Borg Textures

[pepperman]

What's the secret for doing Borg textures in A2. It was my understanding you don't have to do anything to the mesh and just merely borgify the ship texture and save it along these lines: texture_B.tga. I tried this and I am not getting anything close to what I'd expect to see. Here is a picy from the Storm 3D tool to illustrate what I am seeing.

 

[Adm_Z]

I think you are on the right track, but what you have done is make a bump map. I think the naming for borg textures is different, but I don't have a2 on this comp atm so I am not sure what exactly they are. I think they do have borg in the name as a prefix or suffix, and I'm pretty sure _B is a bumpmap.

Hope that helps!

 

[MrVulcan]

Interesting.. what you are seeing is the bump map, lol, but why?

The "_B" suffix is used for borg textures, so that is the correct methodology.

I tried a few configurations, and this error shows up occasionally. It shows up with the exporter script, as well as the original plugin exporter. Restarting Storm doesn't affect the purple-ness.

Did notice that you can apply borg textures to damage effects too So you could recolour the hull breaches to match borgification.

I thought that one must add "c_borg_textureName" as a child node to the mesh that you want to have a borg texture. But it seems that all you've done is add the "_B" suffix, and that produced the results you have.

Very curious, and I don't have a clue why this is happening. Might need some experimenting. Now why am I excited over this? lol

 

[Jetfreak]

Hey pepperman, the "_b" suffix is right man, Storm 3d is just being weird. Try to press F4 in the viewer, then you'll see the borg texture.

 

[MrVulcan]

This one doesn't seem to want to get assimilated.. Hull breaches don't mind the Borg texture. Here I am only using the "c_borg_texName" node. Results are identical if you use "_B" suffix in the texture name for the hull breach.




Works just fine for a variety of material settings. Left-to-right, both rows: (self-illumination + bump maps), (self-illumination), (bump maps), (transparent alpha). First row has the "c_borg_texName" node. If you use the "_B" suffix, all boxes will have the borg texture. Using the "c_borg" nodes, you can specify the Borg texture on a per-mesh basis.




"c_borg" nodes + texture file with the "_B" suffix. The two methods together cause purple boxes.




Unfortunately, this doesn't explain why the original model is still purple. Using either of the two methods has the same result. What's worse, the original plugin exporter does the same thing. Really weird.

Well, I'm off for tonight. Might think of something in the morning

 

[pepperman]

Well at least I know I have the concept right. I did press F4 and that is how I discovered the purple people monster. I even tried it in game to see if Storm was being wierd and it turned purple in game. I will keep experimenting. Never did Borg textures in a mod for A1 or A2 so its all new to me.

 

[pepperman]

So here are the three texture files that I have. The first is the main texture file, which contains an alpha channel for the lights. The second is the bump map. The last is the Borg texture which also contains an alpha channel.

 

[Majestic]

Well in MS3D you need to put a special Borg Joint/HP in the hardpoint setup, I can't remember what it is off hand as I never do Borg textures. It would probably be the same for Max.

 

[pepperman]

Yep, got the borg node.

After some trail and error I found that if I removed the bump map it works fine. A quick look at the stock A2 files suggests that only the borg have bump maps so it begs the question, can you have a bump map and a borg texture together. Hummmmm....

 

[Dominus_Noctis]

If you save the bump TGA as compressed (TLE), the texture will appear blue

 

[MrVulcan]

Yep, got the borg node.

After some trail and error I found that if I removed the bump map it works fine. A quick look at the stock A2 files suggests that only the borg have bump maps so it begs the question, can you have a bump map and a borg texture together. Hummmmm....

You can have both. Look at the first cube (upper left in the second picture I posted). This has bumps and borg texture. I made a bump map for the galor texture as there isn't one in the stock game.

What's driving me bonkers is that no matter what I do, the borg textures work fine with the test model (those cubes with galor texture on it), but refuses to work on the reman model.

I can give my test model the reman texture, with the appropriate bump and borg textures, and it works just fine. The funny thing is, after loading the test model, the reman model borg texture works too! But if I load the reman model first, both the reman and the test models start getting the purple borg texture.

Shall keep trying different things and see what happens I suppose.