@unknownuser said:

I can't help you with the funny material but I am interested in the model you are building.....are you a skater?? The one thing that I haven't seen here or anywhere for that matter is a good model of a skate park....I anxious to see it as it comes along.
Cheers!!

yes I am in fact a skater lol.

Spent the better part of the last 10 years with my feet planted firmly on the grit of my skateboard.

Sadly though in the last year or so i havent been able to do it much because I couldnt afford to buy new boards as I found myself with more and more things i needed to buy instead of things i wanted. So ive been just borrowing my girlfriends skateboard (which i really like, even if it is pink and black) and going for hour or two long rides.
Tricks are out of the question because im unwilling to risk breaking her board, but it feels good to ride.

Here it is with a bit (very small bit) of setup in kerky so i could post it on another forum i visit, im asking them to help me with a name for it, but they are all just lame kids with even worse ideas it seems:

hmm, i think its a moire related problem, because im doing another render (wont be done for at least half an hour, stupid PC) and now its doing it on another section.

wtf happened here??

I got everything set up, but on my fencing above the concessions the texture slowly scales up and gets really huge as it goes from right to left... Thats really odd.
Not to mention other problems im having with the scene, such as light not coming through the transparent glass material i put in the covers of the recessed lights in the little archway near the stairs... But thats probably my fault, and ill fix that later.
So the question is, what in gods name happened to that texture? Its the same texture on every section of fence!

Anyways clip maps are crazy easy to make, just bring the image into PS, play with it until you have black and white only, and you got a clip map.

I imagine its more complex than that, but that worked fine for a fence texture (i used the texture from SU) and with a not so quick, (damn PC) render I got this:

Im about to start a close up render to see how well the normal maps from crazy bump worked on the fence. But it seriously took like 2 hours to render that with no lights or anything in it. My PC sucks.

@gaieus said:

...So don't feel you are wasted - what's more, enjoy the constant and urging discontent with yourself.

Thanks. And I never did get to that clip mapping... Maybe I'll start working on creating a kerky library for all the transparent materials in SU.

Yeah I know that nothing has really started in my life yet but I should have been doing well in school and I should be in college now.

Maybe I am over reacting but my excessive amount of screwing off in high school really screwed me over for a while longer than it should have. At least I have the benefit of having money to pay for school, so I know I'm not really in any kind of hole here, but the problem is figuring out what I want to do

Remember that all of these posts are at a time when I'm really tired, and somewhat, well, more open to talking about things. (Stupid work) Maybe I should just shut it?

Well, I'm not in mass production, more that im the end of the line before the consumers, aka 3rd shift stocking But, if I've learned anything its to just do what you have to do no matter how much of a pain in the behind it is. And no matter how crappy it is the end of the week and the paycheck is so much better when you've earned it.

And to be honest that was the first time in years that I've mentioned the genius thing out loud, so I'll have to apologize for what probably looks like an "im better than you" statement... which it wasn't. I realize that as far as these programs (and no doubt just about everything else) I'm at or near the bottom of the totem pole compared to you guys.

I also realize that I'm wasting my potential because almost everything I do I find (relatively) easy to do, but I also know that nothing beats experience. Personally I know I'm capable of alot more than I'm doing but having spent the better part of my soon to be ending teenage years being a lazy slacker I'm paying for it now. The thing is that I want to find something I'm good at to go to school for, and right now I'm attempting to get a hang of Blender's interface, but it seems that I never have enough time to sit down and use it.

The other problem is that I'm good at and enjoy anything having to do with a trade, electrical, woodworking, metalworking, plumbing, and even heating and a/c are all things that I've done in the past without there ever being a confused moment while doing it.
This sort of stuff though is starting to feel more like a hobby to me than anything, so while I'm here and listening maybe I could get an opinion from some people who have been there? I don't exactly have anyone around for advice here, so fire away. Maybe you guys could help someone to recover from being a huge waste for the 5 years normally reserved for getting on your feet.

@robmoors said:

Next time try to rest before posting. Hmm k? :ewink:

Rofl, I wish. Sleep just isnt in my schedule it seems.
When only 4 people work third shift (should be as many as 12) and the day shift doesnt do anything but make a mess of things, well, yeah... I wind up working alot.

...Dude, i never even looked at any of them yet, I read the thread, said thanks for the info (i explained why i hadnt looked before) and went to shopko to pick up my copy of halo 3.

Do we honestly need to flame me in here for making a simple comment? If you dont like what i said, keep it to yourself, because honestly ive heard it before.
The reason i said it confused me was because i was pretty damn tired as ive already got 15 hours of overtime at work this week and i have 3 days left, so it didnt quite register. And of course after reading it again, as i only skimmed it before, it makes perfect sense.

Depending on the color, it alters the position of the final pixel or whatever in the render in a 3D space.

@fletch said:

you can d/l the normal map plugin for Gimp or Pshop here:
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/nv_texture_tools.html

this will sound condescending in this post, but please understand it's not meant to sound this way at all -
if you are a genius, why don't you look up "Normal Map" in Wikipedia or google, and read up on it yourself? takes like 60 seconds, and this is what I did to learn about it. same way I learned what in the world an "ambient occlusion" render was. we all gotta learn someplace.

Because i was on my way to work at the time and figured i would have an answer by morning, and sure enough here it is. And havent you ever heard that us genius kids have ZERO common sense?

And i already knew what a clip mask does, but thanks. And thanks for everything else.
Now to recover from 13 hours of work....

Im not that lazy at all, but your explanation of the difference between normal and bump mapping confused the crap out of me and im certified as a genius according to the Racine School district.

Clip mapping is used in kerky to produce clear areas in a texture, the same way the fence textures work in SU. I cant save an image as a PNG (i know how to make images with clear backgrounds) because kerkythea renders the "clear" part as white. Which is what the clip maps are for.
A clip map is a map that tells the program what areas will be rendered and what areas will not.

I think what i got out of it is that im using my normal maps wrong, because i do in fact use crazy bump (been using it since version 3 point something), but the normal maps that i seem to be getting out of it are all in greyscale...so that means they arent normals? perhaps a tutorial showing the differences, how they work, and some examples would be helpful.

I know what clip mapping is, so i need a tutorial on how to do it if at all possible, but whats the difference between normal and bump mapping?

Also, how does hight mapping work?? And is there any way to generate hight maps? Ive seen them in action and god do they make things look nice.

ALSO! Im in need of a good fence library (or single material for chain link) for kerkythea if possible.

just use the "scale" tool and it will show up with a bunch of litle boxes on a frame around it.

grab one of the corners and drag it to increase or decrease the size.

Either they are grouped as he said or you smoothed the corners. Smoothing the corners would make the whole object be one solid face.

I imagine you would have to delete it in SU before exporting. Or however you get it to LayOut, but then again, I dont even know what layout is, so i could be wrong entirely.

I usually find it easy to draw the vertical line, then the bottom horizontal line, hit R and then connect the two points. It makes for a nice neat vertical rectangle and ive gotten used to it to a point where i can do it in just a few seconds.

Much faster than making it flat on the "ground" and rotating it in place. Plus it makes it simple to make vertical rectangles that dont fall on the red or green axis. Most of the time anyways, sometimes it wants to make a rectangle at a strange angle, then i have to beat SU into submission.

Hey thats pretty useful. But i meant the invisible portions of gif and png images, like for a fence texture. I found out you have to use clip masks, which doesnt seem too hard.

Well thanks alot for that...But im in no shape to be figuring that all out right now as third shift is rough to get used to, so after im done playing dead in my bed in about 7-8 hours ill be back to check it out.

Thanks again!

SU is capable of displaying .gif and .png images with transparent areas, but when you try and view them in Kerkythea the transparent parts show up as white. Is there a way to fix this or would i have to physically model each little bit of metal mesh and texture it?

I think what the problem is (after reading your great post) is that the radius of the edge is small enough so that it just looks like a mistake. or something to that effect, because it would be there in reality, it just wouldn't be so blatantly obvious as it is in the renders. Your renders make it look normal, while the render i made, at the angle i want it, makes it look terrible.