Wonderful! Do you only have copies of the final NIFs or do you have the working .blend files as well?Berandas wrote: ↑27 Sep 2019, 18:56 Just FYI I am still keeping the whole MOAR thing alive on my Gdrive (data-wise) and there are still people doing little contributions from time to time. I also shared it with the Atlas project some time ago.
Though I should probably do a little cleanup and update the files and guidelines for the newest Blender version.
I'm guessing this is your own personal drive? People are still contributing so do you have any kind of infrastructure set up, even if it's just a Sheets document with a list?
Agreed, I was planning to have some sort of poor man's tracker/list of assets to kind of keep track of what's going on and who's trying to work on what. If this gains any momentum at all, I think the main OpenMW team will be happy to set up a subforum if it even needs that much.Mistahtokyo wrote: ↑26 Sep 2019, 16:02 A total lack of structure would not be good, nor a free-for-all grab since, while the total mesh/texture count is high, there are generally popular/common meshes and textures that are more likely to see work than others. In that case, it's good to establish some idea of what's being worked on. At the very least have a forum style setup for people to claim assets, then a common upload spot to dump the progress in.
I have more thoughts on this that I'll share in my next post, but I don't think that's even worth worrying about. Almost everything is going to stick out like an especially sore thumb simply because of additional polys and normal mapping until it's all completeMistahtokyo wrote: ↑26 Sep 2019, 16:02 Certain rules need to be established as well, such as how long a claim can be held without progress before being opened up for others. Another good thing to consider is ordering the meshes into a list of most used/visible in-game to least so that the project can start out taking on the most important/noticeable pieces first, then gradually work down to things like rings and amulets, etc.
As lysol said, it has been brought up a few times, and maybe I'm not fully aware of Skywind's design philosophy, but I think the even bigger problem than getting various permissions is the fact the meshes won't physically match existing assets. Tiling sets are a particular problem, but even then, if things like barrels or tables are slightly different sizes we'll have too much clipping/floating etc.Mistahtokyo wrote: ↑26 Sep 2019, 16:02 Edit: Also before even starting out, has anyone asked recently whether or not projects like Skywind have any interest in sharing/releasing assets for use in Morrowind? Ideally the project should make use of existing modern asset replacements to avoid duplicate work.
Edit: Forgot to respond to AnyOldName3's bit. Most of it I will discuss in the next post, but figured this might shed some light on a couple key points that I'd rather not enumerate there.
Agreed, and this is one of the main reasons I think many of the old project's assumptions need to be revisited. It's also a much more motivating reason to refurbish the game assets. I know that converters exist between the two workflows, and that they're essentially describing the same things in different ways, but it would also be nice to not have to revisit if possible. Luckily, regardless of which we choose, or indeed if people want to do PBR at all (you should), the first steps will be the same and make a HUGE difference to visuals.AnyOldName3 wrote: ↑23 Sep 2019, 01:41 One thing I'd like if we were doing a MOAR reboot would be to make sure that all new assets have a PBR material set up, otherwise we're going to have to start again in a few years. At this stage, we're not settled on what parameters we're going to eventually support, but for the most part, any sensible set of textures and values can be converted into any other sensible set.
I'm not 100% convinced this will even be entirely necessary. I think it's still best to aim for releasing legacy textures simply for ease of user-end setup and so non-OpenMW users can take advantage, BUT I don't think there's any likelihood of MOAR being finished within even 5 years, so by then even the poorest of us should have a card that can take advantage.AnyOldName3 wrote: ↑23 Sep 2019, 01:41 The hard part with this, though, is going to be coming up with a way of baking a PBR material into something that looks okay with Morrowind's gamma-incorrect Lambert+Phong/Gouraud setup so that the new assets can be used in the meantime. While it's theoretically possible (and should be automatable), it's much harder to find a guide explaining how than the other way around (which requires a human to do all the work). Worst-case scenario, I guess someone could write some code that does a bunch of maths to see what gets the most similar results.
It is damn difficult to find info on this. I think here we should just not be too concerned with making it look absolutely equivalent, but relatively close. As long as the diffuse is the right brightness and things don't look to shiny or plastic-y we're good to go. If we did a good job, it would be interesting if someone could write a neural network that learned from our two sets to help artists convert their standard sets into PBR better than some of the other solutions available, but I digress.