Ships too bright, anyone knows the solution?

from Sins Forums

Well, here's a thinker, and its been bugging me since day one. My ships are too bright, especially when viewed from afar with the ship mesh highlight filter on. In fact, with the filter on, when you zoom out they allmost turn white. With the filter off, they look okay.

But, also, and this may be just my perfectionist attitude at work, but when wieved from the lit side, they also seem a little too bright. Granted, the base color for Xin ships is whitish/grey, but there's plenty of other stuff there and it shouldn't look a bit washed out. I vaguely remember someone (Major Stress maybe) mentioning messing about with a certain channel in one of the textures to correct the lighting, but I've no idea whether its the "standard specular data goes to red data channel" or not. If it is, then I'm worse off because I've no idea how to fix this.

Anyone got suggestions? I'd hate to have to tell people to turn off their mesh highlight option because if vanilla models can use it, so should mine.

modding
3,326 views 4 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

No, I think ships are too stupid.

Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top

manshooter, could this thread https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/?aid=325390 reply 10 be what you were thinking of?

harpo

 

Galactic Civilizations III
Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top

I've been playing with this a lot recently and here is what I found

 

assuming that your diffuse(proper team color), glow(proper glow, very little reflection, very little specular and bloom), normals (it will be too light if you don't have some sort of normal map, fill with 127 and not 0 if you don't have one) and ambient brightness value (32) are all okay you still need to have proper tangents in the model

 

XSI doesn't seem to want to make a proper tangent space map, and max doesn't seem to keep any sanity to it after UVing it always flips portions of the model and there are no easy mirroring options the best I have found is to map with cube world XZ aligned.

 

Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top

The red channel on the '....-da.dds' file dictates how bright the highlights are from a light source, so turning down brightness or playing with contrast on that channel will reduce highlights. However from what I gather the highlight filter simply applies the '...cl.dds' to the entire ship when zoomed out, therefore if the cl is light grey/white then the ship may look artificially exposed. I tend not to play with the highlight filter as i think it isn't realistic.