We got them in 2006, heh... Though it was described in NifScope and, i suppose, SceneImmerse manuals even earlier.

Oh wow i want to know what you two are doing right now /799.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':biglaugh:' />. Specular lighting maybe?

I'm a bit of a trog when it comes to this technical stuff, but I can whip up some fairly decent textures if I do say so myself. If you ever need a texture I am available (I too just mod things for myself, never release because I'm too busy being a student to polish anything up alone).

Well I think the quote says pretty much everything. It's all spelled out for you, really, if you think about it.

"Let there be . light"

Are you adding billboarded glows to light sources, that is one thing I wanna see regarding bloom shaders won't work correctly without them. Or that projection stuff, you are going to create colored glass lighting on areas. It could be very atmospheric even you can create some shadows.

You are right about a lot of what you say. But I am right about the details of why it can only be done through the environmental /reflect map. and applied with that. This maybe nothing more then a language difference.

I thought the Monty PYthon link would help but you didn't catch the joke. So it's just a difference of languages.

I see. I have serious problems with understanding jokes in any language. He-he.


"Let there be . light"

The difficulty is that a lot of great bump tutorials get lost in the depth of the Forum. It would be great that some skilled people could summarize that stuff and post on a public download site like PES.


That's really interesting! While googling I came across several very old messages that long time ago it was possible to buy and later to download for free NetImmerse docs and other materials like Max plugins. I have failed to find this stuff: all official NDL links were dead. Perhaps, some MW modders who were in business from the very beginning might still have these interesting materials. The variant of SceneImmerse (nif viewer)/MaxImmers (Max exporter + help file) I have (from Thanos' Tower) contains only help files for MaxImmerse. Does anybody have more completed documentation?

Available information for latest Gamebryo versions is not always applicable for MW.

/smile.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />

I agree . That why I like to keep things simple. Please join GHF when it's open again. I think you belong with some of the more knowledgeable scripters and texture people.

Thank you.

But I am really bad in scripting and texturing. My modding interests and technical skills (not artistic) are related to PC/NPC animations.

/smile.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />

Still GHF has some great animators there also. A lot of projects are run from there and put here when they are going strong. It's a one stop talent area. Plus everyone is nice to each other and everyone just likes having fun.

Well, form what I hear, environment maps wont work on physiqued chest pieces... My goal just went out the window more or less. I think I'm going to play AVP now.

Your right. I think the best you can do with the MW engine and it's hard-coding is try it with a glowmap and a bump/normal map on briast plates. You can try a bump on that. This doesn't mean you need to give up. You can still do weapons, shields, glass type items and many more with an envmap and a bump/normal. Just keep in mind the pixel shader works on the water so you can get some great effects if your up to being creative. Yes, it's a learning curve. But when you get it down the sky is the limit.

Bump maps are working with skinned/physiqued armor/clothes, but for that these models should be enchanted: MW enchantment conflicts with environment maps in these objects (but not with not-skinned e.g. weapons). Probably, original/endogenous enchantment effect can be attenuated with gloss maps, see:

http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=1009286&hl=

Note, that textures should be in tga format.

/smile.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />

I never thought of that. Textures need to be tga?


I never read Hrnchamd bump and gloss map explained. Thanks for the link my Russian friend.

PRussian friend: I am Canadian German, I learned Russian at school long time ago and still able to read (with on-line translator, he-he), my wherever friend.

/smile.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />

I'm a bird so it would be feathered friend. /1244.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':dancing:' />

Let there be "full stop" light?

Let there be "period" light?

Let there be "point" light?

Let there be "dot" light?

Let there be "menstruation" light?

Let there be "decimal" light?

OK I think I've exhausted the joke now.

Why does everyone say that putting reflections on chest pieces doesn't work? Vanilla wise, that is correct, however, a Russian friend named Hedgehog has done just that. I played around with the textures and model just for a bit. I haven't quite figured out the keys work, but it works, though it has it's limitations (naturally). It's not for me to disclose how he did it, that is something you will have to check out yourself. /biggrin.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':D' />

That's because his chest meshes are not skinned/physiqued/rigged (at least last time I checked them out they weren't). You can have reflections on chest pieces just like on other body parts, as long as they are static... which is why if you check Hedgehog's gauntlets the hand parts dont have any ref map, and why his chest meshes are bulky (but that may also be how he prefers them to look like): if the mesh is bulky, clipping problems will be less obvious. If you don't physique/rig a less bulky cuirass mesh, for instance Nioliv's shirt meshes, you'll probably run into clipping problems. And in the case of Nioliv's shirt meshes, you will have to cut the sleeves into several meshes, like vanilla shirts, and they'll look bad.

It's the subject of the first poster to redo Vanilla Morrowinds armor. That's the only reason we are talking about it.

.....................Dragon Lance, the name sound like I should know it. Have we met?

I have never seen Hedgehog's nif with bumps and skin/physique. Do you have exact nif examples? All what I have seen so far were bumps without skin/physique.
Bjam, Symon69, and I spent a lot of time trying to find the way to use reflections (bump) with skinned armor, but, unfortunately, we failed.

I am fine with all my friends of any kind, he-he, please, don't worry. I am sure that Skydye thinks in the same way. We are peaceful people, but we need sometimes to relax in a wild way.

Mandamus, I was typing too slow.

/smile.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />

No problem. I'm just sad Hedgehog's meshes didn't turn out to be physiqued, I was really hoping he had found a way around the issue /sad.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':(' />. I have never created any gloss map for morrowind (if I understand well the ability to use them is a recent breakthrough), but even if we use gloss maps along with enchantments on cuirasses, doesn't that mean that we don't get to choose what ref map is used for the mesh? What I mean is, the enchantment effect seems to apply the same reflection to all meshes, and I'm not sure there's a way to make a custom enchantment effect for one mesh? If I understand it well, gloss maps make it possible to alter the level of shininess, which is great, but it won't radically change the plastic effect of enchanted cuirasses, or am I missing something?

Edit: in short, I was wondering if it was at all possible to achieve a good metal effect on enchanted cuirasses /happy.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt='^_^' />

Mind you, I didn't say they were physiqued. Simply stated, that it is a part of the chest, which should be a suitable interest considering the hard code.

Skydye... I keep hearing that name for some reason. hmmm..

EDIT: Plangkye has a mod that alters the texture on the enchantments to allow for the reflections to show through, beyond that, I do not know..

Thank you Dragon_Lance, I'm reading its description on http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=20128&id=6984 and it sounds promising /foodndrink.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':foodndrink:' /> Could anyone tell me how well it works with skinned chest meshes with ref maps? I can't check it out myself unfortunately (no morrowind here :/)

In any case, thanks for telling me about this mod, I hadn't heard about it (or I forgot haha) /happy.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt='^_^' />

I remember the code patch discussions, but I thought more stuff will come from it. And it was only silence.

Somewhat related:
DX8.1.... My rant about shaders begin:

Lighting is in a shader. It can be using using per-vertex lighting(if it is, still the game looks unbelievably beautiful.). Somewhere around there there is a shader:

max	r6.xy,		r6.xy, CV_ZERO			; max(N.L, 0.0f)mul	r7,		r6.xy, r5.xy			; factor = max(N.L, 0.0f) * attenuationmul	r8.xyz,		c[CV_LIGHT0_COLOR].xyz, r7.x	; vertex_color = light_color0 * factor0mad	oD0.xyz,	c[CV_LIGHT1_COLOR].xyz, r7.y, r8.xyz	; vertex_color = light_color1 * factor1

-random example 1
Actually there is definitely a vertex one and a pixel one. And by looking how the engine looks today (I kinda like it.), I am sure it is in better position than we think.

It is possible there are some textures going into these shaders. Maybe only 2 or 6(diffuse, detail, gloss, bump etc.). If only 2 textures are going in, I don't know how much we can abuse/hack it. 1 texture can have 4 channels which can increase possibilities. Diffuse + 4channels(normals.x, normals.y, height, glow), the game isn't using more anyway.

The real deal is, by the increase in clock speeds, we can do some brute force there: by doing our calculations and letting GPU cycles do the rest. We can extend the shader to make per-pixel lighting instead of per-vertex lighting by changing-moving some calculations between/in pixel and vertex shaders.

dp3_sat r0, v0_bx2, t0_bx2mov_sat r0.a , v0_bx2.bdp3_sat r1, v1_bx2, t0_bx2add_sat r0.rgb, r0, r1 // diffuse+specularmul r0.rgb, r0, r0.a // apply self-shadowing

-random example 2

Maybe one of the texture registers can be hacked to be used as something else like bump maps. one of the clean ones, detail maps for example or one of the least used one: dark maps??. And its code can be altered as a bump map calculation.

I don't know what I am talking about, but I want to believe someone can locate those shader codes somewhere deep in the engine and change them to better, environment to dot3 bump mapping or some way to have both, maybe Hrnchamd if returns and willing to do this...

A DX8 demo with simple shaders doing per-pixel lighting, self shadowing, bump maps and many more:
http://realtimecg.gamedev-pt.net/downloads/illuminatu.rar
(Very blinding demo reel from the guy behind Crysis!, shadows are problematic but overall good. I find it somewhat funny that he is inspired by Doom and Halo. And his tutorials are hardcoe:
http://realtimecg.gamedev-pt.net/index.htm)

PS. BTW, I will have some stuff regarding shadows. I think I am about to close a gap between Oblivion and Morrowind graphics wise! And I may able to give ONE Oblivion looking character shadow to the PC. But it is still experimental stuff. Just wanna show how not complicated things are. /tongue.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':P' />