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FPSC Classic Product Chat / Why are my Cshop entities BLACK in the editor?

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Cloud of Crows Studios
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Joined: 22nd Nov 2004
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Posted: 18th Apr 2005 06:20 Edited at: 18th Apr 2005 06:33
Any ideas why custom entities would appear very very dark (nearly all black) inside the editor?

They show up fine in the game (in text or regular mode), but it's most annoying to try and orient them when I can't make out the texture faces.

See attached screenshot.

Here's the particulars of my entity creation process

1) I am using Character Shop to create and export the .x files

2) using copied .fpe files

3) using .tga textures

4) using "local" textures and .x files (that is my path contains only the name of the .x file or texture because they are in the same directory as the entity so Bed1.fpe would look like this



5) Just to be extra safe here is bed1.x file in case I am missing something obvious here



Is this a bug or am I doing something wrong here???

Thanks for any help!!!


EDIT - my bed in the picture is the drak one to the right. The bed on the left is a normal FPSC entity placed for comparison.

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Swivel Games
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Joined: 4th Mar 2005
Location: East Texas
Posted: 18th Apr 2005 07:23
Hmmm Good Question and its your lucky day because I have not got any clue how to fix it. But i do have a question for you......How do you take screen shots? i have always woundered and pondered and woundered some more and...well you get the point.

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Poly= Many
Ticks= blood sucking parasites
Van B
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Posted: 29th Apr 2005 04:11 Edited at: 29th Apr 2005 04:15
It could be a residual bit of data from the mesh that is affecting the lighting (looks like it's got some extra vert colouring info that it should'nt have, like specular lighting or something).

EDIT:
This seems a little strange:
0.012549;0.0360784;0.0109804;;

Like a real low colour setting, you could try hacking that to:
0.500000;0.500000;0.500000;;

Worth a try at least, remember carto shop uses 2 seperate .x models, one might be dark so that the lightmap can go on top and lighten everything (that colour might be the mesh diffuse colour set to the ambient colour in carto shop).

Swivel,
The easiest way is just to press the 'Print Screen' button on your keyboard, this copies the screen onto the clipboard which you can then paste as a new image in your art package.


Van-B

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Van-B's mom.
Van B
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Location: Sunnyvale
Posted: 29th Apr 2005 04:17
Pah! - not editing again...

Just occurred to me that inside FPSC it's possibly the case that the mesh is loaded as normal, so it's dark - but then FPSC discards the dodgy colour so it looks fine when you use it on the map.


Van-B

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Van-B's mom.
Cloud of Crows Studios
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Posted: 30th Apr 2005 08:06
Hi Van,

Yes I think you are correct. If I open an .x file made with cartography shop, alter the light settings using another program and then resave the .x file everything is fine in FPSC.

When the new beta of Cshop 5 has a working export capability I will retest.

Thanks for the advice
uman
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Location: UK
Posted: 30th Apr 2005 09:32 Edited at: 30th Apr 2005 09:34
Its not only cartography shop - I dont use that but most models I import into FPSC are very dark in Editor and I also get the same difficulty often in determining which way one needs to rotate the objects. WYSIWYG is not WYSIWYG in FPSC

One can change the kind of lighting/reflectiveness etc on a model in a modelling package on ceation or before import, but such a change will have impact also on how the object is lit in game too as such info is embedded in the .x file. If you need to lighten the object in game its fine but its not much use if the object is already too bright. Just depends on the model requirements in game.

Overall and as a general rule most x.file objects seem to be over dark in both editor and perhaps a little dark in game also.

One thing to remember is you wont see exactly how they will be lit in game until you do a full render/make game and then how they appear will depend on how any in game lighting affects them - so if your fussy about your in game lighting effects perhaps its best to leave them as the default until such time as your near to final testing when lighting will show up where you need to make adjustments?

Lighting a finished game level can take a couple of attempts anyway if you want to get things just as you want to your liking.

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