hello and help

[Buckaroo]

Thanks, I'll try some of your suggestions adlabs, and I'd be happy to send you a copy of the pre bright bmp freelancer, pm me your email address. If my full psp template would help I could send that as well

[Buckaroo]

PROGRESS

Okay, here's what I found, I decided to try the suggestion from Adlabs regarding the strength of my texture layers! so I killed the texture that I was playing with. The first four shots are based on a noise layer with a gausson blur of 2% with overlay blend mode. I varied the opacity setting and that was it for these first four shots.

So here is the bare skin, no textures whatsoever (opacity for the noise layer at 0) Take a good look at the panel lines



10% Opacity on the noise layer



50% Opacity



100% Opacity



Once I saw the progress there, I wondered what it would be like to add a different colour into the mix and this is what I came out with.



It's a world better than it was before, but still a little blotchy. My next step was to keep the noise layer, but take away the gausson blur feature, adjust the opacity and this is the farthest I've gotten so far



Still not perfect but at least I'm not banging my head against the wall quite as hard now!

[Hunhunter]

Umm...I'm still convinced that BRIGHT isn't working. I have done similar colours on a P47 and didn't get any problems. If you are using the BRIGHT .bat file, why are you typing in a command?? If its the one that I knocked up, all you do is drag the skin into the BRIGHT file and then double click the .bat icon. A DOS screen should appear for a few seconds with a load of scrolling text and then disappear. You shouldn't have to type anything

[adlabs6]

HH is exactly right on the technique with the .bat file.

But... let me ask you a question based on what I'm seeing in those pics. Are you painting your panel line and surface effects layers with a very light brush pressure, and making several brush stroke passes to get it darkened to what you want?

Check out this image:


On the left, it's clearly banded, and I built up that stripe by painting with a 5% opacity brush over and over to darken it. On the right, I painted a single stroke with a same sized 80% opacity brush, and lowered the layer transparency to match the shade of the left stripe.

Bright processed that image, and passed that banding on. If those effects layers are built of many passes with very light opacity brushes, then that could be the source of the splotches.

The solution (if that's whats happening) is to paint those layers with brushes in the 50% to 100% opacity range. Then adjust the layer transparency to make the layer lighter or darker.

[Buckaroo]

With the bright file, I am using the .bat that you set up hunhunter, that's just the command line in the file. and I do get the dos Window as it converts. Like you said, all I do is drag it into the folder and click the bat.

The panel lines I did using the technique that you used in your tutorial adlabs, I use the pen tool instead of brushing them on, the highlights under the lines are a copy of the lines and then blurred using the gausson blur feature I then adjust layer transperency to lighten/darken them up.

[UF_Zargos]

Hi. I've experienced he same kind of problems. I use Photoshop and I convert my psd files into 256 colors bmp with bright. There is actually no differences between the to files. But when I use my skin under OpenGL mode with a GeForce 6600GT the same kind of blotching appears. It disapears when I return to DirectX mode..
May be your troubles are the same as mine ? Any way I didn't find any solution although I use the last Nvidia drivers.
So sad !

[Buckaroo]

BREAKTHROUGH

I think I found the problem, after much, much thought. I realized that the problem was not in my template, or in the bright program because the skin still looked half decent on the flat BMP when I examined it in the windows preview viewer. So maybe the problem occured when it got transferred onto a 3d model ingame. So after some browsing through the community help on the UBI board I came across a guy having problems with "blotchy water" He had a screenshot with a plane over some water and I couldn't help but notice his skin looked blotchy as well. The fix he came out with was the texture compression in game. Switching to none solved the problem for him so I figured I'd give it a shot. I went from s3tc compression to none and check out the difference

With S3tc



With Texture Compression set to None



As you can see, it's a whole world of difference. I've still got to play around with layer transperencies etc. (it's still a work in progress) But I think the problem is getting close to being licked!!!!!!

[SeaNorris]

Does BRIGHT go thorugh quite quick or does it take more than a few seconds?

[Freelancer]

When I ran his .bmp through Bright, it was suprisingly fast. To the point that I thoght it had already been compressed. Although, it came out looking fine in the game. No artifacting at all.

Freelancer

[adlabs6]

S3tc compression. Well that last pic looks great, I'm glad it was figured out as I was completely going the wrong way on my solutions. I'd not have guessed that setting could have that effect.

Maybe this also will help Zargos with his similar issue? I hope so.

In anycase, I'll make a note of this solution so if it comes up again we can try this first thing.

Thanks for sharing the solution with us, Buckaroo. Much appreciated.