Post by amoebae on Aug 30, 2016 19:20:38 GMT -5
The first part:
I posted a thread a while ago detailing my problem when using the cabinet shader for some shelving (the underside went entirely black when indoors). I never did solve it, but moved on since it was a minor issue.
I'm hitting the same thing again but this time it's rendering the whole project unusable.
Sorry if this gets long-winded, but I'll try to be as thorough as possible.
I'm recolouring plasticbox's Modular Tiles: modthesims.info/download.php?t=554093
All was fine, they worked as expected in game (with my new texture, recolours, plus a new normal and spec).
I decided to get rid of the shadow at the top of the mesh. I successfully used blender to edit the shadow. However, when I import it back into the game the tiles now show up black indoors (but fine outside).
I did some troubleshooting, and created a brand new package cloned from pbox's, exported their mesh and imported it right back in again with no edits, and the same happened - black indoors, fine outside. I had changed nothing else.
I cloned a painting instead, thinking it was something about the way pbox's package was put together. I imported my mesh, and viola, it was fine. However, I remembered I hadn't changed the shader from phong to cabinet. As soon as I did that, boom! Back to black.
So what I thought was a mesh problem is a shader problem. But, by rights it should happen to pbox's original as well, but it doesn't.
Now, pbox uses tsrw, so it's possible that something was done when creating the package to circumvent the black bug I get when using the cabinet shader with this mesh. I don't know what that is, though, and I don't know how to find out (I'm quite new to all of this, but learning fast!).
It seems to me that when pbox created their package, some shader value or another was linked to the mesh at the time of creation, and replacing the mesh with any other (even the same one re-imported) breaks that connection or changes that value. Simply cloning the package and leaving the mesh as-is keeps whatever relationship is going on there intact.
I found this vaguely-related thread on MTS discussing pbox's shader edits to some counters, but much of it is gobbledygook to me. The part that stood out for me was where they talk about the LITE referencing, but I don't know what that means.
I also saw this thread on cabinet/counter lighting and saw something about 'edge splitting' in blender, but I have no idea what that is either, since my blender knowledge is near nonexistent.
So, can anyone more knowledgable than me please potentially:
a) take a look at pbox's package (linked right at the top of this thread) and see if they can work out what might be going on?
b) let me know what LITE referencing is and whether it's something I should do/how to do it/what it even is?
c) let me know what edge splitting is and whether it might solve my problem?
---
The second part:
If it remains impossible to create a new package with the cabinet shader not causing this black bug, I managed to get rid of that shadow (remember - the whole reason I wanted to edit the mesh and realised this was a disaster in the first place) by deleting everything in the Materials > Items window under dropshadows for each lod. Now, that to me seems like a pretty brute force way of going about it, but it worked.
Is there a 'best practice' way of doing this in the warehouse, in case it's my only option here? Which lines are the ones I should be deleting? I just deleted the lot (Transparency; Shininess; DropShadowStrength (which was set to 0 anyway); DiffuseMap; Specular), and everything seemed to still show up okay in game but there may have been unintended consequences I didn't spot in my limited testing. Is there a specific item in that list I should delete, or perhaps a value on the right under either of them that I can edit to remove the dropshadow, rather than just deleting everything and hoping the world doesn't burn?
Thank you for your time!
I posted a thread a while ago detailing my problem when using the cabinet shader for some shelving (the underside went entirely black when indoors). I never did solve it, but moved on since it was a minor issue.
I'm hitting the same thing again but this time it's rendering the whole project unusable.
Sorry if this gets long-winded, but I'll try to be as thorough as possible.
I'm recolouring plasticbox's Modular Tiles: modthesims.info/download.php?t=554093
All was fine, they worked as expected in game (with my new texture, recolours, plus a new normal and spec).
I decided to get rid of the shadow at the top of the mesh. I successfully used blender to edit the shadow. However, when I import it back into the game the tiles now show up black indoors (but fine outside).
I did some troubleshooting, and created a brand new package cloned from pbox's, exported their mesh and imported it right back in again with no edits, and the same happened - black indoors, fine outside. I had changed nothing else.
I cloned a painting instead, thinking it was something about the way pbox's package was put together. I imported my mesh, and viola, it was fine. However, I remembered I hadn't changed the shader from phong to cabinet. As soon as I did that, boom! Back to black.
So what I thought was a mesh problem is a shader problem. But, by rights it should happen to pbox's original as well, but it doesn't.
Now, pbox uses tsrw, so it's possible that something was done when creating the package to circumvent the black bug I get when using the cabinet shader with this mesh. I don't know what that is, though, and I don't know how to find out (I'm quite new to all of this, but learning fast!).
It seems to me that when pbox created their package, some shader value or another was linked to the mesh at the time of creation, and replacing the mesh with any other (even the same one re-imported) breaks that connection or changes that value. Simply cloning the package and leaving the mesh as-is keeps whatever relationship is going on there intact.
I found this vaguely-related thread on MTS discussing pbox's shader edits to some counters, but much of it is gobbledygook to me. The part that stood out for me was where they talk about the LITE referencing, but I don't know what that means.
I also saw this thread on cabinet/counter lighting and saw something about 'edge splitting' in blender, but I have no idea what that is either, since my blender knowledge is near nonexistent.
So, can anyone more knowledgable than me please potentially:
a) take a look at pbox's package (linked right at the top of this thread) and see if they can work out what might be going on?
b) let me know what LITE referencing is and whether it's something I should do/how to do it/what it even is?
c) let me know what edge splitting is and whether it might solve my problem?
---
The second part:
If it remains impossible to create a new package with the cabinet shader not causing this black bug, I managed to get rid of that shadow (remember - the whole reason I wanted to edit the mesh and realised this was a disaster in the first place) by deleting everything in the Materials > Items window under dropshadows for each lod. Now, that to me seems like a pretty brute force way of going about it, but it worked.
Is there a 'best practice' way of doing this in the warehouse, in case it's my only option here? Which lines are the ones I should be deleting? I just deleted the lot (Transparency; Shininess; DropShadowStrength (which was set to 0 anyway); DiffuseMap; Specular), and everything seemed to still show up okay in game but there may have been unintended consequences I didn't spot in my limited testing. Is there a specific item in that list I should delete, or perhaps a value on the right under either of them that I can edit to remove the dropshadow, rather than just deleting everything and hoping the world doesn't burn?
Thank you for your time!
