DeleD Community Edition

[chronozphere]

Hi DeleD-friends,

Today, I have fixed multi-layer material support in DeleD. When I did, I started playing with the possibilities. Turns out you can do some pretty cool stuff with this.

Note: You can only follow this tutorial if you have DeleD 2.44 (or higher) or if you have downloaded and applied the "multitexture blend patch" from sourceforge.

First of all, you will need my NashaUV plugin as it is the only way to edit the different texture layers. It should be available in the plugins menu.

You might also want to download the files I used here (textures + initial DXS). The can be found here:
Download tutorial textures and DXS

Also, I assume that you are familiar with DeleD, texturing and materials.

Step 1:

Make a mesh of your landscape. I just used a grid. Arrange the vertices in such a way that you can see your path in the geometry. Like this:



Step 2:

Now we will make a new material. You will need two textures. One grass texture that is totally opaque (no alpha) and a texture of the path that is partially transparent. I used a 32bit TGA image. I wont explain here how to make this image transparent.

Make a new material. Put the grass texture in the first layer and the path texture in the second layer. The blend-mode of the second layer must be "alpha-blend".



Step 3:

Now apply this material to your landscape model. It will probably look like this now:



Step 4:

Start NashaUV and select the second layer by using the layer toolbutton at the top (It's the fourth from the right).




Step 5:

Now you want to make sure that the texture is visible in your left viewport. Double click "NO TEXTURE" in the statusbar. It now changes to "TEXTURE", double click again and you will have "TILES" which is what we want.

Select all vertices and scale them down alot, so that they fit in the black area next to the path. It shoud look like this:



Step 6:

Now select the polygons that make up our path. You can shift + click them in any viewport to select them.



Step 7:

Use the move tool (in the left viewport) to move these polygons away from the rest. Now you must use the move, rotate and scale tools to turn these polygons into a long strip. Like this:



Step 8:

We are almost done now. We just have to make sure that the strip is scaled correctly and that none of the vertices is ON the path. All vertices should be in the black area.

Now its time to fine-tune the UV coordinates. Take a good look in the 3d view and carefully move the vertices around in the UV viewport until everything looks neat.



Step 9:

Click the "Floppy disk" icon to send the changes to DeleD. Click the red arrow to exit the plugin.

The result:



I hope you find this tutorial usefull. I also hope more people will start using my plugin.

If you have any questions, please shout.

[elementrix]

very nice addition, I use this sometimes (not in deled) but I always wanted to use it when I still used deled
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[chronozphere]

You guys will love this.

I just made this beach. I used alpha-blending as blend-mode, one double-layered texture and vertex colors (with alpha value) and my own plugin ofcourse.



I could make a tutorial for this one aswell. But not now, because I need sleep.

[trucker2000]

That looks too cool. Thanks for the tut showing us how you did it.
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[Jeroen]

Yeah, that looks really well! Thanks for the tutorial!
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[harper]

Excellent improvement, thanx for that - but:
Where i can download it, or what you called DeleD 2.4 ?

[chronozphere]

[AWM Mars]

This feature will be a boon for creating texturing that is more realistic.. excellent job

I'm thinking moss, ivy, leaves, mountain tops.. the list goes on.
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[Mr.Fletcher]

For the record, I made a similar tutorial here. Nice to see multitexturing in DeleD working now!
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[chronozphere]

That's a very nice one too.

The only problem is that you might encounter z-fighting issues when rendering this in a game-engine, because the two planes are really close to eachother. That's why I prefer multitexturing.

[AWM Mars]

I'm thinking animated meshes for water using similar techniques.... I can also use Property behaviours to create rolling waves, surf, caustics.... Might even try my hand at clouds....
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[harper]

As an old Amiga-user i remember animation often was simulated by colour-rotating, what sometimes realized cool effects. So - what about animated GIF's or something for textures? Especially water surfaces could look good with this? I am in a productive phase, so i produce alot of ideas.... sorry.

[AWM Mars]

I have experimented using actual video on a mesh to simulate water movement. Its worked very well once the short looped movie had downloaded. My experience in creating machinima helped a lot.

I have asked in several forums of many programmes about why GIF's arent supported graphic formats, as animated gifs would solve quite a few issues for designers.. not sure I fully believe the answers, but would be interested to hear here
I suspect it has something to do with animating graphics requiring a runtime engine to work. Albeit I'm only interested in having these effects happening in our hosted engine. That is where the main issue may lie, Ogre graphics engine doesn't support animated gifs, like many other platforms don't either.
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[chronozphere]