WIP Biome BrickWorldTexture

[LiquidGravity]

Hello everyone,

 

I'm a long time LRR player (since the original PC release) and am now getting into modding it (though I have modded other games before).

 

I've looked around a bit but I can't find any brick-ified world textures so I decided to make my own. I'm attempting to make them in ways and that could actually be built. It seems to work great - many buildings even line up perfectly.

 

I have plans to do the rock walls yet. Making a dirt colored base version is also in the works.

 

Let me know what you think.

 

FYI - I did have some other mods running when I took the pic - but this topic is only about the modded world textures.

[aidenpons]

Wow! I really like that! I've also often wanted the biomes to be more Lego-y, and this is exactly what I thought of - as you say, it really works! I love the way the paths look.

 

The reinforcement does seem a little weird (it looks very flat compared to the original texture - there's a 3D model viewable in first person when you go to a reinforce wall), and the ground being green is weird (maybe make it brown? maybe even brown with random speckles of grey and other colors), but I really like it.

 

Shame the 'lighting' on the studs doesn't line up on a tile-to-tile basis, but there's nothing you can really do about that

 

 

I'm looking forward to what you can think up for the walls!

[LiquidGravity]

Thanks! And thanks for the mods you have done!

 

47 minutes ago, aidenpons said:

The reinforcement does seem a little weird (it looks very flat compared to the original texture - there's a 3D model viewable in first person when you go to a reinforce wall),

I agree. The 3d model matches pretty well. Any way it can be 3d all the time?

 

41 minutes ago, aidenpons said:

and the ground being green is weird (maybe make it brown? maybe even brown with random speckles of grey and other colors), but I really like it.

As I mentioned a dirt colored version is in the works.

 

[LiquidGravity]

I altered it to have more depth/shadowing and rotated the hazard stripes to better fit the first person 3d model. Hows that looking?

Are there any tutorials on the wall models? Changing the rocks will not look great unless I can change their models.

[Cirevam]

I'm pretty sure you can't make promeshes visible at all times (maybe our EXE hackers can figure out a method), but I have experimented with custom promeshes in the past. Each wall is two models and the game will flip them in order to make sure corners always look right. They're really unintuitive and nothing seems to line up as expected. You can see Z-fighting where the two seams are supposed to meet in the image below, despite me using the original models to line these up. You can probably get away with it if you're making a rock face. Parallel lines are really obvious but a bunch of rocks aren't so much.

 

 

[Prehistoricman]

On 4/14/2020 at 7:44 AM, LiquidGravity said:

I altered it to have more depth/shadowing and rotated the hazard stripes to better fit the first person 3d model. Hows that looking?

Are there any tutorials on the wall models? Changing the rocks will not look great unless I can change their models.

 

Damn! That reinforced 3D model looks amazing.

 

3 hours ago, Cirevam said:

I'm pretty sure you can't make promeshes visible at all times (maybe our EXE hackers can figure out a method)

Can you explain what promeshes are? Under what conditions are they not visible?

[Cirevam]

Promeshes are the detailed 3D models used for the environment (walls, ground, even water). They are located in Data\World\ProMeshes and are named like world textures are. Going off memory, they only appear in 1st and 2nd person view and only within a certain distance. If no promesh model is defined, it defaults to a single triangle (two make a wall, of course). This is easy to see with the Recharge Seam. Its ID number is 67, but there is no associated promesh. Get up close to one in 1st person and you'll see how it doesn't match up. Here are some CFG entries which may help you.

 

WallProMeshes            TRUE

 

Textures {

        Lava {
            rooftexture                World\WorldTextures\lavaroof.bmp
            surftextwidth            8
            surftextheight            8
            meshbasename            World\ProMeshes\LavaPM
            texturebasename            World\WorldTextures\LavaSplit\Lava
        }

[Prehistoricman]

Ah, this is what "Wall Detail" switches in the advanced options.

It also affects rubble being more 3D-looking. It seems that distance as well as the angle at which you're looking affects whether each wall uses the promesh or not. I'll give it a quick look to see if I can find the logic for this.

[Prehistoricman]

I have some interesting results. You can force the game to use promeshes all the time. Here are the changes you need to make to the exe to do that:

 

Address 33592 (hex):

• Replace 0F 83 18 01 00 00
• With    90 90 90 90 90 90

Address 335A6 (hex):

• Replace 0F 84 04 01 00 00
• With    90 90 90 90 90 90

If you can't find the correct data at the address, do a search for the data to replace (it should be unique). That said, if it's not at the right address, the code will probably be different too.

 

So that stops all the awkward popping in and out that can be seen when moving around.

For some reason, the game doesn't seem able to stitch these meshes together properly, especially on edge walls. So you often see into the void. That might depend on hardware/graphics wrapper.

This effect changes with distance. As you get closer to the edge wall, the two meshes get closer and look better (there's no longer a hole).

Trivia:

• The two changes to the exe I just mentioned skip two checks. These checks are BEFORE the global "Wall Detail" check. Why? Who knows...
• There is a global variable hard coded to be 1.0 that controls how distorted the wall meshes are. Increase it to 100 and they go wild. Decrease it to 0.5 and you can only see a few tiles in front of you. Weird stuff.

[LiquidGravity]

1 hour ago, Prehistoricman said:

I have some interesting results. You can force the game to use promeshes all the time. Here are the changes you need to make to the exe to do that:

Thanks! I tested in LegoRRCE.exe and I can confirm this does make the game use the higher detail promeshes at long view distances in Eye View and Shoulder View. Any chance you can work this magic to have them shown for Top View too?

[Cyrem]

It's not going to be a cake walk to do.... but it IS possible...

 

I've forced some promeshes to display as you can see here: http://prntscr.com/s0bu62

[LiquidGravity]

On 4/15/2020 at 12:40 PM, Cirevam said:

Promeshes are the detailed 3D models used for the environment (walls, ground, even water). They are located in Data\World\ProMeshes and are named like world textures are.

Cirevam: It looks like you use Lightwave to edit the promeshes? I am skilled in 3D CAD from my work but have not used an artist's 3d modeler in 10+ years and even then it was Blender. Would you be willing to do some conversion / creation work for me?

 

16 hours ago, Cyrem said:

It's not going to be a cake walk to do.... but it IS possible...

That is great news! This would pair excellently with the higher screen resolutions in LRR:CE using Cafeteria!

[aidenpons]

24 minutes ago, LiquidGravity said:

Cirevam: It looks like you use Lightwave to edit the promeshes? I am skilled in 3D CAD from my work but have not used an artist's 3d modeler in 10+ years and even then it was Blender. Would you be willing to do some conversion / creation work for me?

I'm not Cirevam , but the promeshes are probably just the .lwo files (I don't think the .x ones do anything), which Lightwave version 8 or earlier can use. However, thanks to some new tools, you can probably make them in Unity and export them , which would allow you to get something useful eventually.

[Cirevam]

You are both correct. The promeshes used are LWO files. I don't actually use Lightwave to model stuff, but it's needed for the final conversion. LWO version 5 (the implementation the game uses) does not seem to support mesh deformation or IK stuff, so it's perfectly feasible to model your pieces in anything else, then load it into Lightwave (OBJ works fine). I give out my copy of LW8 to people who ask and I'll give you a voice rundown of the things you need to do, since Lightwave's interface is a bit special.

 

Even if you use jamesster's tool for the export, you'll still need LW if you want to make anything more complex than a single model. The animator tool is pretty bad but I got used to it. I can make tanks, new monsters, and even stompy robots with it, and I don't have professional experience, so it can't be that hard to learn.

[lol username]

On 4/16/2020 at 4:57 PM, aidenpons said:

However, thanks to some new tools, you can probably make them in Unity and export them , which would allow you to get something useful eventually.

It's more for importing models (presumably made in your preferred modeling program, or converted from something else, etc) then exporting them as LWO - Unity itself isn't for modeling things.

 

On 4/16/2020 at 5:53 PM, Cirevam said:

Even if you use jamesster's tool for the export, you'll still need LW if you want to make anything more complex than a single model. The animator tool is pretty bad but I got used to it. I can make tanks, new monsters, and even stompy robots with it, and I don't have professional experience, so it can't be that hard to learn.

Yeah, the most feasible pipeline at the moment is probably creating LWOs via running models through the Unity toolkit, then animating them (creating LWS files) in Lightwave.

[LiquidGravity]

Ok here is dirt floor (Lego Earth Orange color) with some small rocks. I also turned on PWNZOR's HighPoly ToolStore and as you can see that still fits great.

[LiquidGravity]

Ok I'm just starting to play around with making promeshes. These aren't great but they do get rid of that weird break.

 

I'm translating data through 4 programs and 7 formats to modify them in a program I know well.

Importing: (.lwo) -> AccuTrans 3d -> (.stl) -> stltostp -> (.stp) -> Alibre Design -> (.adprt)

Working In Alibre Design

Exporting: (.adprt) Alibre Design -> (.stl) -> AccuTrans 3d [deleting extra polys]-> (.obj) -> Unity "Rock Raiders Toolkit" -> (.lwo)

 

Kinda exhausting. At least I only had to do two and rename them for the other rock types. And eventually when I do a set in the style of the brick textures I'm working on I can skip the Importing phase entirely.

 

[LiquidGravity]

Well, just so you all don't think I'm just a tease - I released what I have done so far for RockSplit as a Cafeteria mod.

 

 

[phenix8fr]

I need try that