Skinners Collaboration area!

ScottyGEE · Post by **ScottyGEE** » Wed Aug 22, 2007 12:41 am

Welcome to the skinners collaboration area! I am glad you decided to show even the slightest bit of curiosity in the skin section and I hope you will stay.

The purpose of this thread is to allow any fellow skinner to discuss well, anything to do with skinning. Either it be about some new texture site you've found or to ask for help in something like bumpmapping.

One thing that is also good about this section is that it eliminates the need for going to the "Halo 2 modding discussion" section. Instead of having your skinning questions lost in a sea of other people's questions, you can come here instead and know that someone will get back to you at some point (hopefully, I cannot guarantee

.

I am ScottyGEE, I am rather passionate when it comes to a good skin. People try to create a mod without even bothering to think about how a skin could make it better. A skin not only changes the look of a level but in some ways, it changes how you think of it, it feels different when you play it. Seeing lockout become a lush jungle environment really makes things more appealing than the blue colour we've played for almost three years.

So welcome! Sit down, have a cup of tea, or whatever fine beverage you wish to enjoy, and discuss skinning in any way shape or form, and most of all, enjoy yourself!

ScottyGEE · Post by **ScottyGEE** » Wed Aug 22, 2007 12:48 am

I will start off...
No, I'm not asking a question, but instead, I'm going to post a skinning site I've held onto dearly for some time.

It comes with a warning however...If you wish to use these textures, you will have to have an understanding about skinning, tileability and making textures seamless...Otherwise the skin will end up looking horrendous and we don't want that.

Texture site for the experienced user

Here is also a link to having Hi res textures (1024x1024) in halo 2. They bring considerable extra detail for thins if you use it correctly. Hopefully Detox will pull his thumb out and finish his app...which would be great of him to do.

This texture site I noticed from CrowPath's Church map. It contains a fair amount of textures.
Go here

g----13 · Post by **g----13** » Wed Aug 22, 2007 1:46 am

heres a site with almost all of it texture seamless, they are 512x512 some of them have bumpmaps made for them. currently 3468 textures: http://www.filterforge.com/

Heres another site with seamless textures and texture packs:

http://www.spiralgraphics.biz/index.htm

CptnNsan0 · Post by **CptnNsan0** » Wed Aug 22, 2007 6:14 pm

ah I love filter forge. great site for textures. If only I could still skin...my net framework got corrupted and it won't let me fix it...

EvenCoolermatt · Post by **EvenCoolermatt** » Thu Aug 23, 2007 11:59 am

I'm not sure if this is a skinning questions, but after I finished skinning Midship, everything still has that shinny, bright effect to it (like the ghost). Is there any way to get rid of this?

JacksonCougAr · Post by **JacksonCougAr** » Thu Aug 23, 2007 12:29 pm

Multiple... ummm... but whats the esiest?

Change the specularity value in all shaders to 0 maybe o.0 IDK cause I never bother to finish my skins...

jzimmer09 · Post by **jzimmer09** » Thu Aug 23, 2007 1:31 pm

its the shader. just swap the shader, orrrr it might be the bump map also. im not quite sure :/

ScottyGEE · Post by **ScottyGEE** » Thu Aug 23, 2007 5:05 pm

You'll need to null out the reflection maps in the shader. The specularity may help a bit but I'm pretty sure most covie walls have reflection maps.

EvenCoolermatt · Post by **EvenCoolermatt** » Thu Aug 23, 2007 5:36 pm

Ah, alright. Thanks for all the help guys

-DeToX- · Post by **-DeToX-** » Fri Aug 24, 2007 8:34 pm

YOU! I command you to tell me when the next skinning competition is. ;o

ScottyGEE · Post by **ScottyGEE** » Fri Aug 24, 2007 11:22 pm

-DeToX- wrote:YOU! I command you to tell me when the next skinning competition is. ;o

It will most likley be in sync with the Halo 2 modding competition with the same theme too...That's how the plan in my head is going...

should be start of september coz I gotta write up the rules for the modding comp.

Btw, would you have the hires-ifier done by THIS comp?

<3

Xiion · Post by **Xiion** » Fri Aug 24, 2007 11:27 pm

I'll be (hopefully) doing a skinning collaboration with anyone interested in working with me. you give me the dds's, i'll edit them accordingly and make sure they are taken care of in the best view of detail, and send them back for in game preparation.

-DeToX- · Post by **-DeToX-** » Sat Aug 25, 2007 8:03 am

Well Scotty the method I used to create those HiRes was thanks to a bug in entity...

Seeing as increasing dimensions would also increase raw...

Code: Select all

Map Layout.

Index(Order)	Element Name		Type
------------	------------		------
0		Map Header		Table
1		Sound			Raw
2		Model1 & 2		Raw
------------------------------------------------
3		BSP			Raw1   |
4		BSP			Raw2   |
5		Lightmap		Raw    |-If More than one BSP, this repeats.
6		BSP			Raw4   |
7		BSP			Raw3   |
------------------------------------------------
8		Decorator		Raw
9		Weather			Raw
10		Particle Model		Raw
11		Collision		Raw
12		Animation		Raw
------------------------------------------------
13		BSP			Meta   |-If More than one BSP, this repeats.
14		Lightmap		Meta   |
------------------------------------------------
15		StringID128		Table
16		StringIDIndex		Table
17		StringIDTable		Table
18		FileTable		Table
19		FileIndex		Table
20		UnicodeIndex & Table	Tables
21		Ugh!(Crazy)		Raw
22		Bitmap			Raw
23		IndexHeader		Table
24		Metas			Meta
25		Padding			Padding

You see Bitmap Raw as the 4th last Item.
We would need to shift some bitmap raw thats after it, shift every single meta(BSP and LTMP is seperate obviously, but still need to be shifted in the IndexHeader because it points to the scnr), Shift every single reflexive in every meta.

And then repad it.

Doing something like that, the only logical fast way to shift that many Metas that fast is to use hardcoded plugins or plugins.

Meaning I need a .ENT system.

So I would rather leave it to my app I'm making. Just finished chunkcloning on it. Proper too...

What I did basically was go to the Dimension values offset in hex. Edit it, then save. I would open the map in entity, click any bitmap just so the "Inject Bitmap" toolstripItem would appear, then I would click the bitmap I editted. It would error of course, But I would ignore the error and Inject.

Seeing as raw size is increased, this would corrupt the map. So before I close the map and all the values are still in memory, I extracted the bitmaps from the map.

Then Injected in mine. Duplicated a couple of times, then renamed with Insolence, and Used a tool I made to fix Insolence's renamed strings.

Moral of the story, wait until my map editor comes out. :X

Sorry lolz.

Unless of course anyone else wants to do it for Entity, which I have no interest in(Not Entity, but Adding it into Entity).

Oh and thanks for the info on the skinning competition.

kibito87 · Post by **kibito87** » Sat Aug 25, 2007 9:30 am

Was all that really needed...?

little_shadow · Post by **little_shadow** » Sat Aug 25, 2007 8:15 pm

Im sure there is a reason for all of it, unless he is just showing off his leetness again

foxfanatic23I7 · Post by **foxfanatic23I7** » Sun Aug 26, 2007 3:15 pm

It's 39 megabytes, that's why I didn't want to upload all of them to photobucket

.
New link: Here.
Right click, save as.

Edit: Updated old post too.

CptnNsan0 · Post by **CptnNsan0** » Sun Aug 26, 2007 3:47 pm

it said the link was not available. why not just upload all of them to photobucket and share them without us having to download them all.

Prey · Post by **Prey** » Sun Aug 26, 2007 4:15 pm

Detox you are making it more complicated than it really is. Once you've replaced the old bitmap raw with your new bigger bitmap raw, the only thing that will need to be fixed then is the bitmTag that points to the raw you just edited, the bitmTags that point to the raw underneath the one you just replaced, plus a couple of things in the header and indexHeader. The reflexives and meta offsets will be taken care of by the secondary magic, durr..

Also you won't necessarily have to re-pad, just as long as the extra raw (newlen - oldlen) doesn't go over the original padding. Eh.. one last thing, you don't need an .ent system to shift reflexives. Manually worked fine for when I made a tag appender, as it was pretty quick. Granted it could be made a lot quicker, but an .ent system would not be the way to do it.

Yes, but if it does, you need to repad. And what are you saying, change the secondaryMagic? Because the secondaryMagic is supposed to equal to BSP Magic + BSP size + something else or something..

And No I was not trying to Show off, and Kibito yes it was necessary. I was showing him that its a bit more complicated and he'll have to wait a bit more...

Also scanning can be quick, but beleive me hardcoded plugins in my opinion are much quicker...

~DeToX.

foxfanatic23I7 · Post by **foxfanatic23I7** » Sun Aug 26, 2007 6:09 pm

CptnNsan0 wrote:it said the link was not available. why not just upload all of them to photobucket and share them without us having to download them all.

It's 39 megabytes, that's why I didn't want to upload all of them to photobucket

.
New link: Here.
Right click, save as.

Edit: Updated old post too.

kibito87 · Post by **kibito87** » Sun Aug 26, 2007 8:17 pm

foxfanatic23I7 wrote:It's 39 megabytes, that's why I didn't want to upload all of them to photobucket .
New link: Here.
Right click, save as.

Edit: Updated old post too.

I quoted you and fixed the link. Your original post doesn't need the "url" at the end of the Textures.rar.