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Alpha Map Naming

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Alpha Map Naming

Postby nicethugbert » Sun Feb 21, 2010 3:39 am

The current names are not so useful, they don't really mean anything. It would be very useful if they were named after the material they use. Thx.
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Postby Aaron » Sun Feb 21, 2010 4:38 am

Hi nicethugbert,

Thanks for your suggestion. A single alpha map image might contain up to four alpha layers for different materials (in the case of RGBA alpha layers). Concatenating four material names might result in an impractically long layer name.

To find which materials correspond to the layers in an alpha map, I recommend you use the 'Settings->Current project' menu option, then navigate to the 'Alpha->Images' list in the tree. In this list, you will find which materials and textures correspond to which layers of the alpha map images. If you find this impractical or inconvenient, I can add a direct menu option for viewing the alpha map layer settings.

Regards,
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Postby nicethugbert » Sun Feb 21, 2010 10:28 pm

I use the alpha maps separately. I only group alpha maps if they share the same texture. Typically, they share the same texture when the second alpha map covers 2% or less of the map.

I would suggest not concatenating the names when they use the same texture but use the name of the terrain material with the largest coverage.
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Postby Aaron » Mon Feb 22, 2010 9:23 am

Hi Nicethugbert,

nicethugbert wrote:I would suggest [...] use the name of the terrain material with the largest coverage.


If you use single alphas per image, then I agree that might be helpful. However, most users of L3DT pro use 3 or 4 alphas per image, such as this:

Image

This example is an RGB alpha map where red = std_grass (55%), green = std_sand (16%), and blue = std_cliffs (29%). In this case, I don't think naming the whole alpha map layer after just the first material would be helpful, as it is equally as important to know what the other two layers are. In the case of 4 layer RGBA alpha maps, you'd want to know all four.

Now, I could change the system such that when you make monochrome alpha maps (one layer per image), the name of the layer is taken from the material. However, this might break compatibility with 3rd party game engines, applications, plugins and scripts, some of which rely on the current alpha naming scheme to access the map layers. The engines/apps/plugins/scripts could be modified to lookup the list of alpha map names before accessing the alpha maps themselves, but this will take time, and in the mean time compatibility will be broken and bug reports will roll in. My feeling is that the benefits are outweighed by the costs; hence I am disinclined to make this change.

That said, I can write a script for you that would export the alpha layer images using their material names. Would this suffice?

Best regards,
Aaron.
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Postby nicethugbert » Tue Feb 23, 2010 1:56 am

A script would be great. Would it be a problem if some alphas are combined as I explained above? For combined alphas, I would go by the dominant map in the combo.
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Postby Aaron » Tue Feb 23, 2010 11:25 am

Hi nicethugbert,

Combining alpha layers shouldn't be a problem (at least, not one that I haven't had to solve in L3DT already). I'm working on the script now...

By the way, do you use mosaic alpha maps?

Cheers,
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Postby nicethugbert » Tue Feb 23, 2010 3:20 pm

I don't use mosiac maps. My maps are destined for use in NWN2 through YATT(the importer plugin I use). So, I set the height map size to match YATT's texture map to area size expectation, i.e.:
640
768
896
1024
1152
1280
1408
1536
...
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Postby Aaron » Wed Feb 24, 2010 9:32 am

Hi Nicethugbert,

You'll find the 'ExportAlphaAsMaterialNames.zs' script included with the latest developmental build of L3DT Pro (v2.8 build 15). Please let me know if you find any problems.

If you're using L3DT Standard Edition, the update will be available later today.

Best regards,
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Postby nicethugbert » Wed Mar 17, 2010 11:42 pm

I have 2.8 build 7. Do I have to uninstall 2.8 build 7 then install 2.8 build 16 to get this script?
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Postby Aaron » Thu Mar 18, 2010 7:17 am

Hi Nicethugbert,

The new build will safely install alongside the old build, so you don't need to uninstall the old one if you don't want to.

Cheerio,
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Postby nicethugbert » Thu Mar 18, 2010 10:12 pm

Seems to work fine. I've imported 2 L3DT map sets into NWN2 successfully thus far. Thx a ton. :)
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