Re: Asset Replacement Reboot
Posted: 29 Sep 2019, 13:51
I guess he never filed a complaint to the court.AnyOldName3 wrote: ↑28 Sep 2019, 20:07 If the law were that strict, Bethesda would be paying royalties to Gary Gygax for being too similar to D&D. Everything's inspired by other works in some way.
I am pretty sure that there is no such way of having this as a non-derivative work while looking like MW at the same time. And this was already discussed many times.
About the PBR, yes, it should be generally working the same, but the presence of profiles (in the texturing software) related to different engines or renderers shows, that there are some differences, I am no CG programming expert, so I can't really tell something more specific. It would be good, if we could be using any of the already existing profiles to export the textures.
Another thing that people do not realise that often is, that in order for the material to look good or reallistic, it's not only PBR materials that's required, very often there are also other thigs invloved, such as Global Illumination, HDR lights, lightmapping, reflections (Reflection probes, self-reflections, etc.), Shadows (Self-shadowing, etc.), Post-processing (SSAO, Bloom, etc.), ... Just take a look at ArtStation at all those lovely renders from Marmoset for example.
Originally we were first focused at furniture objects, misc objects and interior tilesets. (Later I also did some Balmora exterior pieces, mostly walls and stairs and also did some plant containers)Mistahtokyo wrote: ↑28 Sep 2019, 15:47 Selecting a region/city and replacing the assets that apply to it first seems like a great way to start.
Well, my opinion is that if we're using sculpting to create HP meshes, we should do it properly (In my PBR mods I was mostly using the vanilla textures as displacement and then doing a little sculpting on the top. The results are looking okay, but far from perfect (also this technique might not work for all the textures). Simply converting the diffuse maps into normal maps in some reasonable software will give you quite "similar" result, while being significantly faster. Also I would not necessarily try to parallax everything, because of both the performance and visual quality, it works best for flat surfaces, worst for organic round complex topology.Ravenwing wrote: ↑28 Sep 2019, 22:36 Even if we did nothing beyond baking in radiused edges where appropriate we'd be able to maintain a lower polycount and let parallaxing do it's thing. My impression is that something between simply subdividing meshes and actual detail sculpting would be the sweet spot. Some things, mostly organic shapes like the Telvanni set and trees etc will need to be sculpted to some degree anyway. Anything ultra-fancy can be revisited at the end of the project or left to other asset packs.
Also, since this is all handled on the engine level, how can we control disabling normal maps/ parallax/etc. on LoD meshes?
At the moment the .nif format can handle all the things we need, so I would stick to that for now, all the source files are sharing a uniform setup, so everything can be easily batch-exported later when needed. There should be some new standard format replacing the current .fbx standard in the future and I think it's going to be open-source.Ravenwing wrote: ↑28 Sep 2019, 22:36 So glad you guys brought this up, because if there's one thing that drives me crazy, it's having to use 3 different pieces of software in a 7 step process for something that should be done in one and one. The lower the barrier of entry for this, the more likely we'll get a larger population of volunteers. If we're focusing on OpenMW, we should be able to use other formats besides NIF correct? I tried exporting something as DAE but it didn't work, although my guess is I did something wrong. This doesn't solve animations or the initial import of the mesh however.