Upcoming stuff

Since I'm really happy with the lighting now, I thought it would be a good thing to do some work on the trees, so they get light up correctly.

Also, I'm fixing the flipped faces and creating new double sides for those on the flow of the road.  So when you look back, you see the back faces.

Since the original used double meshes, both in alpha transparency and chroma, but I cannot do the same in AC.

I'm detaching every single tree into a separate object that will get grouped up by the editor and get proper lighting in game.  Should take a few days, but I believe it will be largely worth it.  Then I might look to see how I could use my forest plugin to generate additional forests where there should be, and maybe replace the treelines with real trees as I did with my rf2 version..  With the 3d trees we have, it should look pretty darn neat, I think!

I'll post a screenshot or two when I have one to show off!

EDIT:  After breaking up two tree objects, fixed the faces, center the pivot and exported, and sure enough, it worked!  Things are looking promising to say the least :)  It's too early to show a screenshot yet as I will need to fine tune the material settings, and I will be able to make better use of the specular value.  Previously it was applied as a whole, on the whole tree object, containing many trees, now they are applied individually.  Much better.

And it looks weird with most of the trees around not lit up the same way.  I'll post an in game screenshot once I have like the full dottinger hohe done, so you will be able to get an idea of how things will look for around the track.

I'm also duplicating the polys for all 3d trees, so we should see all of their branches from both directions.  They appeared a bit funny if you stared at them sometimes, with half of the tree missing at times.

Things should get a whole lot better once this will be done!

EDIT2:  The first two tree objects I broke up were simple X style and a 3 sided star style tree, like this * but with 3 faces instead of 4.

I just broke up a confier object that consisted of two X shape mesh one above the other, slightly rotated, and the result is staggering in game.. the conifer looks wonderful!  This is so exciting, I will likely be updating this post as I go, it's just too much!

EDIT3:  Things are going great.  I improved the way I initially started and ended up doing what I did in the little how to I posted, and things are going great.  I have converted like 7-8 mats already.  And this includes all the trees around the track for that kind.  So it's pretty efficient.  It's going to be a lot quicker than I thought!