EVE Search - Need some help: Triexporter/Maya2012/etc

CPPC Drone wrote:

Xenuria wrote:

The last time I used maya professionally was when it was called maya 6.
I was 15 and at a community college putting **** on everything with the sculpt tool. When I wasen't doing that I was making some seriously cool stuff.

Honestly my memory is foggy and maya has obviously changed somewhat since then. I said before that I would be more than happy to pay somebody to make an accurate up to date guide for me and anybody else that wants it.

Edit: also I HAVE looked at guides...
ALL of them are outdated or inaccurate.

Its 3am and I'm notoriously **** with english at this time, but I'll quickly tell you what to do for PGS textured objects (this will not be the same for NGS textures)

0) Download an old version of the client that uses .red files to control what a ship looks like in game (these can be opened in a text editor) so that you know what base colours to use on your textures and texture masks. .Black files have replaced .red files but I have no idea how you read these.

1) Remember to always flip textures horizontally before you extract any channels or save a completed texture; when saving do so as a 24bit targa using the highest quality mipmap available from the .dds file.

2) Diffuse texture - ????_d.dds

3) Normal map - ????_n.dds, move the Green Channel to the red, Move the Alpha channel to the Green, delete the alpha channel before you save as a targa file.

4) Specular map - ????_pgs.dds, green channel

5) Self Ilumination Texture/ Light Map - ????_pgs.dds, alpha channel
5b) Make sure to check the lightmap to see if it has any tertiarty masks in it, you can tell because there will be solid white shaped that do not look like either lights or engine parts. You can either extract these yourself from the light maps and make into their own masks which are needed for certain ships that require actual geometry maskins (like the rifter sticky out bits, or the apocolypse) or you can set these up in your shader if you know how and the objects UVs are still intact.

6) Mask - ????_pgs.dds, Red channel, invert the texture before saving as a targa file

7) Submask - ????_pgs.dds, Blue Channel

8) Use composite maps instead of straight texture files, with atleast 3 layers in your composite map to account for the different effects. For example your diffuse texture setup is made up of 3 different hierarchical texture layers each with their own masks as shown below:

Example Diffuse Setup:
Layer 3: Texture: diffuse.tga with colour ramping to match .red file values under "submask" + Mask: submask.tga
Layer 2: Texture: diffuse.tga with colour ramping to match .red file values under "mask" + Mask: mask.tga
Later 1: Texture: diffuse.tga with colour ramping and no mask

9) When reading the .red files from old client files (.black files that are used now are currently unreadable) multiply the values found by 100, and apply colours to each of the texture layer in each of your composite maps. Depending on how you setup your shader or what program you use, you may or may not be able to use all the variables found in a .red file.

10) Save the whole scene and material setup without making any changes to any variables.

11) Play with the shaders and your setup manually to get desired results. DX shaders tend to look the most similar to ingame and have the added benefit of actually using your video card and will rasterise in real time (if you gpu is any good). However you will most likely be restricted to 3 lights.

Thats all you need to know to get started, but I'd suggest making a script to do all the above for you like I have, it saves a shitload of time.

:)