Okay , I officaly Hate The Material Thingy

[Tenshi]

Re: Okay , I officaly Hate The Material Thingy

??? only materials that can be used are bundle and static mesh... nothing clever* about tht...

sorry i have no idea what a bundle or a static mesh is...well i do know what a static mesh is but i dont see the connection. Im not a modder though.

I meant that although you cant just export a max material and open it in a bf2 editor, you can still use the max materials for more than just their diffuse channel, thats all.

*clever in comparison to this thread

[jimbob]

Re: Okay , I officaly Hate The Material Thingy

*clever in comparison to this thread

very true!

static and bundle meshes (in skinning) are material types that are layered so you can organize the files and map channels better - clour map (_c) in 1, detail in two (_de), dirt in 3 (_di) etc etc...

[Cdr]

Re: Okay , I officaly Hate The Material Thingy

Asking for help on the material editor / rendering is like asking for help on how to model.

It's such a huge topic it'd take a while to sit and explain it all to him (not that I know the ins and outs of it all).

If he was more specific in his question, we might be able to at least point him in the right direction. What settings are you using? What tutorial did you do? What renderer are you using? How have you set up the lights? What are your render settings?

[Tenshi]

Re: Okay , I officaly Hate The Material Thingy

To me a static mesh is a ...mesh...that is ..static...lol. It has limited functionality but it can be hardware accelerated, so you can have lots of them...as aposed to something like a character model that has animation data etc etc.

Pressumably a bundle is a kind of resource package? With complex material data built in?

The definition of a material depends greatly on the software. In max a material is the way the surface interacts with light, i guess in a game a material is more general (but specific to the needs of the game)...so the way the surface handles collisions for sound calling, or the "armour" values etc.


BF2 seems to handle some sort of basic specularity**, rendered through a surface detail apha mask. Gives an effect similar to bump mapping, but alot faster. I was wondering if this can be designed in max or has to be added once the mesh has left max?

**The effect looks like an environmental map but its somehow effected by other objects - so a suface will 'reflect' the sun's light until something obscures the sun...its a pretty good effect, you can see it on the grounds usually.


On the topic of this thread...im not sure its a material problem since materials are always present. The render apearing black and white seems like a rendering problem. This has only happened to me once, when i had a sunlight which totally over exposed the shot (since its 600x brigther than a normal light) and resulted in extreme values ie. black and white. I had simply forgot to use an exposure control...which is unlikely to be the problem here.

[Cdr]

Re: Okay , I officaly Hate The Material Thingy

The Bundledmesh and Staticmesh in relation to max are the name of the shaders max uses so the game knows what type of object it is (obviously, something using the staticmesh shader is a static and something using the bundledmesh is an vehicle, weapon etc). They're nothing more than a way for the game to know how to handle the material.

The effects like specularity and transparency are only handled in max insofar as the naming of the material. Calling a bundledmesh shader material 'EnvMapColormapGloss' will tell the editor and the game that the object is reflective and has specularity. What governs how reflective or how strong the speculative highlights are (or how transparent), are the alpha channels in the colour and normalmap texture files (_c.dds and _b.dds).

No information from max materials will be recognised by the game apart from the name of the material and the shader used.

[Tenshi]

Re: Okay , I officaly Hate The Material Thingy

Ah right.

Ive never seen bundlemesh or staticmesh shaders.

Is this gmax only? Or do you get them with the game dev tools?

So these shaders mean that the model can just be taken out of max and put straight to the game engine?

[jimbob]

Re: Okay , I officaly Hate The Material Thingy

Ah right.

Ive never seen bundlemesh or staticmesh shaders.

Is this gmax only? Or do you get them with the game dev tools?

So these shaders mean that the model can just be taken out of max and put straight to the game engine?

they are in the material types

no - go and get the 3ds tools for bf2 if you have 3ds

no - this is where i think alot of people get confused - you have the bundlemesh shader to compile your normal, colour and "shadow" (?) maps and then there is the arranging of the heirarchy of LOD and collision meshes which is also called in the community "bundlemeshing" - once both of these are done THEN you can put it into the editor... hopefully