[1.12.x] Textures Unlimited Recolour Depot

[Manwith Noname]

@Weak Player I don't know if you're getting things mixed up but reflection resolution doesn't matter, in fact I would recommend not putting it above 256. The two settings in the graphics options that are important are the rendering quality, which needs to be good or higher and the reflection refresh rate, which needs to be low or higher. If either of these is not met, then things will appear to work in the VAB / SPH but will fail when loading in to the game world.

Your second screenshot suggest that the configs are being applied so I would double check the two graphics options if things don't look right. 

[OnlyLightMatters]

Hi all, hi @Manwith Noname

I've started to work on the actual recolouration of MH parts, and I've an issue with how it renders for now.

I'm using only one home made texture, the paint one:

But it renders this way

As you can see I have some metal effects where there should have none.

What do I miss?

Sample screenshot to illustrate the work

 

Edit: OK I've tied multiple dds formats, nothing changed. I've try adding a specular texture, nothing happened. 

I really don't understand what I missed. A bit of a help would be greatly appreciated here. 

Edited May 15, 2021 by OnlyLightMatters

[Manwith Noname]

@OnlyLightMatters From what you have shown here it was hard to understand what wasn't working as you expected. I noticed your post in the main TU thread though and I think I can perhaps shed some light on what is missing.

The black area of the colour mask takes metallic and specular values from another texture. This can be defined in a number of ways but I highly suspect that the texture being used for this contains no alpha layer. Or perhaps more importantly, the alpha layer has a value of 1 in the areas where you are seeing reflections you don't want. If you're following the texture sets I have defined using the TU/Metallic shader then the metal value is read from the red channel of the RGB layer and the shininess value is read from the alpha channel.

[OnlyLightMatters]

@Manwith Noname okay I was far from doing this correctly. Is this why each time you provide a mask texture, you provide a specular texture as well? 
You can have a look at what I have done so far in https://github.com/OnlyLightMatters/TURD-MH-BG

At the beginning the only texture used was the paint one and for the specular one I tried the occ.dds one you provide within TURD.

Edited May 15, 2021 by OnlyLightMatters

[OnlyLightMatters]

Ok then, that's an improvement

 

As you can see I have still a few adjustments to make on the windows.

Also, I have additionnal questions. How do you find the values for:
        vector = _DiffuseNorm,0.39,0.5,0.35
        vector = _MetalNorm,0.28,0.35,0.25
        vector = _SmoothnessNorm,0.28,0.35,0.25

And do you have a specific technique to make a specular texture, based on the Squad's diffuse one?

Why do you redo the diffuse texture, already provided by Squad? (ex mk2LanderCan_v2)

Edited May 17, 2021 by OnlyLightMatters

[OnlyLightMatters]

Still don't know how to pick the norm values ... BUT.... I managed to do without them with statisying results to my eyes for the fuel tanks (at least), W and BW.

1/ start with the Squad .dds diffuse texture
2/ create a layer on top of the default with the solid #c6c6c6 value.
3/ change the blend mode to screen
4/ in a fusion mask, exclude all zones which are not recoloured.

With no alpha channel, export a dds -> becomes the new diffuse texture for recolouration
Copy the result in a new alpha channel, export a dds -> becomes the specular texture.
 

Edited May 17, 2021 by OnlyLightMatters

[linuxgurugamer]

@Manwith Noname  The B9 PWings (fork) group is approaching a release of the next version.  Would it be ok if we include the patch for it in the  mod?

[Manwith Noname]

 

On 5/15/2021 at 11:26 PM, OnlyLightMatters said:

How do you find the values for:

Ok, in a technical sense this is a luminance value. For "Porkjet white", I established this a long time ago as 0.74 for diffuse and 0.5 for spec and metal just by looking at the colour values of the pixels and fiddling around a bit to get the effect I wanted. I don't know what texture editor you use but I use GIMP but I imagine if you use Photoshop the same or similar and more is available. Simply opening up the colour palette window and using the colour picking tool to get values from the diffuse texture will give me reasonably close values for anything that is essentially greyscale. For colours, I typically desaturate based on luminance values. Gimp now also gives colour values in numerous formats, so whereas previously I divided 190 by 255 to get 0.74, I can view values on a scale of 0-100 so this calculation is essentially done already and Porkjet white reads as 74.

This isn't the be all and end all value but I'll get to that in a moment.

 

On 5/15/2021 at 11:26 PM, OnlyLightMatters said:

And do you have a specific technique to make a specular texture, based on the Squad's diffuse one?

Right, I start with my metal and spec maps being identical to the diffuse but converted to luminance greyscale via the desaturation tool in GIMP. I'll put this in exactly as that until I'm settled on my colour mask. During the creation of the colour mask I will have created numerous paths that allow me to select the same area repeatedly and consistently. This will ultimately include areas of the texture that I'm not going to paint. Sometimes, for very simple parts I don't do this but, I digress. When I'm settled on what parts of the texture I'm not painting I have a couple of level adjustment presets for converting areas to metal and spec values that I settled on through trial and error then universally apply to try and be consistent.

Now, to come back to the be all and end all. These are things that get me to the ball park of what I want in an artistic sense. Depending on who the original artists was, things will invariably be slightly different and results will be slightly off from what I personally want. I'll load up the game, I'll put my baseline parts down which are things by Porkjet like the MK1 and MK2 cockpits. I'll put the newly covered part next to them and start applying the same colours and comparing the results. Based on what I see, I tweak values slightly. My main aim is to get things so they aren't noticeably different. Setting the detail slider to 500 can be particularly helpful in highlighting out of range diffuse values. If your norm value is too low the colour will over saturate, if it's too high everything goes black or too dark. Again, the original artwork impacts this massively. There are some parts I have that oversaturate in places which leads to...

 

On 5/15/2021 at 11:26 PM, OnlyLightMatters said:

Why do you redo the diffuse texture, already provided by Squad? (ex mk2LanderCan_v2)

Sometimes the original artwork contains areas that don't suit what I'm trying to achieve and when I can be bothered, I modify the original texture to eliminate things I find offensive, typically those horrendous highlights that are blobbed all around newer parts. Porkjet did this but they weren't blobby and they were within a colour range that meant they didn't look terrible (at least to me). There's plenty of parts I kind of want to revisit in this regard. In the case of the mk2 lander can, there was two thing I wanted to do. One was remove the ghastly highlights around the panels and increase the darkness of the recesses between them. The other was a fix to the rover roof because Squad somehow balls'd that up. I don't know if that mistake is still there today but it's largely irrelevant to me because of the other modifications I performed. There's things like black and white fuel tanks where I manipulated the black area to allow better colour blending through the GUI that just wasn't working when using normalise values alone. And so on, essentially if I have the motivation when I'm covering the part to fix things I dislike, then it will typically start with a modified diffuse texture because everything else is formed from that.

 

18 hours ago, linuxgurugamer said:

The B9 PWings (fork) group is approaching a release of the next version.  Would it be ok if we include the patch for it in the  mod?

You can but are you just including the patches or the textures too? I don't know how other people feel but because TU and recolouring always seemed a bit niche I've made packs in a way that those who want it can add them if they want. It also meant that if and when I wanted to improve things I just change my download rather than bothering others to update their mod.

 

 

Edit:

@OnlyLightMatters If you use GIMP I think I can extract my level adjustment presets and send them to you.

Edited May 18, 2021 by Manwith Noname

[linuxgurugamer]

27 minutes ago, Manwith Noname said:

17 hours ago, linuxgurugamer said:

The B9 PWings (fork) group is approaching a release of the next version.  Would it be ok if we include the patch for it in the  mod?

You can but are you just including the patches or the textures too? I don't know how other people feel but because TU and recolouring always seemed a bit niche I've made packs in a way that those who want it can add them if they want. It also meant that if and when I wanted to improve things I just change my download rather than bothering others to update their mod

Was planning on all.  If TU not installed, it won’t do anything except take up a bit of memory.

One issue is that this is not available via CKAN (unless I just didn’t see it in the OP).  If it was in CKAN, then it would just be a  netkan suggestion.

[Manwith Noname]

@linuxgurugamer It just occurred to me that it would perhaps be best to slightly modify the B9 Pwings files so they work stand alone. Right now they require that the stock recolour pack be installed. If it isn't there will be some strange errors due to missing texture set configuration and the configs don't make specific checks to ensure this doesn't happen. As far as CKAN goes, there's another hurdle as some packs rely on a dev build of Textures Unlimited that was not fully released and doesn't appear on CKAN either to my knowledge.

Edited May 18, 2021 by Manwith Noname

[linuxgurugamer]

2 hours ago, Manwith Noname said:

@linuxgurugamer It just occurred to me that it would perhaps be best to slightly modify the B9 Pwings files so they work stand alone. Right now they require that the stock recolour pack be installed. If it isn't there will be some strange errors due to missing texture set configuration and the configs don't make specific checks to ensure this doesn't happen. As far as CKAN goes, there's another hurdle as some packs rely on a dev build of Textures Unlimited that was not fully released and doesn't appear on CKAN either to my knowledge.

Ummm, are you offering to do so, or suggesting that I do that?

[OnlyLightMatters]

@Manwith Noname I have PS & GIMP installed here. I am more used to PS but I can look at your profiles in GIMP to understand them.

For "Porkjet white", I established this a long time ago as 0.74 for diffuse and 0.5 [...]
Simply opening up the colour palette window and using the colour picking tool to get values from the diffuse texture will give me reasonably close values for anything that is essentially greyscale.

Sorry but what is Porkjet white? Do we speak about max values, average values or anything else?

[linuxgurugamer]

7 hours ago, Manwith Noname said:

@linuxgurugamer It just occurred to me that it would perhaps be best to slightly modify the B9 Pwings files so they work stand alone. Right now they require that the stock recolour pack be installed. If it isn't there will be some strange errors due to missing texture set configuration and the configs don't make specific checks to ensure this doesn't happen. As far as CKAN goes, there's another hurdle as some packs rely on a dev build of Textures Unlimited that was not fully released and doesn't appear on CKAN either to my knowledge.

I'm leaning towards not including them, after reviewing the two sets of patches.

Edit:  Not sure if you need to make the changes I had listed, so deleted them for now

Edited May 19, 2021 by linuxgurugamer

[Kerbalwings]

I hope we soon someday get a mod that automatically makes TURD configs for every part like this  https://spacedock.info/mod/2721/QuickSilver

[Spaceman.Spiff]

18 hours ago, Kerbalwings said:

I hope we soon someday get a mod that automatically makes TURD configs for every part like this  https://spacedock.info/mod/2721/QuickSilver

Huh… I’ve never seen that mod before. 
Looks very interesting. 

[OnlyLightMatters]

On 5/22/2021 at 2:19 AM, Kerbalwings said:

I hope we soon someday get a mod that automatically makes TURD configs for every part like this  https://spacedock.info/mod/2721/QuickSilver

You can bring a specific rendering  to all parts but this kind of mod will never allow any smart local recolouration.

[Kerbalwings]

1 hour ago, OnlyLightMatters said:

You can bring a specific rendering  to all parts but this kind of mod will never allow any smart local recolouration.

Well someday we will have a smart local recolouration program. I don't know how to make parts compatible with TURD

[OnlyLightMatters]

1 hour ago, Kerbalwings said:

Well someday we will have a smart local recolouration program. I don't know how to make parts compatible with TURD

Well I don't know yet any program which can make artistic choices and can decide to revamp a diffuse texture or make a decent specular one. Which is common work with TURD. The more I do, the more I appreciate and respect the wonderful job @Manwith Noname has done with TURD so far.

[Kerbalwings]

Hey whenever I use use the b9 procedural wings Config it resets to normal and I don't know why.  

[Probus]

On 5/21/2021 at 7:19 PM, Kerbalwings said:

I hope we soon someday get a mod that automatically makes TURD configs for every part like this  https://spacedock.info/mod/2721/QuickSilver

Does anyone know how to contact the creator of QuickSilver?  1) Running an .exe kinda makes me nervous and 2) I have some feedback for him/her to make QuickSilver ever better (like drilldown and whitelists).

[Spaceman.Spiff]

42 minutes ago, Probus said:

Does anyone know how to contact the creator of QuickSilver?  1) Running an .exe kinda makes me nervous and 2) I have some feedback for him/her to make QuickSilver ever better (like drilldown and whitelists).

Maybe raise an issue on GitHub?

[610yesnolovely]

Thanks @Manwith Noname for this amazing mod, @Shadowmage for Textures Unlimited, @OnlyLightMatters for the MH/BG work so far (I downloaded latest zip from GitHub). Together with other visual mods, TUFX and Conformal Decals this makes for even more distraction from actually building a rocket that might reach the Mun. Sheesh, I'm never going to get to Duna at this rate. Hmmm... now... what color should I make the Snack dispensers?

 

[OnlyLightMatters]

16 hours ago, 610yesnolovely said:

Thanks @Manwith Noname for this amazing mod, @Shadowmage for Textures Unlimited, @OnlyLightMatters for the MH/BG work so far (I downloaded latest zip from GitHub). Together with other visual mods, TUFX and Conformal Decals this makes for even more distraction from actually building a rocket that might reach the Mun. Sheesh, I'm never going to get to Duna at this rate. Hmmm... now... what color should I make the Snack dispensers?

 

I will release in less than a week a new pre release with recolouration for all MH parts. All my devs are committed into the dev branch. 

(I have still some testing to be done, maybe some diffuse textures to modify) 

[LHACK4142]

This looks like a really cool mod! How do you change the looks of the parts? Is there a GUI?

[OnlyLightMatters]

7 hours ago, LHACK4142 said:

This looks like a really cool mod! How do you change the looks of the parts? Is there a GUI?

The mod/patches add an option in the UI. There are 2 ways to to so, depending on how it was configured in TURD, by right-clicking on the part

• A slider which allows to pick a Squad appearance, a default metallic "It's all Shiny" or a Recolour option.
• New variants if the part already have variants, for  "It's all Shiny" and recolouration.

When Recolour is chosen, a button appears in the UI to tell the mod which colour should replace areas of the Red/Green/Blue mask.

Beyond this post, if you want to know more, install TURD or search for a video on YT which will explain better what I've just told.