out I guess lol.

 

[-Tj-]

The Xenocide skin has really detailed 256x256 textures that scale relatively well to higher resolutions, especially since only a small portion of it is ever visible at any given time. The amount of detail you work into your texture will determine whether or not it will work scaled to 1024x1024. If you work any kind of graphic that has sharp edges, such as text, it will always appear blurrier when scaled up.

You CAN use a 256x256 pixel texture at its native resolution on a 1024x1024 if you use the TexScaler to scale it down and move it around.

The Xenocide skin isn't terribly complicated, just overwhelming if you look at it all at the same time. If you open up just the Shader node you can see where everything goes and where everything comes from. Also refer to this page for more detailed material info:

http://udn.epicgames.com/Two/ShaderSupport

 

[daloonie]

TexScaler? I must play around with that one. I've never seen such one before...

Combiners are useful too to create for example panning textures on top of a skin too. But as TJ also said the UDN's is by far the best source for information about these things.

Else most of my skins in my skinpack has shaders. Simple ones but it's hell of a download just to see the shaders.

 

[BooGiTyBoY]

Hey if it helps me it's worth it

Messed around with the TexScaler tonight... it's pretty cool but my shaders are still coming out rather blurry when I apply them, grrrr....

I'll get it right eventually LOL

 

[-Tj-]

Are your texture settings in UT2K4 set low? The editor takes some settings from the game and uses them in the editor, so if you have your textures set low in the game, they'll show up low in the editor. It's just a thought, and might not even be it, but that happens to me sometimes and I have to go back and set the textures high again in the game. I'm sure there's a setting in the editor itself that can be changed somewhere, but I don't know where or how to access it.

 

[daloonie]

I had that problem when I was forced to use an old TNT2 GFX. But since I got my things up and running nicely again I only got my Decal Stay set to Normal, everything else is bloated to highest detail levels

What about some screenies boogity !?

 

[BooGiTyBoY]

Here's a shot of how I currently have the texture set up... not sure if it's right but it kinda works (although teh textures are still blurry. Tried a smoke effect on this one:
[screenshot]http://img203.echo.cx/img203/6480/untitled10iu.jpg[/screenshot]

Here's the full Material Tree:

And here's a small test I did on Neg's skin. The texture I used was pretty detailed multi-colored lightning. Yet it blurs and distorts wikked badly unlike Xenocide's textures which stay nice and clear, specially on the backpipes. (And I even tried the texscaler to make it smaller but no workies )

http://www.jumpinjuggernuts.com/downloads/test.avi

Oh and I thought of the texture detail thinger already... I have all my textures set to LOD_playerskin and even when my skin settings are set to highest it makes no difference on the shader.


...and thanks for putting up with my noobishness at this so far guys haha. Greatly appreciated.

EDIT: Okay.... Radiosity has clued me into what selfillumination actually does so I know I have some textures in the wrong slots there now
I'm gonna try to make my first combiner later so that should fix me right up. (I hope)

 

[-Tj-]

Try the TexScaler again, but use these settings:

UScale: .5
VScale: .5
UOffset: 0
VOffset: 0
TexCoordCount: TCN_2DCoords
TexCoordPorjected: False
Material: Your texture goes here

That should make it a 512x512 texture. Substitute .25 in both UOffset and VOffset if you want it to be 1024x1024

 

[daloonie]

Well if it seems distorted it's because of the model and how it uses textures(UW Maps).
The panner will go directly on top of the texture and not the model and it can get the panner to look distorted all depending on the models UW Map.

Else you should use a more detailed texture if it seems too blurry. Or try what Tj said.

 

[BooGiTyBoY]

Thanks again guys.. one of these days I'll get it right.

Also... does anyone know why certain cards won't show the shaders.. they come out as white spots on some older cards such as my buddies geforce mx440 and one of my other buds has an ati 9600. He says the shader works fine in the character select screen... but once he goes back to the player screen and in the actual game they just stand still and don't move?

ANyone know what exactly the culprit could be in these situations? The mx440 I can see maybe doesnt support the environmental shaders or something... but the 9600 problem has got me wikked confoozled on that one.

 

[daloonie]

It takes time to get it right. I have had alot of trouble getting to where I am now
And I still have alot to learn.

The MX440 card is only DirectX 7(and based on the GeForce 2 core) and as I remember it, it's not supporting those features at all or lacks full support.
The ATI card could sound like a driver issue.

 

[-Tj-]

I had some problems like that with Felina. Older cards don't support all the shader functionality in UT2004 that newer cards do, and sometimes it's just strange conflicts between software or even driver differences.

A couple of things you could do to make sure your shaders work on the majority of video cards out there:
1: Check your material against the different emulation options available in UEd:
View>Rendering Emulation>[your choice here]
This will help you get a good idea if your shader works on multiple cards or not.
2: ALWAYS specify a FallbackMaterial in your material. This will ensure that if your shader doesn't work on any particular card for any particular reason, it will fall back to the material specified here. Your best bet is to use the basic texture you used before any special effects were applied to it (usually just the original texture).

That should help with compatibility issues. It won't fix any non-moving texture issues, but it'll make sure the textures show on pretty much all systems.