Hi all. I've been playing about with a little scene using a cave Rolfy put up on these forums, plus standard stuff, and one of my own (not great but only for the distance at the minute!).

I've put together a short video of it in action. It looks pretty nice, thanks to that cave (Thanks Rolfy!), and Reloaded's improved graphics !



I also made a small video, useable as a dreamscene, made using FPSC Reloaded. It's not perfect, but it's not easy in Windows Movie Maker to try to make it seamless!

Many thanks for posting the vid

It's not often I catch what people do with media I create and love what you did with the cave, particularly the little pool inside, it's a great scene all round

Great video thanks for sharing !



/rolfy, your cave gave a few members some great ideas, even myself. I was thinking about making a town and a dock inside of the cave.

Great "warts and all" video.



Not sure what your problem is with the normal map on the research building. Should be easy to fix. Zip the model (i.e. X file, textures, fpe file) and either post it here or email it to me and I'll see if I can fix it for you. I've done similar things for myself for various models in the model packs already.

Thanks Rolfy, E30Legend and Green Gandalf! Always nice to get some feedback on the stuff your working on! The cave looks great by the way Rolfy! It took me hours and hours to make that ropey building I put in lol, mostly texturing, as I am not great.

Green Gandalf, I was planning to give the house away if I could get it looking semi decent anyway so have no issues zipping it up here. I am not sure why I am having issues with the normal map. I made it in Gimp, using the diffuse texture. Imported it into Blender, and with a little head scratching, managed to get it working in that. Exporting the finished .x model into FPS however shows no difference at all. I even tried Dark Shader, although again, I am not sure exactly what I am doing lol.I always remember being very underwhelmed with that at the time. No decent instructions!

I've added the house zip file, well one of them lol, had a few tries! If you can get it working a little better great! I meant it to be as low poly as possible, perhaps making a more detailed model for closer up stuff. Again not sure how LOD works in Reloaded as yet. Can't just load em in like in DB!



Edit - Oh did anyone try my Dreamscene video? I though it worked quite well considering the archaic way I had to make it!



Edit - Oh and the house is possibly a bit over scale at the moment. I must admit so far, I have had issues with scale, as the default scale Blender is set at seems way, way too small when importing into FPS. So I have to scale things a whole lot before it is a decent size in FPSC. To the point where you can't see the object in Blender because of camera distance issues! It makes it awkward lol! I'm sure there must be a way to change that, but no idea what lol!

OK. Downloading the zip now. I'll report back as soon as I can.

Had a look at this and done some experimenting. First the easy bit. I fixed the scaling problem by changing this in the X file:







to this:







That change simply doubles the object's size. You don't seem to be able to do it consistently via the .fpe files yet.



I then loaded the object into my "object fixing" utility and saved the new mesh.



I'm not sure how you wanted it to look but the FPSC entity shader (which seems to be the default even when none is specified in the fpe file) now makes the object look like this:







Is that any better? Still looks weird to me since the things which are meant to be behind the window (I assume) seem to show a bump map effect. Such large areas of glass really need a reflection shader applied to them to look realistic.

The textures were only meant to be viewed from a reasonable distance It's no great work of art I was planning to make another model with more detail for windows and such as at the moment they are just texture based to keep polycount down. I was more interested in if the walls had texture on them, rather than looking flat, and not much though about the windows reflections etc . Hard to tell with a still image. Cheers! I'll give it a try in FPSCR!



Edit - or not lol. Noticed it was the same image lol. Still looked like there was some bump effect there, so better than I had!

Looks very nice! I must however point out that the texture stretching (on such parts as in the beginning with the hill on the right) looks pretty nasty. It'd be much better with that sorted out.

Yeah, the terrain can look a bit rough if you make it to high and too steep. Still , I didn't really work on that part too much, really it was the scene in the cave and around it that I spent the time on. By the time I got to the side part I was worrying about performance, so left it fairly bare for now! Thanks for taking a look!



I notice no one has mentioned the Dreamscene I made. Meaning it's either not working , people just don't use it anymore, or no one has noticed lol. If your running Windows 7, you can activate Dreamscene by downloading the Dreamscene Activator. Then after a restart, just right click my short video clip and set as backdrop. Or if you have windows XP, VLC will simulate a animated desktop. Anyway just checking people noticed it lol!

Sorry for the double post. I just thought I would let you know the new beta seems to import my house with normal maps working! Pity it seems to struggle a little, but still a nice bonus!

I noticed it and stopped as soon as I was asked to install yet more unfamiliar software.

@DVader



I took a look at your small video and it is very nice. I like the water and trees animation.



Good Job.

Thanks Tingalls! Always nice to get positive feedback! Green Gandalf, I can only think you mean the Dreamscene Activator. As far as I can see it is a genuine program and has caused me no issues. Of course you can never be sure, but I did check it out a little before downloading it myself. It seems legit. You only need it because Microsoft in their infinite wisdom decided to disable Dreamscenes in Windows 7! If your running Vista it should work as standard. I must admit to Dreamscenes being the only part of Vista I actually liked, so was disappointed when they removed it from Windows 7. Still, I can understand your reluctance! I think you can enable dreamscenes manually if you prefer, I'm pretty sure the activator just comments some stuff back in to the registry!

Thanks for the explanations DVader. I'll take a look.



Edit OK. Downloaded and ran the DreamScene activator but now nothing happens when I right click a video file and choose "Set as DreamScene".



Is there something else I need to do? The video plays fine in Windows Media Player- and looks good. . Same problem applies to all the other .mpg/.wmv files that I have.

The video file needs to be a wmv. Other types of video don't work. Dream Scene also needs a restart after activating. Maybe one of those are the issue?

Your file was a .wmv I believe.







That's probably it. Don't know why I didn't do that.



Thanks.

Heh, no problem. It is rare you need to restart for anything these days, I was the same

Just tested the restart. Works nicely. Thanks.

Cool, glad it worked! Nice to know someone has looked at it! I though it looked pretty cool as a backdrop.

How did you create the video?



I have Windows 7 and something called Windows Live Movie Maker which seems to have rather limited capability. A bit of browsing suggests that Windows Movie Maker is a different program with better features - but every site suggests it's included with Windows.

I used Windows Movie Maker. I think they dropped it from Windows 7 as standard. But you can download it from Microsofts site directly. Not the easiest to use it for making a loop, but possible with a bit of patience.

The version I have is MovieMaker.exe dated 5 February 2013 but doesn't seem to have any way of directly capturing the screen. Did I miss something? Perhaps you are using an older Vista version?



Edit The only way I can see is to take a series of screenshots and put them together in a video but that would be incredibly laborious.



I've also got an earlier version for Vista but that doesn't help either.

Ah, no that is just for getting the right loop edit. I capture using Debut or Fraps.

Ah, I see. Thanks.