3D meshes materials how to. | Forums

[cr1m3]

Coj2play asked how to modify his mesh materials.

So before to modify your mat file, you will have to make your object's textures.

1: the color map = clr in chrome engine (object's color texture).

2: the normal map texture = nrm in chrome engine. (the relief map of the object's surface. this texture will render the depht of the texture).

3: the specular map texture = shn in chrome engine.(the shine texture of the object surface details)

There's also ems textures = light textures in chromed
dfm texture = deform texture in chromed
blr texture = blur texture in chromed
also dye texture = not sure but maybe dirt texture but it can cause problems in objects colors.
And maybe other textures that you can add in your mesh material script.

There's a video on how to make meshe's normal map in maya:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hANTXvM4V0M
But don't save the normal texture as tga file but as dds file.

Also crazybump: http://www.andrewklein.net/bh/crazybumpdemo.html
There's a tutorial on how to do specular maps: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Gqp4bNJ52M
Personally, to make the specular map, i take the normal texture in a paint program then; i desaturate the colors, i invert the colors, then i adjust the contrast and brightness.

You can also add a green channel to the shn texture to soften the texture rendering in chromed.
There's a Seir tutorial on how to make and add green channel:

THIS IS COMPLETE TUTORIAL HOW TO ADD 
LOADING SCREENS AND PREVEW SCREENS ON COJMODDING.COM 
 Programs suggested: - Image Editor - "Paint.Net" (freeware) 
or other with .tga support - DDS Converter - "DDS Converter 2" (freeware) or plugins for other image editors 

 Making of screenshots of the map - In Game 
Just run your map in game, center screen  on place 
you want to take screenshot and press "PrintScreen" ("PrtScr"  key on you keyboard).
 All your screenshots will be saved as .tga file in  "My Documents/Call of Juarez Bound in Blood/Out/Screenshots".
 You can  open .tga with image editor (like Paint.Net). Open it, crop it if you  like and save it as .jpg. 
Max width is about 1000 px.  

Making of screenshots of the map - In Editor
 Also you can use "Panoramic preview" ("G"  key) so editor will remove all the interface.
 Before that you need to  remove all the "helpers" (waypoints, spawnpoints, markers)
 by "Edit >  Show/Hide Objects > Show/Hide Helpers".  Hide helpers, turn on panoramic preview and press "PrtScr".
 Now your screen is in the clipboard. 

    
Open  your image editor go to "Edit > Paste" ("CTRL + V") and you should  see your image. 
Now crop this image to remove desktop part of the  screenshot. Leave only map view.
 Save it to jpg file (max width is about  1000 px).  

Now you have your screenshots for previews on COJModding.com ready!

  How to make loading screens: Take  your three .jpg files and open them with image editor. 
Now you need to  crop all that images to 1024px (width) x 512px (height). 
After croping  add new layer, fill it with green color (RGB: 0, 255, 0), go to layer  properties
and from "Blending" choose "Mode: Multiply". Now your image  is green! Save it as .jpg.


 
   


 Now run DDS Converter and convert your .jpg files as .dds (DCT5).
 Now go to your map directory and:  For single player missions: Paste your .dds files in 
map direcory as: _screen.dds _screen2.dds _screen3.dds  
Open "_StartProp.scr" with Notepad and find "DescriptionPicture".
 Delete whole line and in this place paste:  
Quote: DescriptionPicture("_Screen.dds") DescriptionPicture2("_Screen2.dds") 
DescriptionPicture3("_Screen3.dds") 
  For multiplayer missions: Open  .trk file and find LoadingArtworks. 
Replace standard  .dds files with your .dds' for every game mode available in .trk.   That's all :)   
                                     _________________ COJModding.com

Now for the mat file, there's an example of a mat file:

import "Templates.mtt"
sub material()
{
 use mtt_objects(
  s_clr = "Pipe_tex_b.dds",
  s_shn = "Pipe_tex_b_shn.dds",
  f_shn_factor = 1.0,
  s_nrm = "Pipe_tex_b_nrm.dds",
  f_nrm_scale = 1.0,
  e_srf_id = SRF_METAL   // surface type
 );
}

But you need the textures in your map or model folder, cause the mat file is only linking the mesh with the textures.
And you can set some values to change your texture aspects ingame.

If you want to find more complex mat files, just browse the data.paks from your game folder,
you can also extract them with 7zip to another directory to browse the folders without using an archive extractor.

There's the textures related to the mat file showed in code above:
Shine Normal Color

There's another program than paint.net described in the seir's tutorial above.
It is for editing or creating your dds textures, it's called Gimp 2.8 and it's also free.
(there's more programs that are compatible with dds image format like photoshop, paint shop pro...)

Gimp 2.8:
http://www.gimp.org/downloads/

And there's the dds plugin working with gimp 2.8, install notes are inside the archive:
http://code.google.com/p/gimp-dds/downloads/list

Also you can make normal maps with gimp by a single click, just need to install the plugin:
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/...on_in_The_GIMP
http://code.google.com/p/gimp-normalmap/downloads/list



One more thing,
your mat file's name is written by maya (or any 3d program used) in your msh file's code when you export the mesh to chromed.

So you can't change your .mat script file's name after the msh been exported, otherwise,
the textures wont be mapped to the object in chromed.
If so, the default grey dummy texture will be used instead of your textures because the mat file's name is not matching with the hard coded .mat name in the msh file.
(you can open the msh file with a text editor then you'll see there's a text string with the object's material name, in the first line of the code).

When you export custom objects from your 3D program to chrome editor,
If the chromed msh exporter is not creating any mat file, there's something wrong with your objects material or texture.
Some times it is due to missing textures inside the object folder, before the exporting process.(common error in blender)


And there's other explanations on material scripts:
http://forums.ubi.com/showthread.php...es-not-showing