Q:Textures on a lightsaber hilt

[LSaberDuelist]

Hi,

 

well every padawan has to construct his own lightsaber and so I tried to model a Count Dooku-style lightsaber, but I still have some problems with the textures on this model. I will post some pics to illustrate my problems:

this is what the hilt looks like in gmax: http://img159.imageshack.us/img159/8655/screen037mm.jpg

here it is in Kotor1:

http://img117.imageshack.us/img117/6900/screen016tp.jpg

and here it is in Kotor2:

http://img159.imageshack.us/img159/6871/screen024ve.jpg

 

As you see, in Kotor1 it is quite ok, the details are visible, however in Kotor2 it is just a shiny piece of silver. So I am trying to figure out how to correct this and why this is happening.

 

BTW I would like to thank the makers of the tutorials 'A-Z of lightsaber modelling' and 'UVW mapping, detaching and UVW unwrapping'. These are great tutorials, very detailed, easy to understand and they surely helped me a lot.

[Jeff]

The only thing I can think of is making sure you didn't misspell anything. It doesn't make sense that it works in kotor 1 and not in 2 though...

[Achilles]

Also, don't forget that there is a Dooku saber for TSL included in the USM. I don't want to discourage you from trying to do your own stuff (really nice saber btw) but I thought I would point that out in case you didn't know.

[T7nowhere]

Are you using a custom shader for the hilt?

Is the texture a perfect square?(ie. 128x128, 256x256,512x512)

Did you set the material properties(in gmax or 3ds max) to metal with a white diffuse?

[LSaberDuelist]

Are you using a custom shader for the hilt?

Is the texture a perfect square?(ie. 128x128, 256x256,512x512)

Did you set the material properties(in gmax or 3ds max) to metal with a white diffuse?

 

1. I don't think so, because I don't know how to do that...

 

2. Yes, it is 512x512

 

3.Hmm, thats sounds like a good explanation, I think I have default settings, but I still do not really know how to use the material editor properly. Here is a screenshot of the material editor and navigator:

http://img215.imageshack.us/img215/2034/screen043lp.jpg

[LSaberDuelist]

Ok, now the texture is visible. I changed the shader from Blinn shader model to Metal and set the colors for ambient and diffuse to white. But it is still very shiny and the black is not really black, but black with really shiny white highlights. So far thanks for the help! I will now play around with the material editor and try to improve things a bit.

[T7nowhere]

For TSL you will probably have to lighten the Alpha channel on the texture, TSL has a way of making shaders much brighter. You can also play with the diffuse setting if the model is too bright ,try making the diffuse a little darker.

 

If your making models for both games your going to find that the same model will appear different between games, so a little tweaking will be nessesary.