Dromed 1.18 Architecture Tutorial

[Alexius]

Ze Architecture Tutorial Supreme
(Collection of most useful dromed functions regarding architectural creations)
Brought to you by Alexius
(The Hammerite Imperium Lead)
(Special thanks to Mortal Monkey & GOB for their grand help)


A NEW WAY TO GO: Building around textures
“What sort of madness is this?” Ye might ask, and I shalt answer-
How doth thy everyday dromeder build?
He crafts brushes upon brushes, then taketh he some olde thief 2 textures and applyeth them onto thee walls.
The effect of creation is lessened for the player’s eyes art used to ye olde thief 2 textures and wisheth they to see the new, the purty, and unexpected.

So my brethren, let us begin to forge the world anew as the master builder hath once said.

Texture making tutorial:
Find yourself a good texture that suits thy needs.
If ye art building a castle- then find a castle picture
If ye art building a city- then find some images of ye olde city.
Usually search engines like www.google.com and www.altavista.com have “find image options”, it might take a while to find a great, high quality image, but with it thy mission shall be grandiose.
If you got the image from the internet, make sure ask for permission and credit whoever you got the picture from when thy fm is completed, following the copyright laws.
The picture has to be preferably flat (the buildings facing towards you or a bit to the side) and of a very large size. The larger-the better.

For example:
Here is a photograph that I took during my stay at Amsterdam.
(real image 3 times bigger)

The plan is to create this building in dromed, using new textures obtained from the photograph.

A very useful tool in thy quest is Photoshop 7.0, which you can buy or obtain on www.downloads.com here, or get elsewhere using thy resources and knowledge.

Edit+Transform+Skew is quite a useful Photoshop function.

Using it, you can transform almost any large photograph into a great thief 2 texture.
First I've skewed my picture a bit, so ithe building is facing me.

Make sure that every line of the picture is at 90 degrees.

Keep using the Skew function until everything is straight.
Use Stretch, option to make sure your size is perfect.
Use cut and paste, rotate & flip horizontal function to make the texture face you.
Use blur function to blur together the parts that don’t match.

Here's the bottom part of the building, from which I have obtained 3 textures.

[Alexius]

Make sure your textures are 256x256 in size.
Save your texture as middletower.bmp (example)

Here are all the textures that I've obtained from my photograph.

Full.bmp is just a copy of any 1 texture from that family that gives thief 2 the 256 color scheme for the family. Without it your textures won't work.

Place your .bmp files that you've made in photoshop into your bright183 folder.
If you don't have bright183, then download it from the editors guild, &
unzip it somewhere.
Next, download combined palettes.bat from me here:
http://www.angelfire.com/empire/alex...d_palettes.bat
(file provided by Mortal Monkey)

Place combined palettes.bat
Into your bright183 folder
Run combined palettes.bat file.
A dos window should appear with tons of lines scrolling through it.
Wait until the process is done.
Your new thief texture should appear in your bright 183 folder.
So, you will have 2 files with same name middletower.bmp (which you can erase now) and middletower.pcx!
Example:
http://thief.duodecimal.net/images/transform.jpg


Take your .pcx textures and place into your thief2/fam/mytextu folder
("mutextu" will be the name of this texture family, it can be named any way ye like)


Same will work if you have 30 textures. You just need 1 full.pcx file and they all have to be taken from bright 183 after they've been modified from .bmp to .pcx together, & placed into your Thief2/fam/"XXXX" folder!
Nice and easy.

Go into dromed and enter command into the command window
Add_family_mytextu
After clicking Alt+T you should see your new texture family like this-
ready to work with.
http://thief.duodecimal.net/images/family1.jpg
Test your texture out in dromed!
Here's how I added the textures on this very simple test design.

See how every texture looks, if it’s blurred, then make the scale smaller, if you see any mistakes, correct them.

This is the easiest and fastest way to make dromed textures, I assure you.
If you are confused just send me an email or a PM.


This is the basic start of our building:

Here is the building, 3d Dromed view to test the new textures.(done in 30 min)



The building itself is quite simple in design, extra elements such as lights, statues, detailed windows, trees & extra architectural detail can be added easely, because the polygon count is very low.

Experiment! Make sure your brushes follow the shapes of your textures , not the other way around!

Advice:
Use command-

load_a_texture

to add textures.
This way you are less likely to run out of texture space and crash/mess up your mission.

Exactly 246 textures fit into the Dromed texture window.
If you add more then 246, textures WILL start dissapearing from the level when you least expect them to.

Sound is added to new textures in Editors+object hirearchy(change Archetypes to "textures"), then select your new textures and simply move them to the folders.
If you have a metal texture then move it to MetalTex, obviously.

[Alexius]

Learn to build around textures -
First you gather as much textures as you can from 1 picture, from 1 style, for 1 building.
Then you save them into a family.
Then you begin building by creating a fill solid cube.
As you apply textures, keep adding more cubes, wedges, and going until you use up every texture available out of your texture family.

For example, I've created a family of textures from St Vitus cathedral:
http://www.users.bigpond.com/nitram_luap/photos/091.jpg
A texture for every 10 metres of the cathedral front.

Look how really simple this cathedral is in dromed.

Don't complicate yourself & multiply polygon count with 10 sided cylinders or 9 sided pyramids!
Don't just use plain squares with old & default thief textures!

And look how detailed it is in this screenshot. Another plus-no slowdown, only 200 polygons in player’s view.
This is the power of-“building around textures”. This is the trick, which allows infinite detail and low polygon count. Use it in thy building, and ye shalt be rewarded greatly.

Here's another interesting way to gather textures:
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthrea...664#post942664


To see how many polygons are in view, enter command in dromed:
show_stats
Then go in game. You will see "polygons rendered"
Dromed can handle around 800 polygons fine.
It crashes at 1200 polys, usually.
Stay below 800 and you'll be fine.
To turn off stats, just enter the command again.
You can enter the command while in game mode, by pressing ctrl+P

To fly around your level, press shift+Q.
To fall press shift+P.

[Alexius]

Building tips:

Stain Glass/window:


Square + a rotated 8 or 11 sided cylinder on top works best. Place A SpotLightPoint on top (make the height of spotlight 1, its brightness 150 or more)
Choose any color for your stain glass light:
Where:
Hue can be 0.00-1.00
0 = Red
.1= Orange
.2= Yellow
.3= Green
.4= Cyan
.5= Light Blue
.6= Dark Blue
.7= Purple
.8= Violet
.9= Red/Purple
1 = Red
Saturation:
0-Less Color, closer to default white light
1-More color
.8 best setting for realistic stain glass lighting.

(provided by caffeinatedzombeh)



Look how realistic the stain glass appears, especially when you have a window in a wall texture on the outside wall too.

[Alexius]

Corridors

CORRIDOR/ROOM TYPE 1:
Some corridors can be made the same way as a stain glass. Simple fill air brushes.
Don't try to make walls with solid brushes. Dromed doesn't like that.
Square at the bottom, 8 sided cylinder at the top.

Same idea, 2 corridor crossing

Final 3d version of the corridor

Bottom texture is from DEDX.
As you can see the bottom square is 16 dromed units high.
The cylinder for the top of the corridor has 8 sides & is 19 dromed units high

CORRIDOR/ROOM TYPE 2:
"Wedges at the top."
Here is a nice little room that illustrates this type of easy to do, good looking architecture.

Here is the view in dromed:

The rotated, long wedges surrond the top of the room.
Square, or even cylinder colums work nicely at the sides.
With nicely aligned textres and well placed wedges you can achieve this great effect:

(Image taken from CoSaS)

STAIRCASES?

Go here:
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~w_hairst/stairs/stairs-tut.html
Grand staircase tutorial by w_hairst!

[Alexius]

<-Aligning textures->
Select any texturized wall, and this window should appear.

V is moving the texture up and down
U is moving the texture left and right
You can use < > to move the texture on the wall, or enter a number from 0 to 256 in the window.


Faster way:
Click the left mouse button & hold it over U so it turns into U
Then move the mouse left, without releasing the left mouse button.
You will see the texture move on your 3d screen. (Light_bright has to be on!), sometimes you have to portalize the mission before you see any changes. But usually, if you didn’t make any new brushes, you’ll see what you are moving right away.
Same works for V.
This makes texture aligning simple and quick!

Another useful texture function-changing its size in dromed:
Scale: < > buttons make the texture larger or smaller.

Be careful, don't go too low or too high. When you go higher, your texture gets blurred, so its a good idea to place it on a building that's far away from player's view, or above the player.
Stay in the general area of (for a small stain glass)15-18(for open areas)

Be aware-When you resize textures (to scale 17-18) sometimes you will notice weird effects such as:
Even when the light bright is on your texture aligning will seem off.
Your texture will split into 2 or 3 pieces each, and will look quite strange when you will try to align it.
Don't worry-quick portalizing fixes that.
Use area brush that's small enough to surround the room you are texturizing and portalize more often.

Also, Bigger texture scale=lower poly count & worse lighting (blurred shadows)
Thus, lower texture scale=higher poly count and COMPLEX shadow layouts possible


Another usefull option is rotate, with enough practice with it, you will be able to align textures on rotated cylinders and other weird shapes.

[Alexius]

Multibrushing
To discover new ways of building, increase your dromed architectural knowledge & speed of creation, use Area brushes and the multibrush function.
Open any level original or your own fan mission find a room you wish to copy & select it with an Area brush.
The Area brush has to contain the entire room (that you wish to learn from) in it.

It has 2 options
Show all (me only not enabled)

Me only (viewing only that segment)

Also very useful, when you want to portalize ONLY one part of the level that's inside an activated Area brush. This allows for much faster level building, by creating 1 part of the level, then another, then another, without having to wait 3 hours for your entire level to portalize each time you modify something!
Using "multibrush me" option we select everything that’s in this room.

Now we are able to Insert (copy) this room, move the entire room anywhere, or save multibrush and place it into any other level.

When you use multibrush, its a good idea to have Komag's dromed menus, or just know these 3 commands that help you align the entire level and make sure its "Coplanar case" error free.
Enter these into your command window every time you multibrushed, or are getting a coplanar case error during optimizing:
This will snap all your brushes to the gridlines.

hilight_check_snap 1 -highlights all the dodgy(unsnapped) brushes
hilight_do_snap 1 -sorts them, snaps them to grid
hilight_clear -turns off highlights




Building "skyplanes" with Objects:
Because thief distant art is sometimes too damn repetitive/boring,
sometimes object planes can be used to create sky/distant art to produce this result:

(This is just an example, not an actual mission)

How did I do that? I call the method- creating “skyplanes”.
Simple- I took a starry photograph of sky, cut it into 4 parts (4 textures), every part 256x256 texture, leaving small black spaces at the sides, so texture doesn't blend itself over the edges.
Then I took a four of the 4x4 secret door and put my textures on them, then slapped them to the sky.
(This only works when you have your ENTIRE level facing the sky)
Using this method, various non-sky things can be constructed: trees for a forest background, ships for a sea background, ocean plane for the docks with water that looks more real then the ugly thief 2 water! –Just a transparent, gigantic “skyplane” (except you won’t be able to swim in this water… unless you place real water underneath! and make the “skyplane” travel-thoughable and nontransparent)

This command can be entered in the dromed window, so "sky planes" objects won't seep/show/consume through brushes:
set_zfar 3500

Sadly I just found out that this command is re-set every time you restart dromed, so you'll just have to make sure that objects don't seep through the brushes, by carefull testing of the mission...
If anybody finds out how to make zfar stay at 3500, pm me or post here.

Anyhow, dromed’s limit in creating a (nice, completely connected and open) city is around 1000x1000x1000.
This means that you can build your city inside a 1000x1000x1000 fill air brush.
How would you avoid high-poly crashing?
-By setting every texture of the 1000x1000x1000 fill air cube to 24!
(Even the ground, as you can build new ground with fill solid brushes that aren’t 1000 units long)
(Always set sky textures to 24 for better performance)
-By making sure player won’t look at the city from above and by building the city streets in a labyrinth fashion, so there’s no open views of the high poly places from other high poly places.







More pages coming in the future with usefull tips on building outside & inside areas.

[Alexius]

Go ahead and post thy opinions fellow dromeders.

Or if thou wisheth- give me an architectural topic to write about, or maybe some suggestions on improvement & additional stuff!

[Origami Thief]

Wow.....

This is mindblowing stuff...and kind of depressing for someone who's been patiently building the traditional way..you know with bricks and mortar...


but keep it coming.

[caffeinatedzombeh]

good stuff

a few small things...

1: filter->render->3d transform is probably a better way of getting the piece of wall to face you

2: it might be a good idea to take a copy of that picture rather than link directly to it as I tend to delete everything regularly (well, regularlyish)

3: encouraging piracy of photoshop is bad

[Alexius]

Post modified with updates.
If that picture disappears, I can just get it uploaded from my hardrive.

[Yandros]

Excellent, Alexius. Your goal of achieving splendous detail with low polycounts is noble, and it's nice to see it all documented in one place.

[Vigil]

Speaking of piracy, what about the matter of encouraging image piracy? A high percentage of good-quality photo libraries are either illegal to reproduce or cost money to license, even for personal or non-profit use. The photo at the very top of this thread, for instance, is clearly copyrighted, and according to their site "Personal use (such as school reports, personal web pages, etc) will probably get free use, but requests and approvals are still required." (their italics). That applies to the comp photos on their site, not just to the high-res versions they send paying customers, and microscopically few professional photography firms are happy with a credit in a readme file after their work has already been ripped off and released.

But then I'm sure you asked, didn't you?

[Bobotsin]

Return to the Cathedral in Thief 1 used the same technique of building using texturing as the main attraction for visuals.

Your texturing though is excellent! Very pleasing to the eye. Only downfall is that when the player goes right up against the brush, he can see that it's a completely flat surface against the texture.

Great job!

[Caradavin]

Coolness! How simple that is! My goddess!

[Alexius]

The piracy thing- he was talking about "me talking about Kazza".

Originally posted by Bobotsin
Only downfall is that when the player goes right up against the brush, he can see that it's a completely flat surface against the texture.

That's why a dromeder should use this approach only in areas that the player cannot reach.
Unless the player can fly of course...

[Alexius]

Ah damn. Looks like it got shut down because I posted a zip file there.
Stupid free angelfire.
Can somebody host the images for me?
They are only 2mb.

[Duodecimal]

What was the bandwidth usage? I've got somewhere between 2 and 3 gigs to spare...

[Alexius]

I don't think it was bandwidth at all.
As soon as any pictures are placed in this forum, they are taking bandwidth from it, I think.
My Angelfire account just got shut down because of the "illegal zip file" thing.
I still can't figure out what was illegal about it.

[Duodecimal]

I'll put them up. Send'em to duodecimal at duodecimal.net

[Morrgan]

Originally posted by Alexius
The piracy thing- he was talking about "me talking about Kazza".

Stealing somebody else's photos is piracy as well. Maybe you didn't know that? As Vigil said, did you ask the people you took the copyrighted photo from if you may use it? If not, I wonder what they would say if they'd find out you've stolen one of their images.

[Alexius]

I did actually email the photographer asking for ze picture permussssion....
still didn't get a reply....
oh well... I'll just redo that part of the tutorial. Not a problem.

Thanks to my gracious helper-Duodecimal, the dromeding tutorial is up once again!

The texture making tutorial is being updated with better, new info! Stay tuned!

[Morrgan]

Follow the link provided by Vigil in his previous post, there's information there. It basically says personal use, such as putting it on personal web pages (which I suppose would be what you're using the image for right now) will probably be allowed and free, but that you should still ask for and get permission first. So, I'd say asking would be a good idea, and if you already did and got your permission, then no problem.

[mopgoblin]

Originally posted by Alexius
As soon as any pictures are placed in this forum, they are taking bandwidth from it, I think.

No, any image you include in a post will use the bandwidth of the image host rather than the bandwidth of the forum host. While it would be possible to write forum software which would automatically copy and host images, it wouldn't be a good idea, as it would be open to abuse unless the filesize limit was so small that the feature was rendered useless. And even if not abused, it would still devour a lot of forum bandwidth for no good reason.


Now, as for the issue of permission to use the images, it is quite unwise (and probably also illegal) to use an image without permission of the copyright owner, even if you do give credit. Modifying and using the image without permission is likely to be worse. I am not completely certain of the law regarding such cases, but it seems to me that the only process which is completely honest would include -

1. Request the permission of the copyright owner (before doing anything else), stating the nature of the project in which the image will be used, exactly which image(s) would be used, any modifications which would be made to the image, how credit would be given, and all other relevant information.
   
2. If and only if permission is given, use the image in ways limited to those for which permission has been given by the owner. If you later want to use the image in additional ways, use additional images for which they own the copyright, use additional instances of the image, make further modifications than you currently have permission for, or alter the way in which credit will be given or that the project will be distributed, request that permission be extended to cover that (and do not proceed with those changes if the owner does not give permission or does not respond).
   
3. If the owner wishes to partially or completely withdraw permission at any stage for any reason, comply by removing all instances of (and/or modifications to) all images for which they wish to withdraw permission. Essentially, they get the power to veto anything you wish to do with the image, as it is their property.
   

I'm not sure of the legal accuracy of this (don't blame me if you follow this and still get sued or something like that), but I'd say that following them is necessary to ensure that you're not doing anything morally wrong, and therefore it probably would be a good idea to follow these guidelines (in addition to any other legal obligations you may have regarding the issue) even if there is no legal requirement to follow some parts of them.

[Hex]

Screw permission. Do whatever the hell you want Alexius. It was an awesome tutorial.