Hello fellow mappers!

Today I present you with a new problem, which has been probably unheard of.....probably.

Anywhoo, I will cut to the chase, basically. I ripped a halo 4 bsp along with all of it's textures using adjutant. I have fixed around 172 of the 189 materials however there is a specific brand of materials which I cannot fix... Unfortunately I am not aware of the shader/materials technological name, but within the multisub object slots they are named as composite maps.

The first problem I have with meshes which utilize composite shaders/maps instead of standard diffuse maps is they don't show correctly within the view port or render. This problem I think can be solved by changing certain things within the composite shader but I have no idea what does what and why.

The second and most severe problem I have is, I am 100% sure halo won't compile composite shadsers which use those special maps,

I am speculating here but they maybe a mix of blended RBG data which is incorporated into the main diffuse maps alpha e.t.c

So I was wondering if it is possible to combine a composite map to create 1 diffuse texture from all of the separate elements within photoshop or gimp.

I can't stress how problematic this dilemma is, until now I have either deleted the composite shaders and replaced them with standard shaders using the main diffuse texture from the composite shader or I have deleted the whole thing entirely.

But, I have come across one main texture which covers the floor mesh of the map I am porting, this texture instead of using 1 main diffuse map and a few separate other detail maps on the alpha of the main map.

Instead utilizes a blend or composite map as the main texture, and I am guessing roughly on the RGB and alpha channels uses, a suite of detailed textures such as grass, sand and pebble to blend all the maps together.

I basically, want to fuse the maps together into one diffuse layer so it can be used within a standard material shader.



As seen above is the composite texture map which covers the entire floor.

I have also included a link to the models and textures I am trying to fix so they will compile too!

http://www.mediafire.com/download/mrtz2ddoo7goq4w/cex_bc_composite_models.7z




Lastly, I am aware of R39sniper's composite map tutorial which demonstrates how to set up a biped and it's materials to render nicely within the mental ray and scan-line render-er, but the video blacks out quite often and the tutorial is geared more to setting up materials for a nice render rather than making them compilable.


However, I would appreciate any help with this matter, especially from maniac1000, waffles or r93 sniper!


To put it into context, I want the composite maps to be compilable within halo instead of just 3dsmax, a helpful video or thread tutorial or reply would be extremley helpful with the portation of cex_battle_canyon.

Thank you for reading, and hopefully helping too!
Edited by SS Flanker on Sep 20, 2014 at 10:00 AM

Hmm, the problem I have is the diffues texture for the floor mesh is just a blend map. Which binds together additional detail textures to form the diff map.

What I am trying to do is, merge the blend map and it's detail maps within the appropriate layers using the correct blending modes to merge all the textures together to gain the diffuse map.

I've played around with, the texture channels, blending modes. I even tried to emulate what max did within it's composite shader but to no avail.

Please download this!: http://www.mediafire.com/download/mrtz2ddoo7goq4w/cex_bc_composite_models.7z

And if you are still confused, max uses this texture \/ As some kind of a mask.



To bring all of these elements together \/









To create something that looks like this \/



I want, to combine all those elements into 1 diffuse texture so it resembles something like what you see above.

This is what the floor looks like in hr or hcea


Edited by SS Flanker on Sep 20, 2014 at 10:35 AM

@Waffles, I understand but surely if the textures can be configured in max's comp shader system you can do exactly the same in photoshop. To my knowledge it looks like the shader just mess's around with blend mode's and channels.

@Mootjuh: Sorry I have a max2011 version here: http://www.mediafire.com/download/2fpdnn5kn16g536/bc_composite_models+textures.7z

I would abandon this, but the floor texture is such a main piece, there really is no way to get out of this.

Edited by Super Flanker on Feb 4, 2016 at 06:03 AM

I was planning to just scale it down to 1024x1024 or less and use 512x512 detail maps.

Out of the 189 textures I i've fixed 130 I have 2 more materials to fix and then I can move back to optimizing, might make a thread about....

Edited by Super Flanker on Feb 4, 2016 at 06:02 AM