Atomic Systems

I have just tried two separate objects export to RailWorks. Both times, I receive a "missing texture" sign. I know It's not my file setup because I can do objects okay from 3dCanvas. So I am unsure what I am doing wrong, being new to Blender.

Known sources of error are:

Absolute instead of relative path name in Blender,
image file name not specified in the texture slots (following the shader name),
ACE not under textures (not likely with you since you did it fine using 3DCanvas).

Since in another thread, you said that you succeeded with the Simple Box tutorial before, I guess the easiest for you would be to look for any differences between the two projects. There will be far less differences between them than between anyone's guesses of your setup and the real thing.

As always with these things, watch out for the minute details.

Actually that one had missing textures as well.

Are you saying that this needs to be the same name as the name of the texture?



(This is the only thing that's different on my first truly successful one.)

Okay, I found the source of my problem.

If you use the arrows for selecting an image (the step after setting Tex and then creating a new slot for an image) you will get an absolute path. You have to navigate to it in Blender's browser to get a relative path.

Try "Save default settings" in the leftmost menu (or Ctrl-U).
This relative/absolute path issue fooled me for quite a while, until someone told me about this menu entry. So you set it to relative once, then save default settings, and for me, it was on relative paths ever since.

A weird thing is though, I already have done that, and I had checked that it was set when I got an absolute path (which it was still set).

You mentioned somewhere using these little arrows when you specified the filename.
Maybe it cached the absolute path there, i.e., a previous entry before changing to relative path.

But as long as it works out fine in the end, you need not understand everything.

I moved onto trying Ambient Occlusion, but two issues come up. One is that the Ambient Occlusion texture created has "extra" paint/color created. For example-

Click the image to zoom in

(I'm using a hemi light directly above the far corner "cube" in the back.)



Another is that it seems when I view the render the mapping of the texture isn't followed sometimes after editing the texture with Gimp.

Trainguy76 wrote:Another is that it seems when I view the render the mapping of the texture isn't followed sometimes after editing the texture with Gimp.

Oops, this should read,

'Another issue is that when I view the render (F12) in Blender, the texture applied doesn't follow the mapping of the texture.'

Learn to think before typing.

Trainguy76 wrote:Another issue is that when I view the render (F12) in Blender, the texture applied doesn't follow the mapping of the texture.

I've had this issue many times on Blender and never did figure out why although the textures appeared in the game ok.

Trainguy76 wrote:

I moved onto trying Ambient Occlusion, but two issues come up. One is that the Ambient Occlusion texture created has "extra" paint/color created. For example-

Click the image to zoom in

(I'm using a hemi light directly above the far corner "cube" in the back.)

Extra paint? Not sure what you mean, that is exactly what I would expect to see for what you've explained.
I would recommend using an ambient light rather than any individual lights as the light source in game will not always be in the same place that your light is placed.
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:M ... _Occlusion
Also place a plane underneath the object as a fake ground to give the correct shadowing at the bottom.

Trainguy76 wrote:Another is that it seems when I view the render the mapping of the texture isn't followed sometimes after editing the texture with Gimp.

You need to reload the image. You can do this either in the UV pane where the selected image is listed, or if you've assigned it to a material texture there is a reload button next to the image selection.
Also sometimes you need to change your view angle a little in the 3D pane to get it to update if you're using the alt-z texture view.

Thank you for the advise Karma.

karma99 wrote: Extra paint? Not sure what you mean, that is exactly what I would expect to see for what you've explained.

If you look at the picture I posted again, you see a dark line in the top right of the object (that is from two faces mapped immediately next to each other, but not overlapping), where a lit face is next to a less lit face.
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Onto a new question-
(Anyone can answer)

When trying to make a tunnel entrance, immediately next to an object is fine, but not from certain angles of a distance away.


Click the image to zoom in

^ This picture is okay.


^ This one, you can see the different faces separated by a black line.


Click the image to zoom in

^ And on this, you see a black line on the roof.

I think I can attribute this to ambient occlusion, because making a simple rectangle with multiple extrusions of the default cube, gives me the black lines when you see it textured.

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Last question for a while, maybe.

When I tried adding a stencil shadow, I typed in "StencilShadow.fx" into the place where you would normally put Tex, or TexDiff into the first slot, just above the slot linking the image. When I did this, I received an entirely black model in RailWorks.

Regarding the black lines in the portal: Is the surrounding on the texture black or dark? You need to have the same colour (or a very similar one) on a margin a few pixels around the shape shown on the UV map. The reason is that for smaller resolutions, the game averages the pixels, so the neighbouring pixels, which lies just outside the part of the texture which you map on these polygons gets counted in.

Regarding the black shadow object, my guess would be that you did not observe the naming convention. Something must be _shadow, I guess the node, but could be the whole IGS. I cannot look it up right now, but there was something in these PDFs of old - should be in the Wiki now. Anyway, your description seems to indicated that the game takes the shadow object for the object itself.

I think your black lines are caused by your texture. I would pretty safely bet that the items on your texture sheet are all surrounded by black?
What happens is, when you're not close to an object the graphics engine creates an "average" image to apply to the object. When it does this it can often use pixels that surround your texture, which are frequently black and so they create the fine line. Just surround your textures with the main texture colour as opposed to black and this should go away.

For shadows the object needs to be named 1_0512_shadow_myobject
where 0512 is the usual distance modifier where you want the shadow to be visible up to, and myobject is the name of an already existing object in your scene (doesn't matter which one)

Click the image to zoom in


Thanks guys,

Here is my texture, obviously surrounded by black, is there an "easy" way of getting the black to be a lighter color, as the black is created from the AO process.