Hi guys, I've been dong a lot of practising with texturing lately and one thing I've started to get a little annoyed with, something that makes the whole process laborious is having to import a model with its textures into gameguru to be able to see how they have turned out when compiled together, then when you make a change having to close gameguru down, delete the DBO file and then load gameguru up, rinse repeat.

Now while researching texturing and mapping, I've noticed quite a few of the people making tutorials tend to use a 3D viewer of some sort to preview how they will turn out, most seem to use Marmoset Toolbag, this does seem like an almost perfect tool to cut down on the messing about.

However it's quite expensive.

Does anybody know of a cheaper alternative?

Basically what I need is a tool that I can place the diffuse, normal, and specular texture into and it will display them combined so you can check your mapping, I don't even need it to import a model, just the textures on a flat plane will do.

Any ideas?

The problem is, they will look different in any other software. So you cant really tell what there going to look like in GG until there in GG. Xnormal has all that though, so I would say xnormal as its free. Xnormal is also one of the best free normal mappers out there. Another good one is awsomebump. Great normal mapper etc and has a great viewer.

I use Gimp 2.8, free and do the trick nicely, it's like a free PS.

3com

I use insanebump, Gimp which gives you preview of all textures prior to executing for processing/saving. You will never know what anything looks like until you place it into GameGuru or any software.

I'm having the same headache, especially with normal and specular maps that are more detailed than GG likes. GG turns them into dotted messes and I find myself reworking again and again to get a good result without losing too much detail. But as said above, testing in other software doesn't give the same result GG will give anyway. It's up to me to find a happy medium for now, I suppose.

crazybump.

Lol, that's even more expensive than the ones I mentioned in my opening post :p

I usually just close level (open blank map), make the changes I want (delete dbos, fpe file, model, etc), and reopen it.

3com

@Belidos,

All I do is set up the texture maps in blender and fire off a quick render. Using Cycles with around 100 samples, just to get a nice idea of how it will look.

I also sometimes render some of them at around 1000 samples, as I will need a render of the model(s) for the store or to show people.

Remember, Blender is your friend for most things. You can even use it in place of Adobe After Effects and create awesome videos.

Cheers

Jay.

I have absolutely no idea how to do that, but i'll take a look, I've been avoiding cycles because I've read a lot of bad things about it, and the few times I've tried to texture using cycles for some reason it won't UV map.

I keep saying it but will one last time, you do not need to delete .dbo files at all, these will auto update themselves with any ,x model changes. You are wasting your time deleting these for texture changes anyhow as they have nothing to do with textures. Only time you would store it in .x is as binary for multiple texture paths, nothing else, in fact every time you delete the dbo you are forcing GG editor to take the time to create new one and this can be long for larger files such as character models etc for no good reason.
There was a time back when texture changes would update without having to close the program but this stopped working around the same time they removed texture and shader selection in the properties panel, guess it's the way GG now stores these in memory for editor display but a step backwards for anyone looking for easy editing of entities. I agree it is one of the most annoying things about GG is not being able to refresh directly in editor for texture and model changes and something I whined a lot about back at the very start, it prompted the dbo update then went downhill again with texture and shader changes as I say above and having to close out for this every time kills creativity.

Just my two cents and not going to care anymore if folks want to waste time deleting files that don't need it but it is an old habit that seems to die hard for some and new users are told to do it unnecessarily.

Yes, you keep saying that, but it has not been my experience, and others have said the same.

Whenever I change the texture of an object, if it has a .dbo it shows the texture wrong, it may not supposed to be doing that but it does for me.

Maybe there's some kind of cache that takes time to update and just coincides with the time that I delete the .dbo I don't know, but I do know that my textures do not update automatically.

It's the same if I alter the actual .x file at all it always shows the old model until I delete the .dbo without fail.

If I get chance this weekend, I might try to get a simple video up to show you how I texture things in Cycles. You NEED to get on with cycles man! It's the best thing to happen to Blender since time began. You have much more control over the materials in Cycles. You basically have a PBR viewer and can bake some really nice textures out.

I will try to get a video sorted.

Cheers

Jay.

Cool thanks J, i'm looking forward to it.



I've been avoiding it because when I tried it the first time, I UV mapped the object then went to bake and the whole bake section of the options was completely missing.

When I went to the Blender dev forum and asked what I had done wrong, I was told that cycles is only for rendering in the Blender game and animation engine and it does not bake textures, and that is why it was missing.

That was a while ago though, and I know they've done a lot of updates since then, i'll have to have another look.

Blender is a pain on some things. A lot of things in blender could use simplification, but its also great at some things. Like rigging and animating and texturing. It doesnt get any easier when it comes to tangent normal mapping then xnormal. Not to mention xnormal does ambient occlusion, cavity and just about every other type of map you can think of. Xnormal also has a very good model viewer. Add its 100 percent free and you cant go wrong.

Another awsome one I use to use a lot is SMAK: Super Model Army Knife, but sadly it hates windows 10 so I can no longer use it http://getsmak.com/

Top Free in my book in order of I like is:

SMAK : normal mapping etc
Xnormal norml: tangent normal mapping etc
Wings 3d: for modeling
Blender : for uv mapping and texturing
Sculptris: The best free 3d sculpting app for making your highres model to create your tangent normal maps, also has a good texturing feature.