Not sure I'm quite ready for a full-on return to Game Guru yet as many features still seem to be broken in development. Instead, I've been indulging in a bit of modelling for some possible in-game assets. And now that DX11 is (sort of) here, it seemed like a good opportunity to teach myself texturing for PBR. I do not own Substance Designer or Marmoset Ballbag Toolbag, so I'm doing this manually using Paint Shop Pro 5 (which was released in 1998), xNormal (which is free), and Sketchfab (which I created a free account on so I can use it as a PBR viewer).

I wanted something that involved a mixture of shiny and tarnished metals, concretes, plastics, painted surfaces, and ceramics.

So, I've decided to model some London Underground assets.

Here's my progress so far:

Rail Section
The idea is to create something modular and low-poly. No idea if this concept will work in Game Guru, or whether you will see the 'stitches'.



Platform Section
My day job is working for a sight loss charity so I got stupidly excited to model some accurate tactile paving slabs for Game Guru. Very sad I know...



Tunnel Sections
This element is the only one with 4096x4096 textures so far, and the only reason for the high res is because one texture set spans three different sections of tunnel (blank tiles, entrance left and entrance right). Each tunnel, track and platform section is 2m long.



Roundel
TfL (Transport for London) have some incredibly detailed and helpful PDFs on their website that give details on not only station design and layout, but also on materials, lighting design, brand colours, fonts, and sign placement. It's basically a step-by-step manual on how to design a tube station and I couldn't have got this far without them! Sadly though, they own the copyright to both the quintessential Johnston 100 typeface and the iconic roundel design. I will have to approach them to license these, which you can do through their website. I have no idea if this will be free or not (I suspect not).



Roof panels
For this station, I'm replicating the Central London Railway style, most commonly associated with stations on the Central Line, such as Oxford Circus and Lancaster Gate. It may be possible to adapt the pack and provide additional variations to mimic other popular station styles.



I'm working on this on and off but I hope there will be more to follow!

AE

And a very nice job you are making of it,just goes to show what you can do with old tools .very nice

Dave

Welcome back. Great start so far.

You should be fine. For now at least. I too am using old tools (Ps CS 2) and a cheap PBR viewer (p3d.in). Materials look a bit worse in GG but that's to be expected, at this stage. Better to stumble forward than cling to the past.

This is some great work, something I started working on a couple of weeks ago between other jobs but yours is quite a bit cleaner, I love the naming 'Bamber Street', I was wondering what to name mine.


Andrew...

Help Point
I had great fun this afternoon making what I consider to be a very accurate rendition of a help point, which are found throughout the underground and particularly at platform level. I'm particularly happy with the way the fire alarm came out, especially considering I texturing it 'by hand' and didn't just use a photograph.



I also spent some time earlier in the week exporting the assets from my first batch and getting them into Game Guru. They look great but you can see the joins between each tunnel and rail section. If I were to make a level out of them, I'd be tempted to assemble the station in a 3D package first and weld the sections together there, before importing the whole lot into Game Guru.



And all while the lightmapping in Game Guru is broken, I can't do any atmospheric renders like I want to.

AE

Good progress otherwise Glad to find another paint shop user

...









...is it though? You and I must have very different definitions of "working".

AE

Nice image But I bet your surface level sliders are all quite high. Now try lighting an exterior scene at night with streetlights and you'll find that as soon as you lower the surface sliders to create a dark, faint, moonlight (instead of a sun), your static lightmaps will be crushed into insignificance, no matter how many static lights you duplicate into the same point. I even tried using a mixture of dynamic and static lights but to no avail

Wouldn't be a problem if we could control the sun intensity and colour separately.

AE

I have not posted on GitHub, I'm not signed up to it. May do that though...

AE

Bin
...I mean, there's not much to say...it's just a bin.
In all seriousness though, this object presented some interesting modelling and texturing challenges regarding how to create realistic trash that will (hopefully) be visible inside the semi-transparent plastic bin bag. The easiest option, and what I might have done a few years ago for FPSC, would be to have a nondescript 'trash texture' on a solid mesh in the bottom of the bag. Or do it all using the bag texture itself. Instead, I opted for the more complicated option of actually making an assortment of low poly trash models including cups, paper, and packaging to sit in the bottom of the bin.



The cost of the extra polygons isn't too high, and it's all textured from one atlas (along with _metal, _gloss, and _normal maps). Each item of trash represented a different material, from the shiny metal of the can, to the waxy cardboard of the drinks cup, to the transparent plastic of the bottle. I enjoyed coming up with faux brand names for all the products, and designing a fake newspaper front page.



The model is shown here with its full 2048 x 2048 maps but it won't need to be this high res in Game Guru so I'll resize the maps before importing. Maybe if I release this pack on the store, I could include the full res versions too.

EDIT: Looking at it again, I think I might dirty up the bag texture itself a bit. Still looks a bit too clean...

AE

Nice bin there.

I have been avoiding transparency lately, could get to work in X9. But in X11 even if I get to work, it always end up getting trashed (lol - pun not intended) by the light map process. Just can't get blender to keep the transparent mesh parts in the right place.

So yeah, great job AE

Reliquia....

Bench (2 x Variations)
One of the objects I've been looking forward to modelling most is the metal benches found at many London Underground platforms. The combination of curving painted metal seats and armrests, chrome accents, and lots of holes provided some interesting modelling and texturing challenges for me. The free-standing bench is slightly higher-poly than I would like (currently 1700) but I just learned how to do LODs so I may be able to provide more optimised versions too.



The bench comes in two variations. I was initially only going to model the free standing one but I could see whilst modelling that I was going to have a lot of space left on the UV map and, since the two variations share many of the same components, I was able to squeeze them all onto the one map. With both benches sharing the same texture, I have effectively created two benches for the price of one, which will give developers a little more choice when they come to designing their own stations.



Stay tuned for more progress!

AE

Nice models Avenging Eagle,they look real

Dave

Office
On several of my reference images, I noticed many of the platforms at underground stations have these small rectangular rooms at each end. Don't know whether these are tiny offices, broom cupboards, or doors to service passages, but I felt adding them would lend an extra layer of authenticity and break up the geometry a bit. So, I modelled a rectangle with a door inset in it. Not exactly the world's most complicated model, but it does its job well.



I'm pleased with how the PBR textures turned out on this one. The door and tiles both have the appropriate level of shininess, and I also made some slight changes to the tiles on all the tunnel sections to dirty them up a bit. No underground station is completely sterile and clean after all.



This week also saw me finally get those benches from the last update into GG, with the added benefit of LOD meshes. Several members of the forum helped point me in the right direction when I was struggling, so thanks to them! Here's what we've got in GG so far.



I'm still weighing up whether to model more platform details like signage, or move onto other parts of the station. Rest assured though, when I have something new, I'll be back with an update

AE

It depends which platform you are talking about, most of them are just cubby holes where the breakers for the lights etc are, and various cleaning supplies are kept, others are entrances into the service areas that run parallel to the tracks.



I've never been convinced that there are benefits to LOD, on the one hand you have less draw calls until you get close to the entity, but on the other hand, a model with 2 stages of LOD is essentially 3 models in one, so would take up considerably more memory on loading, i suppose it's a balance between loading times and fps.

WOW AE this is really good work well done

Signage #1
This weekend, I started creating some smaller decorative elements like posters, and signage. Anyone who saw my other thread will know I tried to make a model with multiple materials but it ended up being Game Guru'd in the kneecaps (to use Wolf's phrase!) so I ended up reverting to a simpler method which should still allow relatively easy customisation. The signs were fun to make, and gave me another opportunity to study documentation from TfL on how to lay them out correctly. I squeezed all 3 signs onto a single 1024 texture without losing much detail too.



Two of the signs feature _emissive maps, which were a bit challenging to get right in Game Guru because most other threads and documentation seem to suggest _illumination is the correct suffix for illumination maps. It can safely say, it is NOT!



And here's how these 4 new models look in Game Guru. My little test level is starting to get a bit cluttered so I may rebuild it from scratch with a longer platform to give me room to expand.



I'm actually in London tomorrow with my camera so hopefully I'll get the opportunity to take some reference stills. There's one or two elements I'm struggling to find decent pictures of that I'm dying to model.

AE

Great looking models,maybe a little clean looking for London


What is

Dave

For dnsi textures, _i is the extension.
For pbr textures _illumination is the extension. _emmisive can be used on everything but weapons and characters. I have not tried that extension.

Illuminated objects will show as dynamic obects when lightmapped.
Use f11 function to enter pbr debug mode, keys 1 thru 0

Make sure your illumination texture has an alpha channel.
Select what you want to be illuminated and level it pure white in the alpha channel. Select inverse and press the delete key.
Save file as _i or _illumination as .dds with dxt1 compression.

Use abpr_illumination shader for pbr
Entry_basic for dnsi

Thanks for that,I think I will print that one out

Dave

I use _illumination since it is what Lee set as the standard for textures away back, never heard of _emissive till this thread.

I find PBR illumination to be flat - seams more like it just changes the color to a brighter shade rather than actually glowing, unless you turn Bloom way up, which of course has the two-fold result of washing out the sky, and draining FPS big time.

I have experimented using both abpr_basic and apbr_illumination but no difference.

Pirate Myke, when I read your reply above I thought aha that's what I have been missing, promptly fired up photoshop after the cricket, and can safely say I have no idea what you are suggesting - lol.
To test, I added an alpha channel, saved as dxt1 no alpha - no difference just flat brighter color - also tried dxt1 with 1 bit alpha, same result.

Would be nice to have some kind of official locked down method of textures for GG.
As with transparency, and like here with illumination, there are numerous conflicting posts as to what we should be doing, but nothing concrete as to what is the correct way for GG to handle these things properly.

Reliquia....

That'll be what I missed, I didn't realise you needed an alpha channel. I also didn't realise DXT 1 would be the correct compression method. Because I make all my textures as .png in an old version of Paint Shop Pro, I'm very familiar with creating alpha channels based on luminance (white = opaque, greys = semi transparent, black = transparent). But Paint Shop Pro can't save as .dds, and I'm still very much a novice when it comes to creating alpha channels in Photoshop, or saving pre-existing alpha channels in a .png file into a .dds. Thanks for the info though!

On balance, I prefer the _emissive method because it's more like what I'm used to in 3D animation and doesn't require me to make an alpha channel (it literally doesn't work if you DO have an alpha channel).

AE

For Photoshop Only:
Select what you want to be illuminated and paint it pure white.
Select inverse and paint pure black.
Magic wand select the white.
Hold shift key and press Add mask.
Right click on the mask part in the layers and press apply mask.

Save file as _i or _illumination as .dds with dxt1 argb 4 bpp 1 bit alpha compression.

That should work for you now.

Thanks Myke will give that a go

Edit: So if I am doing this correctly - which I doubt lol - we end up with a transparent map with the bits we want illuminated being white?

Reliquia....

Are there not any plugs for it? Graphics cards are optimized for .dds and likewise GG handles them better than png.

Gimp is opensource and has plugs for .dds - might be an option.

Reliquia....

https://download.nvidia.com/developer/NVTextureSuite/Paint_Shop_Pro_Steps.pdf

links in instructions

Thanks for all your help, guys. Sadly, Belidos, my version of Paint Shop Pro (5) is so old (1998) that the Nvidia plugin just seems to break it. It's OK though, I've had Nvidia plugins working in Photoshop for ages and I'm happy to do the conversions to dds in Photoshop.

PirateMyke, many thanks for the tutorial, it works for me, but naturally a 1-bit alpha channel is either black or white, transparent or opaque. That's why I personally prefer the _emissive workflow because it can cope with all the semi-glowing bits.

AE

Have'u tried tried this one?

Nice work so far.

Security camera(s)
I've really been looking forward to modelling these London-Underground-branded security cameras that can be found all over the network. Some careful modelling upfront ensured I will get three distinctly different variant models out of the same mesh. Here I'm presenting the 'double' layout, which would be placed mid-platform to look both ways, but there's also a single camera that can hang from the ceiling, and even one that can be mounted to the arching walls of the platform.



I'm a fairly modest person but I've got to say I feel I've really outdone myself with this model The mixture of painted metal casing, glass front, metal screws and bolts all presented opportunities for PBR to shine but, for me, I'm most proud of the shielded metal cabling because I got it totally seamless. That allowed me to construct these very realistic twisting cables in a low poly way.



One more beauty shot, showing off the camera lens. Total poly count for this variant is 1396, which is acceptable for something so small, but I may yet make a LOD for it as I've become obsessed with performance!



But that's not all I modelled recently...

Loudspeaker
Lots of London Underground platforms have these distinctive loudspeakers retrofitted into the ceiling so I was keen to model one. This one has been difficult simply because I couldn't find any decent reference images of it. For the longest time, I couldn't work out the exact shape of one, because they are always above platform level. Cue my girlfriend very kindly snapping some reference images for me on her commute (and no doubt looking like a total goon). Anyway, thanks to her, I got the model done...and all in under 150 polys. I really dirtied this one up too



Until next time...

AE

Very nice modeling their Avenging Eagle.

Great attention to detail , and the models are great

Dave

It's been a while since my last update, but I have been busy. After my last post, I decided to make a bigger station to better showcase my models and test out the viability of building an actual level out of them. If you've seen my thread in Product Chat, you'll know I was experiencing some lighting issues with my segments, something which I eventually solved by de-triangulated them and adjusting the positions of individual vertexes to be mathematically correct. This took a lot of time and testing, but the upshot is that I can now use the segments as originally intended to build perfectly-aligned seamless stations in Game Guru. I can't tell you how pleased I am to have finally fixed this issue, thanks entirely to the helpful users of this forum!

Posters
I've also been busy making a small assortment of dull but necessary models; posters. London Underground stations are full of advertising and information posters, and it was vital I modelled some to add detail, authenticity, and visual interest to the station, especially now I've worked out each platform needs to be 130 metres long to be accurate to life. After some research, I discovered the three main poster sizes used are 4-sheet, 12-sheet, and 48-sheet, which allowed me to create accurately scaled models that arch over in tandem with the tunnel segments. I then set about the laborious task of designing some fake posters; I've done one in each size but will need a lot more to fill a whole station.

Incidentally, if you want to advertise your game, film, band, brand, product, hometown, business, or whiskey, do get in touch, I'd love to add more posters!

In addition, I also modelled some information posters; namely a tubemap (which shows the whole network) and a linemap (which just shows the stops on one line). Can't wait for TFL to deny me the license to actually reproduce these...



Timing Board
Another model I've been very much looking forward to modelling is the timing boards, which show incoming trains and service messages.



I'd love for the text to be animated but Game Guru doesn't support video textures (yet?) and 64 frames is too few to consider doing it as a sprite sheet. For now I've popped actual text and numbers on there but obviously it's a static texture so the time doesn't change. I may do one where the timing board has obviously failed and just shows a scattering of dots, which wouldn't need to be animated.



And, finally, here's a screenshot from within Game Guru of all the elements discussed in this update.



I think I'm nearly done with platform assets now, and will soon be moving on to do some bits for the rest of the station, including corridors and stairs.

AE

Safety Barriers
Safety barriers like this are a common sight on most underground platforms so I felt I should model some. They don't all look the same though, so rather than simply model one, a bit of careful forethought upfront allowed me to squeeze 8 variations out of the one model. Naturally, they all share the same textures.



I managed to get some great reference photos on one of my recces to London recently, one of which was so good I ended up using it in the texture itself. Believe it or not, this is currently the only model I've done so far that uses an actual photo in the texture rather than something I've created by hand.



This model has some nice alpha channel work going on to create the mesh effect. Sadly Game Guru doesn't render this as well as SketchFab



This model, and its variations, concludes all of the platform entities I wanted to make. Now I'm moving my attentions to the rest of the station. Stay tuned for more!

AE

Some nice detail there AE - great work.

Pity there is not a more effective way to get animations in for signs an things like computer terminals in Game Guru - like you say 64 frames is not enough.

Just wondering what size your textures are to get that amount of detail in....

Reliquia....

You can have as many frames as you want. (If your machine can deal with it)
Copy the FX file.
Rename it.
Open it in Notepad.exe

Change the rows and columns in the tweakable section to what ever you want.


128 x 128 image size is about the smallest cell you want on a 4K texture. DX11 can take up to 8K texture for this task and you can have clearer images or more of them.
Based on 4096 x 4096:
128 Pixel Frame is 32 x 32
256 Pixel Frame is 16 x 16

Save the new shader file, and you will need to compile the shaders, so set the forceloadtestgameshaders=1 in the setup.ini
Run Game Guru.
Load the map with the shader you want to use. Run the map. It will take a bit longer then normal to compile the shaders.
Once the map is in test game, you can exit Game Guru and set the forceloadtestgameshaders=0 in the setup.ini file.

Your new shaders are ready for use.

For presentation here, it's predominantly 2K and 4K .png with a few 1024, but once in Game Guru, sometimes I downsize them during the dds conversion. I could probably do more in this regard but I'm waiting until I've built a bigger level before I start optimising texture size further. If I were to release this as a pack, I could include all the full size .pngs to allow users to scale as they wish.

@PirateMyke
That's handy to know but not suitable for most entities. Yes 128 x 128 on a 4K texture gives you 40 seconds of animation, but at such a terrible resolution it would only be useful for very small entities or very pixelated screens. The lowest res I would want to go on my timing board to maintain detail is 1024, so that gives me 16 frames to play with, or 64 if I went to 8K. It would just be so much easier if video textures were an option.

AE

This is really good work as far as the signs yes it can be done, the quality is not that bad infact for the video in this clip I had to make the security feed black and white and add noise it looked too clear lol



The texture for the security camera is 9836x9836 40x40 and it works quite well yes its a big texture but I wanted more than 30 seconds I think it is about 60 seconds maybe a bit more.



I have attached the shader files to this post the .fx and the .blob

I originally intended my next update to feature corridors but I'm still working on them, slowly. Instead, I'd like to take this opportunity to show off a little breakthrough I had with my next train indicators, thanks to examining the files GraPhiX supplied in the post above this one. I decided to spend the weekend playing with shaders and eventually came up with not only a solution to animate the next train indicator itself, but also a workflow for creating an accurate digital clock in Game Guru!

For weeks I'd been hypothesising about how to create a LUA-controlled digital clock in Game Guru using a series of one directional flat polygons ("cards") that would be animated to flip round to the appropriate number when called by the script. This would give developers complete control over what time the clock would start on. Although I built a prototype, I struggled to animate it in both Milkshape and Fragmotion and eventually gave up in favour of a much simpler shader-based solution (thanks again GraPhiX!). It's a little less customisable than I'd like, but nothing a video tutorial couldn't teach the average user how to exploit. It took a lot of trial and error to get right, not least because I had to work out how to make a 64 frame animation only show 60 different numbers. Eventually I arrived at the solution used by the clock seen below; it uses three separate shaders (one for seconds, one for minutes, one for hours), and two different atlas textures.



As you can imagine, testing its accuracy over long periods of time is a little challenging but I'm happy to report I've run a test game for over an hour and the clock remained precise to the second throughout Not sure many Game Guru levels will ever be longer than that!

It's also worth mentioning I had to place these shaders in the Galaxy Seed folder of the effectbank because they reference other shaders located there.

Next time, corridors!

AE

Excellent stuff, you have done an amazing job with this

Very creative guys. Great job.

This is looking really good. When the newest particle commands get released (later this week?) you will be able to do that sort of thing using particles btw.

Just waiting for a PM from GraPhiX with a model bedside digital alarm clock needing a script.

Although that would make a lot of what I just made surplus to requirements, I'd certainly prefer a particle-based solution; my one currently relies on some rather precise entity placement and is a bit...fiddly. Can't wait to see yours in action! Funnily enough, I was already considering modelling both a bedside alarm clock, and the launch countdown counter to experiment more with clocks



Thanks, GraPhiX! You gave me just the nudge I needed to delve into shaders a little more. Hopefully I'll be able to implement more animated elements later on.



Many thanks, Myke!

AE

Yep, you would still need a sprite sheet with the digits on but that shouldn't be too difficult.

The new commands basically allow a single particle to be placed at an exact location and angle so for a clock display you would simply need to work out the offsets from the models origin for each digit and the script can then calculate the position and rotation at runtime and place the 'particle' appropriately.

One thing I may need to do to make this sort of thing really useful is add the ability to control the frame of the animation at runtime, I'm not sure if the control we have currently is good enough, although I haven't played with this yet so it may be possible already.

(by this I mean to be able to specify which frame of animation to start from, which to end at and have the animation speed specifiable for each particle generated)

How exciting.

Great job on that clock,amazing what people can do when they get together station look fantastic to,maybe a little to clean for London

Dave

That looks absolutely stunning - very well done.

Cheers.

Beautiful work

This is ridiculously long update about something that took ridiculously long to do...

Corridors
For this update, I want to delve a little into how I went about creating some seemingly simple corridor assets...which turned out to be anything but!

The initial idea was to create some FPSC-style corridors to link platforms and bits of the station together, something you can play with and arrange in any layout you like. The starting point, as always, was lots and lots of reference photography, much of which I shot myself on various recces throughout January and February.



My idea was to model a 'kit' of base meshes that all shared the same texture. These could be manipulated to give different configurations; straight sections, T-junctions, left and right corners, and stairs. I had assumed I'd only need to model flat ceilings but my recces showed curved, vaulted ceilings are also very prevalent. Rather than choose one or the other, I decided to create a separate kit for just the ceilings. To get an idea of scale, I modelled some basic mockups for GG and played around until I had the right size.



I basically had to approach these corridors like small Lego kits; I needed to model all the pieces I'd need to construct the full segments later on after texturing. Not only that, but the segments had to be able to fit together seamlessly in-engine once assembled. This required a lot of careful thought, and nowhere was this more apparent than the stairs segments. I spent a fortnight mentally planning how I'd construct the staircase, what sections I'd need, and what they'd need to look like. I even start making sketches to work out angles.



It started to drive me a little crazy because I couldn't seem to get the proportions right - it always looks cartoony. Then I had an idea; if I could find out the dimensions of each step, I could accurately model the stairs and then just angle the walls to match. This led me to consult my reference photos again.



The edge of these steps have a metallic nosing on them made by a company called AATI Ltd. So I went and found AATI's website and, sure enough, not only do they have nice renderings of all their products (including the step nosing seen above) but they also give dimensions for them!



So I went back to my reference images and measured the height and depth of a step in pixels, then used the measurements above to work out what that must convert to in millimetres. I made one step 'to scale' and then duplicated it multiple times to create a staircase. And guess what? It looked spot on; not too steep, not too shallow, steps in proportion, AND it fit almost perfectly into the 200 vertical units gap Game Guru puts between one floor and the next. I then used a triangle calculator to work out what angle everything needed to go up at; 30.2°. This led to more drawing...



...and some much more successful modelling. Here's the full corridor 'kit' I exported to unwrap. Every corridor segment I made was created from this.



Then it took a day to lay out the UVs and a few more days to texture. I mastered this one in 4K but it could easily be dropped to 2K without too much loss of quality.



Then I repeated the process with the ceilings, creating a single kit containing both flat and curved ceiling elements, exporting it all, UV mapping it, texturing it, and then gradually reassembling it into different segments back in Anim8or. The curved ceilings presented lots of challenges from a modelling point-of-view, the flat ceilings were easier to model but any gaps between segments were more obvious so they needed to be millimetrically precise.

Finally, today, I've been able to get a small mock-up of a few segments into SketchFab so I could finalise the look of the gloss and normal map textures and do some beauty renders. As usual, they won't look this good in Game Guru at the moment, but with some development to the lighting engine, these segments could really start to shine (quite literally, they have _emissive maps too!).






Whilst a lot of work, the two 'kits' I exported (corridors and ceilings) have resulted in 22 separate models for Game Guru that can be mixed and matched accordingly. I also have a few ideas for additional corridor sections I'd like to model to add more options.

What keeps me going through all this, aside from an almost fanatically devotion to creating realistic assets for what will most likely be zero monetary gain, is your continued support. Every comment I get on here is very much appreciated, so thank you. And if you've actually read all this, I hope you found it at least a little bit interesting!

Until next time...

AE

I haven't checked this thread in a while and I must say I am absolutely keen on the level of realism you achieved.
Very natural looking texture work too.



-Wolf