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Post by [RaD] on Oct 10, 2021 12:37:18 GMT -5
hello all!
I'm having an issue and wondered if perhaps anyone could help.
I'm converting an object that is supposed to look like smoke. Did all the steps of cloning and importing in blender. Imported the mesh into s4s and it looks wonderful in the preview panel.
So I load it into my game and place it on a lot and it looks like its covered in black. Not only that, but it seems to have split into two different packages, one black and one shiny.
Blend file |
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Post by Fwecka (Lolabellesims) on Oct 11, 2021 8:20:58 GMT -5
Can you post a screenshot? I'm having trouble visualizing what you're describing. As for "two packages" I'm having trouble understanding what you mean by that, too, but I did notice that your package file still has the original bump map and specular map. The shine, I think, can be attributed to the specular map that you haven't changed. Try replacing the specular and bump maps.
And I'm questioning the wisdom of using a plant. Plants have built in transparency but they have at least one unique feature and that is that the leaves are double-sided. Each leaf is made of a single flat plane but the mesh is tuned in such a way that the leaf texture is visible on both sides of the flat plane. If necessary, you can turn that off, of course. You can also try cloning something else and switching its shader to PhongAlpha. First, replace the bump and specular map since you'll have to do that regardless. See if that makes a difference.
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Post by [RaD] on Oct 11, 2021 15:40:50 GMT -5
Can you post a screenshot? I'm having trouble visualizing what you're describing. As for "two packages" I'm having trouble understanding what you mean by that, too, but I did notice that your package file still has the original bump map and specular map. The shine, I think, can be attributed to the specular map that you haven't changed. Try replacing the specular and bump maps. And I'm questioning the wisdom of using a plant. Plants have built in transparency but they have at least one unique feature and that is that the leaves are double-sided. Each leaf is made of a single flat plane but the mesh is tuned in such a way that the leaf texture is visible on both sides of the flat plane. If necessary, you can turn that off, of course. You can also try cloning something else and switching its shader to PhongAlpha. First, replace the bump and specular map since you'll have to do that regardless. See if that makes a difference.
So I replaced the spec and bumps with blanks (is that okay?) and loaded my game. The second, weird debug package disappeared but my object is still just a black blob.
I've been reading a lot of tutorials but I can't figure it out with my limited knowledge. I'm gonna read about specs and bumps so I can make sure to do that right in the future.
Thank you for the help!!
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Post by Fwecka (Lolabellesims) on Oct 11, 2021 19:13:50 GMT -5
Yeah, I'm going to have to look into this a little more. I can see some more things that might provide the answer, but I'd need to do some testing. Can you share the file that has the blank specular and bump map you imported?
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Post by [RaD] on Oct 11, 2021 20:57:40 GMT -5
Yeah, I'm going to have to look into this a little more. I can see some more things that might provide the answer, but I'd need to do some testing. Can you share the file that has the blank specular and bump map you imported? Thank you so much.
I was thinking about what you said about the plant and figured I'd try cloning something different and see what happens. I'll let you know.
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Post by Fwecka (Lolabellesims) on Oct 12, 2021 2:59:23 GMT -5
Here's what I did and I think it worked out well.  I cloned the Bust of Baron von Dithering floor statue. You don't have to use that; you just need something that sits on the floor, is a decor item, and has one mesh group. Your mesh is already made so I imported it for LOD 0 and LOD 1. The statue, however, requires shadow meshes which are used by the game to cast a shadow when your object is outdoors. I think an outdoor shadow would look odd so, rather than remove the shadow mesh resources from the package (because I don't know if doing so would break the package), I opened your mesh in Blender, deleted the floor plane, changed the cut number to 0, went into edit mode, and selected your entire mesh except for one face then deleted what I had selected. That left the one face. I scaled that down until it was pin-sized and lowered it below the grid so that it will be hidden in the ground. Then I save the blend and imported it to S4S. Then I changed to shader from Phong to Phong Alpha which is what the game uses for transparent items (except for plants; plants are tuned differently somehow). Below are some screenshots from a tutorial I wrote but they show how to get to the shader dropdown menu. Note that the shader has to be changed for LOD 0 and LOD 1 and that each variant needs to be changed, as well, or it won't work. "Model LOD" with the group number of 00000000 is LOD 0 and "Model" with the group number of 00000000 is LOD 1. "Model" has a couple of different screens to go through to get to the screen that holds the variant information.      If you want to, you can turn double-sided on so that the back of the smoke isn't invisible. Right above the shader dropdown click the edit items button. In the next screen, select DoubleSided and change the value from 0 to 1. That will turn DoubleSided on. Be sure to change both LODs and every variant.  I also opened your diffuse in Photoshop and using Brightness/Contrast darkened the alpha somewhat. Darker colors mean greater transparency. You don't have to do this if you don't want to. It just depends on what effect you're going for. |
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