Valkyrie Cosmetic WIP

Ok, I think I figured out how to get the gloss black glass that I wanted. I remember reading a post about somebody having this same issue on their TR goggles they were texturing. I remember it had to do with his faces being scaled so small to fit the texture swatch that it screws with the normals mapping.



I had to make some seams in the texture so that I could scale the faces up in U/V map1 and still fit it in the tiny gloss black swatch on the texture sheet, but I think it's hidden fairly well with the creases I used . I might be able to do this with the VS cockpit glass, but I'm skeptical it'll appear so seamless.

the seams dont appear as long as everything is the same scale and rotation. so you could arguably have every single face as a individual UV island

@Fuzz Thanks! That cleared it up for me! I hoped I could snap every U/V face to one cursor position on the texture sheet by setting pivot mode to 'individual origins', but it just moves the whole island. I managed to do it in a few minutes thanks to binding a hotkey to Blender's "Snap selection to Cursor (offset)". I still had to click each face and then the snap key individually (over five hundred faces!) but it worked out real slick!


What does everyone think of chrome on the VS Valkyrie cockpit?

Note: To get a super shiny glass look, I also shrank my UV2 mapping down to a pixel sized island AND used vertex painting to tell the game engine to not put any grime or dirt on the surface.

Work continues on my Terran Valkyrie concept:

I've been working hard to fashion a design over the base Valkyrie that can:

• Incorporate the TR aesthetics - curves and modules
• Has enough eye-catching detail that it would sell well.
• Is not too high polycount (result was 12k, I think that is reasonable)

I'm pretty proud of my cockpit design, and feel that it's finalized. But I may still go back to the drawing board on the rest of the exterior, I'm just not feeling like it's eye-catching enough... except for the rear of the engines where I added some emissive bits.

Edit: So I did stick with the original cockpit. Engines were fine too. I had to redo the 'Fender' area where I covered over the decal area. I added a bunch more detail to the upper and lower intakes, turning them into turbines instead of rectangle scoops, I think I nailed it and then I threw in the banners w/the TR logo over the rumble seats and BAM it's over-the-top! I'm thinking to myself : NICE WORK SOLDIER- YOU'VE DONE THE TR PROUD

imgur album:
https://imgur.com/a/C1ICTXN

P3D:
https://p3d.in/ByXJY

Highlights:

I'm still playing with my Terran propaganda-mobile concept as well
When I showed my buddies in my outfit the concept, they thought the banners looked too-out-of-place for Planetside.
Still, I was excited to find a texture swatch that gives me a plain red banner, but also, if camo is applied, it shows the camo with a slight red tint apparently.
I looked, and couldn't find any model in game that uses this swatch, so it's impossible to try out this look with different camos applied, but I imagine it would look pretty striking!


I cut the TR logo into the geo of the banner and textured it with some black and glowing bits.
If there's no way to project player decals over the banner, then this is a pretty good solution I think.



at night:

Wow! thats some great work your improving a ton!

- to get points to a centre S + 0 scales all points to a zero'd location

- VS valk is looking phenomenal! youve cleaned up the nose really well

- TR valk is still a bit wobbly on those nose textures; but the rest is looking great!!

- for the banner we can use UV3 for decal positions. (if the UV island if off the UV space the decal isnt used, and the decal is mapped 0-1 in the UV space) you could also try out using another texture sheet; I think the TR armour one has a cloth TR symbol but I may be wrong.

Finally, with the Vanu and Terran well on their way, it's time to work on the New Conglomerate.

I'm approaching the concept of the NC Valkyrie from the angle of " What industrial aviation equipment would the NC re-purpose for use in the war effort? "

A crop duster!
https://goo.gl/images/EQF9Dr

I wish we were allowed to program particle effects

I ran this idea past my PS2 mates and they liked it a lot.
When I brought up the idea to model placards onto the 'storage tanks'
http://www.formtechprint.com/images/chemical_placards.png
-warning- the contents are bio-hazard or poison- kinda thing, to really sell the idea of it being a deadly re-purposing of civilian tech...
Well, my mates thought that was just too far... That we shouldn't condone chemical weapons in a game with a teen audience.

It's a good point. And I would like to get some feedback from the someone in charge, perhaps I have to make a Reddit post... ugh, I dread the inevitable wave of low effort ****post responses one has to sift through...

Maybe it's something I should not include in the design , but if there's some grey area; a skull-and-crossbones (poison) symbol might be ok because it's sorta-a-generic "we are baddies" symbol,
but not the bio-hazard symbol because that invokes serious war crime atrocities,

Anyway, without further adieu, here's my very rough concept so far of the New Conglomerate 'Crop Duster' Valkyrie:

P3d:
https://p3d.in/9NjDH

Just wanted to say thanks Fuzz! For all the kind feedback and helpful suggestions. And I forgot to mention Lobstrex earlier, chiming in with the positive encouragement, thanks man. But wow, Fuzz, it's really great to see someone making so many positive contributions. I spend enough time lurking on r/Planetside to know you as one of THE MOST helpful and level-headed individuals we could even hope to have in such a competitive ego driven community such as PS2, and despite all the recent negativity you stay positive about the eventual outcome, and accept the negatives as they come.

I for one would say it's not all in vain. It keeps my hope alive at the very least. And I hope PS2 continues on so you can reap the benefits of your contributions for many years to come, Fuzz.

Worst case scenario, all the layoffs spell the end, Playerstudio is closing up and I won't ever see my designs make it Live. I still had a great time building my designs and you guys helped sharpen my modeling skills that I'll surely use else ware in my hobbies, no big deal.


*Edit* :

P.S. also, totally agree, the wonky TR Valk nose texture is bad form. Thanks for pointing that out. and
P.P.S yep, we've been reassured none of this drama really affects Planetside or PlayerStudio, and I believe them. I hope it doesn't come off like I'm nay-saying Daybreak. I think we might agree: They're doing the best the can for us! They're a game [COMPANY], not a charity.
If more people supported the game financially, we'd see proportionately less time spent on developing monitization schemes to keep it afloat. I joined in late 2015, and they've added sooo much content in the time I've been playing. I been buying yearly membership since ~3months in and spent atleast $500 on in-game cosmetics since. Before Planetside, I swore to hell I'd NEVER spend real $ on video game "hats", but knowing it will help keep this niche awesome experience alive, I'm OK with it.

Going by what roxxly has said player studio should continue for the time being (The queue and all that is handled by the art team), but it is really sad ricks gone.

and Thanks Im just trying to help others like folk helped me

I like your crop duster! the belly im not 100% on but the skids are really cool!

Latest update on the NC Valkyrie:

Following your suggestion Fuzz, I got rid of the underbelly tank. Replaced it with some tubes and a power capacitor thingy.

Over all, I feel this one is ready to go after some detailing.

Any things you see that need major changes?

P3d:
https://p3d.in/rL86t

Imgur Album:
https://imgur.com/a/VISe27f

Great progress! your modelling and texturing is coming on a ton! still a few minor things though

- the texture mirroring on the front is pretty bad imo,those lighting issues will persist ingame.

- a few of your faces you should probably work on sharpening up; for example the wing lights aint flat? it looks kinda weird. bevels are good but sharpness has its place. The little skiffs (the square feet at the front of the wing) look great because they are clear, sharp and good.

- the tip of the nose might need a bit of work? you dont need to stick too closley to the default shillohete, so you might want to box that out keeping with the theme of the cockpit? I like the boxy textured bit, im just meaning the tiny point at the front.


I love the new battery bit though

Thanks as always for the very constructive feedback!

About the texture mirroring, hold up, are you telling me that's not just an artifact of the PlayerStudio render? Any texture mirrored in UV1 will show up with inside-out normal mapping on one half compared to the un-mirrored?
When I saw this issue I tried fixing it: I finish applying the mirror modifier to my geo so I have an actual complete mesh, then i go into my UV2 map and re-unwrap. I was thinking this would fix the inside-out texture normals, but in my test, it did not appear to fix it.
I don't know what I'm doing wrong, I could definitely use some help here Fuzz.

Edit:
Ok, I've been giving this some thought and study, and I think I understand the problem and some of my misconceptions about texturing.

#1 Dumb mistake, It finally dawned on me now that the UV2 map has nothing at all to do with how the UV1 normals appear, and only controls the repeating detail and camo scale/rotation etc.. I had the latter part working fine, but assumed it controlled UV1 texture normals ''cause they're textured normals", durr, idk.
I also falsely assumed the UV1 normals texture could be treated like a height/bump map, but it appears NOT..

I think I get it now, the normals texture encodes 'xyz vector' to the lighting interaction (RGB=XYZ), not the height of a surface. That's why it looks messed up when I map a bit of tex normal colored/pointing (r:255,g:255,b:255 = x:1,y:1,z:1), mirrored over the X-axis of the model should be colored/pointing (r:0,g:255,b:255 = x:-1,y:1,z:1), since I can't control the rgb component of the texture obviously, I end up with textured normals that are getting lit from both sides. Am I right?

But I still don't quite understand why I'm seeing this in the Playerstudio viewer:
Why is it, that if I mirror the UV1 of a mesh face, the light hitting the textured detail normals will appear 'inside-out' next to a un-mirrored face of the same identical texture swatch.
I swear I'm seeing this in playerstudio even with the provided game models, but I don't think I see these inside-out artifacts in the live game (it's not so easy to test, since I can't turn up detail strength, or spin the sun around the model).
I feel like I'm just overlooking something obvious.

As for the other bits, yep, good call, those were all on my to-do list. The nose tip, I was definitely looking at that already and I agree, it's a bit smooth in contrast to the cockpit. On the other hand, I kinda think it looks like a hooked beak of a bird, and together with the cockpit it kinda has the look of a majestic eagle of freedom, very fitting for NC flavor. But I'll take your advice and give it a go at sharpening it up or some other variation of blocky look.

so yeah PSview is the same rendering sorta rending as is ingame; so if it looks wonky ingame itll look wonky ingame. the lighting doesnt look too bad as long as the mirrored bits on UV1 dont touch.

So I'm still curious about this texture lighting issue. Is there any chance you could point me to one of the PS2 art team to contact?

Again, I'm seeing these bad lighting artifacts even in on the stock models in PSview, but they are clearly NOT visible in-game.
With Detail Strength cranked up to 2.0 you can clearly see the contrasting seams and whole panels of texture appear to be 'inside-out'. Sure you can tune detail strength down, but it's visible the moment you increase it to anything above zero.

See these 3 DIFFERENT RESULTS I GET:

Top one is a STOCK MODEL, straight from SOE/DBG, in the 'PlayerStudio\Samples' folder,
Second and Third are exported with either 'Include Tangent Space Normals and Bi-normals' setting ENABLED or DISABLED.


This makes me think the encoding of the surface normals in the FBX format has something to do with as well.
I've searched the forum, and I just do not see any answers regarding this.
I really want to make sure my stuff looks top-notch and NOT just assume that the art team will fix whatever is wrong here, if there is something I can do to format my file correctly I'd love to hear it from one of the devs or one of the creators that knows the nuts-and-bolts. Who knows this stuff and Where can I reach them? Twitter? Discord? Reddit? (tried that yeah, on Reddit Wrel says he liked my work, but that's all I've gotten out of him, hopefully he or Roxxlyy will respond to a DM, I'm sure they get flooded with them though)

Its a mystery too me too; you need to have tangents enabled as otherwise the entire models lighting goes weird.

Ive even encounteered it on mirrored pannels that are not connected, and I could swear its more prominent on some texture sheets.

Personally I just model additional detail at the seams to avoid this (either panel lines to bisect it, or additional plates over the top). or do a retexture of anything central once ive applied the mirror modifier.

For people to talk to the last art dude is bishop, who is on here, or at twitter at https://twitter.com/DBG_Bishop You could also try to ask wrel for his email. You could also look at items ingame and see if any other PS creators have solved the issue.

Funny enough, this is something that has been bothering me forever, and finally today I have managed to fix this issue with the PS viewer. It turns out the detail normal maps supplied are not saved correctly and cause these weird lighting inconsistencies whenever they are turned on.

So in relation to your question, you should always export with Tangents/Binormals ENABLED. But in order for it to look correct you will need to override ( make backups just in case ) some of your textures with the fixd ones I've just made : PS_TEXTURE_FIX

I will make a post on Reddit so other PS viewer users can get these also.

Here's the difference ( re-exported model, stock FBX has its own problems ):

Wait... that isn't actually an issue in-game?! I spent sooooo much time trying to fix that nonsense for my VS ANT and now... *sigh*

I checked the Valk in game and it had no issues, so I assume the problem was local to the PS viewer tool only.

I submitted these today! It's a shame we don't get much feedback or support from Daybreak regarding PlayerStudio, and I still have unanswered questions, but hopefully all goes well.

I emailed Bishop about the TextureDetail artifacts. By the time he responded telling me that the PSviewer issues were just faulty textures...
D0ku had already posted a downloadable texture fix file on Reddit, aayye thanks D0ku!

errrr, BTW, that 'PS_Texture_Fix.rar' file is still not working for me. Has anyone else managed to open it? I just get a 'corrupt file' on multiple computers. Maybe D0ku would be so cool as to share how he fixed the textures?

I asked Bishop if my average polygon count (>10k) was ok but he never gave me an answer, so I'm just gonna assume there's no problems with that -like the DetailNormal Lighting Artifacts in our janky PSviewer

Oh, apparently the CTI Tax Registration database is broken. I payed my $10 registration fee, but I still can't log into the tax website to complete my W8/W9 forms. It tells me they have no record of my login info.
Uhh, I guess I should have sorted this out months ago while I was working on this project, instead of waiting to the last week. Damn it, I hope this doesn't delay my submission...

TL:DR Well, here's what you guys wanna see:

_________________________________________________

Vanu 'VENOMOUS'

triangle count:
cockpit: 1958
exterior: 5329

p3D:
https://p3d.in/EdD0c
https://p3d.in/sSzaT

Imgur album:
https://imgur.com/a/NftbLw7
_________________________________________________

Terran 'PANOPTICON'

triangle count:
cockpit: 3440
exterior: 7943

p3D:
https://p3d.in/7k3r6
https://p3d.in/pYFdW

Imgur album:
https://imgur.com/a/VYBGjFb
__________________________________________________

Conglomerate 'CROP DUSTER'

triangle count:
cockpit: 1538
exterior: 9063

p3D:
https://p3d.in/VXQ5C
https://p3d.in/qKSSo

Imgur album:
https://imgur.com/a/jMqtpZJ
__________________________________________________

I've already checked on their submission status and they were 'VALID' right away, I didn't completely mess it up, Huzzah!

But if anyone is interested in looking over my work, I'll happily mail you my fbx's.
Hit me up on Gmail with the same name as my Reddit account.