Asset Replacement Reboot

General discussion regarding the OpenMW project.
For technical support, please use the Support subforum.
User avatar
Berandas
Posts: 96
Joined: 28 Oct 2012, 11:23
Location: Prague, Czech Republic
Contact:

Re: Asset Replacement Reboot

Post by Berandas »

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 guess he never filed a complaint to the court. ;)
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Also, since this is all handled on the engine level, how can we control disabling normal maps/ parallax/etc. on LoD meshes?
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.
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.
User avatar
Mistahtokyo
Posts: 139
Joined: 07 Sep 2013, 18:31

Re: Asset Replacement Reboot

Post by Mistahtokyo »

For statics it might be better to use the Native Mesh Format (OSGT).

According to the wiki, the available texture types are:
  • diffuseMap: base texture
  • normalMap: normal map, as described earlier
  • normalHeightMap: same as normal map, but including height information in alpha channel to be used for parallax effects
  • emissiveMap: controls the material's emission, useful for objects that glow in the dark
  • darkMap: multiplied onto the base texture
  • detailMap: multiplied by 2 and then multiplied onto the base texture
  • envMap: spherical environment map
  • specularMap: specular map, as described earlier
More info on it
User avatar
lysol
Posts: 1513
Joined: 26 Mar 2013, 01:48
Location: Sweden

Re: Asset Replacement Reboot

Post by lysol »

Mistahtokyo wrote: 30 Sep 2019, 02:25 For statics it might be better to use the Native Mesh Format (OSGT).

According to the wiki, the available texture types are:
  • diffuseMap: base texture
  • normalMap: normal map, as described earlier
  • normalHeightMap: same as normal map, but including height information in alpha channel to be used for parallax effects
  • emissiveMap: controls the material's emission, useful for objects that glow in the dark
  • darkMap: multiplied onto the base texture
  • detailMap: multiplied by 2 and then multiplied onto the base texture
  • envMap: spherical environment map
  • specularMap: specular map, as described earlier
More info on it
Sounds like this would need some editing before it gets ready for a PBR texturing pipeline? Support for albedo, roughness and metalness I mean?
User avatar
AnyOldName3
Posts: 2668
Joined: 26 Nov 2015, 03:25

Re: Asset Replacement Reboot

Post by AnyOldName3 »

Yeah, those are just the things Morrowind supports plus what OpenMW's normal mapping and parallax mapping have added. There's no PBR stuff there yet.

Also, we have no support for animation for things that aren't in the Nif format, so making everything OSGT or OSGB isn't going to be feasible unless that changes.
User avatar
Mistahtokyo
Posts: 139
Joined: 07 Sep 2013, 18:31

Re: Asset Replacement Reboot

Post by Mistahtokyo »

Yeah, though there's no PBR stuff for NIF either, at least not on OpenMW. There are some OSG PBR implementations from what I have looked at online, though it's not likely simple to take and add here. I mention that format since I assume the performance/load times might be better with it, but I wouldn't know. Scrawl also mentioned the following:

Technically speaking, we could also load any mesh format that OSG has a plugin for - and there are quite a lot of those: 3ds, collada, etc. However as far as I'm concerned these formats are not officially supported by OpenMW, nor recommended, for a couple of reasons:
- More formats means more potential for bugs and more support overhead.
- Whether or not a plugin has been built depends on the person compiling OSG. Some plugins (like Collada) depend on external libraries, so they're not built by default. This creates an unfortunate situation where some builds of OpenMW would have support for different mesh formats than other builds.
- Some format plugins cross-reference files in an unsupported manner. For example, .obj files reference a .mtl file of the same name. The .obj plugin for OSG tries to open that file from the filesystem, which will not work since we are using a virtual file system where files could be contained in BSA or ZIP files. (In contrast, file references in .osg files work fine with the virtual file system, because they go through the osgDB::ReadFileCallback rather than directly opening a file).

I don't know if, despite the objections, there's any benefit to focusing on outright supporting a more user friendly/common format to avoid the NIF plugin issues people tend to have.
User avatar
AnyOldName3
Posts: 2668
Joined: 26 Nov 2015, 03:25

Re: Asset Replacement Reboot

Post by AnyOldName3 »

At least in the short term, having a PBR-friendly .blend as the canonical file and then converting it to a Morrowind's-non-gamma-correct-legacy-setup-firendly .nif is reasonable. If we decide on a format later on, we might not stick to it, so ensuring we have the source model rather than just the exported result means we can change as needed.
Forlarren
Posts: 1
Joined: 17 Oct 2019, 03:13

Re: Asset Replacement Reboot

Post by Forlarren »

Made this account to comment here. If you don't mind letting an old school open source grognard pontificate a bit:
Ravenwing wrote: 28 Sep 2019, 06:38 So if we've decided to use a Google Drive to store and keep track of progress until/unless the project becomes busy enough to require a more rigorous solution, let's move on to more fun things to discuss!
I'd like to go back to organization.

I've seen decades of these projects come and go and I have some simple advice (for certain values of "simple").

Insist on a perpetual use license granted to the project and Bethesda with a copyleft provision. Basically Bethesda can literally just have the assets if they want them for their own use no strings attached. In exchange they don't sue anyone, and let you enforce a copyleft license assigned to the project. That way if an artist ever leaves their art doesn't become a dead end. This isn't just important so further artists down the line can improve on their work but simply book keeping. That doesn't put the art in the full public domain, it's only a license for contributing to this specific project. You also aren't authorizing anyone to make any derivative works, or even commenting on what is or isn't derivative, only passing on the (assumed) rights to copy and edit (as a third party in good faith) files for use in Morrowind derived projects (making all good faith efforts to not support pirated copies).

Now that the pseudo-legalese is done the meat of the plan.

* Very simple copyleft license to the project.
* A wiki of all assets.
* Create a master file from wiki files for end users.

Then nobody puts dibs on anything. It's perfectly fine to have multiple attempts at the same assets, just host all of them and let people pick what they like, and improve what's not up to chops. Variety is the spice of life.

It would be cool if one could go though the wiki and select the preferred asset with a check box. Start with "vanilla" pre-selected. Then users can go through the wiki choosing and/or adding the assets they want instead. At the end you hit an output button and it zips up your files and spits it out to you. Also there should be a "save preset" button next to the output button, so people can share their presets. Put voting (stars ups whatever) on the presets and/or the individual files so everything can be filtered by popularity.

Pre-populate the wiki with every page having the big yellow Morrowind exclamation point thingy until an asset has been contributed.

Then sit back and more or less just let it happen, organizationally that is.

Only server side trick really needed that's not out of the box wiki stuff is generating the zip. And maybe that's a thing nowadays, back when I web developed the server farm was uphill both ways in the snow and we liked it that way, so I'm a little out of date.

JMHO YMMV IANAL
DMKW
Posts: 6
Joined: 08 Jun 2015, 13:10

Re: Asset Replacement Reboot

Post by DMKW »

A wiki where you could select the assets of your choosing would be a dream come true.
Post Reply