Looking for help to edit textures for PBR shaders
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List of people that are interested in helping when the time comes:
- Madmax
- ruskul
- Microships
Note that by signing up you're not obligated to do anything. We're a voluntary association - you can pick it up as you see fit at the time.
Initial list of units that will require attention (as per 31/10/2022)
Something is wrong, but we're not sure what yet
anti-air gunship
Aeon T3 Artillery
TempestNormals of
Atlantis
T2 Aeon Transport
Mongoose
UEF Land HQMissing or broken blue channel of many UEF units, including
T2 PGen
Pillar
MongooseMissing red channel of many Cybran units, including
Mantis
Hoplite
Hydrocarbon
Shield generators
Mass extractor
mobile stealth gen
T3 PGen
Scathis
T1 bomber
T1 air scout
Torp bomber
Wall (also missing green channel)Broken red channel on various Cybran units, including
Nuke launcher
transports
land factories
stealth boat -
To expand on Jip's post, here is an example of a unit with texture problems:
In this particular case the mex is missing the red channel of the specTeam texture, which we mainly use to determine the metalness of a unit. You can see that the gray areas of the mex look rather dull and not like metal at all, while these triangles of the Wailer look much better, because the Wailer has correct textures.Your job here would be to create the red channel. For this it's probably easiest to convert the albedo texture to grayscale and then maybe tune the contrast and brightness a bit.
Many Cybran units have this problem of a missing red channel, so once you figured out a workflow that works for you, you can probably fix a lot of units in little time. -
go on then ill sign up can we get a post about the methodology for testing changes
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@madmax said in Request for help to edit textures for PBR shaders:
go on then ill sign up can we get a post about the methodology for testing changes
Yes - we're working on it!
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I'd love to help.
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I'd love to help as well, about time I make some contributions! I have some experience B.S. CS w/ Physics
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Wow! A chance to help out.
I am in. I am an environment artist and I have a good bit of experience with shader work in various engines.Unfortunately we are in a bit of a crunch at work though so my time right now might be limited.
Do we have a rough Idea about when we want this taken care of?
Missed the last paragraph. I will get a clone and start getting familiar with the repo. Hopefully I will be able to contribute.Just for a general approach though I would suggest we look into a systemic and iteration friendly approach through substance designer(Or painter, depending on how much of a re-work we want to do) doing one unit at a time will end up with inconsistent results.
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Huge thanks to everyone that has shown up already! We will still need some time to post more instructions as Jip is busy with the game patch release at the moment and I am busy with dealing with my failed hard drive. So expect it to be some days until the next update.
I have never used substance designer, so I can't comment on the specifics. A unified workflow will surely help with units that have entirely missing texture channels. For the rest, the challenge is that their current textures are inconsistent already, so they have to be brought more in line with each other. This means that you will have to do some of them one at a time anyway.You won't have to spend much time getting familiar with the repo. You just have to set up the environment so you can easily and rapidly test the texture changes in game, but you don't have to change any code for this. It's just a matter of copying the texture into the right folder.
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So how can i help?
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I'm too limit by time, but would like to help too.
B. Sc. EE -
Hey all, I can help with this, I know my way around Photoshop. Let me know how I can assist.
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Hello, Gyle sent me! I have 10+ years of game development experience as an artist and have worked extensively with PBR shaders.
Also, yay Metal! The new shaders are looking great
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Hi!
I would love to help out. I have a lot of experience with Photoshop, but I have zero knowledge about development of games. -
We'll make it work
, our appreciation to everyone that have shown up already! We'll be working on making a list of items this weekend. That will contain what needs to be done, a general approach on how it can be done and a way to test it locally to confirm your changes. -
Need to look how they work atm, but i think i can try and build converter in substance designer, so anyone can use via substance player, which is free. And with that i can expose controls whatever would be needed, e.g. how shiny it should be etc.
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We've been working on a list and a description of the changes. We're not finished with it yet, and we'll not meet today's deadline.
For those that would like to give it a preview, you can find it here:
For those that would like to start preparing, you can start with steps (2) and (4) of the Prerequisites. Note that for step 4 there is also a video, which is likely more friendly to use for those with no to little experience with Github.
@sodisodisodi / @thorolavs / @slowBro / @CatchThat / @GD / @Bolmagasa / @fredriklars / @Microships / @ruskul / @MadMax
We'll ping you again when it is ready for you to start picking up bits and pieces, this is just an update about us not making the initial deadline.
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@jip On the github there is a comparison between the Summit's old and new normal maps. I think, to help with consistency, there should be a public detailed pipeline walkthrough (preferably on these forums) on how to create every single texture map based on the albedo for each faction. That way, even people who aren't volunteering can help out on the side if they wanted.
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Those walkthroughs is why we didn't make the deadline
, we're on it! -
@Jip ok, here is quick and dirty way to do this, but it should be also normalised somehow to something, needs testing. But I just drop it here so people might pick up from it. The whole thing could be automized, I think. https://imgur.com/esZHcAA
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A minor update on the progress on creating the workflow pipeline that allows everyone to contribute to supporting PBR shaders.
We've been looking into doing a few units and noticed that there are various issues, not just related to textures but sometimes also related to the mesh itself. After tweaking away yesterday evening together with @Degulum and @thekodecs we managed to produce the following image. On the left is the old factory (tech 2 support) with all sorts of issues and on the right is the new factory (tech 3 support) with the majority of the issues fixed:
Now that is looking crisp!
The reason the factory on the left is so messed up is because the game 'smooths' properties between welded vertices, and a lot of vertices in the UEF land factories are welded together. This should only be the case if the surface is recently similar, e.g. a flat surface can have welded vertices but on a 90 degree edge the vertices should be split.
This is a trivial operation to do in Blender, but it also means that some units cannot be fixed with just adjusting the textures. And that pushes the skill requirements to help contribute for quite a few units.
On the other end, we also managed to simplify things. There is now an easy-to-use branch (we'll talk more about those later) that allow you to find all the necessary files and immediately preview changes in-game. It also allows you to inspect various properties by changing a few characters in the shader.
With thanks to @thekodecs we have a first example video on how to approach this. We've learned from this video, and this weekend we'll be making more videos to assist you through the process. The videos on their own should help you each step of the way, but as a lot of you are not programmers by nature we'll also be introducing help sessions. During these sessions we can help you through any issue you have on the process with the exception of doing the actual work - as I am a programmer and not a texture artist. I can't help you with the work itself, only with the workflow surrounding the work.
I hope the majority of you are still as eager as us to get started with this project - the results are promising - it is just a matter of time at this point!
@sodisodisodi I'll respond in more detail later this weekend on your message!
