Help with Imported Textures

[SoyMante]

I'm learning how to use RMS and import World of Warcraft models. But I've run into this problem. Some textures have this strange shading or black tones, which are noticeable from a distance, but less so up close. It's a bit hard to explain, but the image should make it clear. I need help with this problem. Maybe I can do something with Reteras to fix it.

 

[deepstrasz]

Wouldn't it be best either to ask @Retera or post the message in the model editor's thread?
Unless you were thinking of fixing it with some other model editor?

 

[SoyMante]

Wouldn't it be best either to ask @Retera or post the message in the model editor's thread?
Unless you were thinking of fixing it with some other model editor?

I'm not sure how to address this problem. I'd like to stick with RMS because I'm just learning how to use it. If you think it's better to move my question to another thread, that's fine. But since I'm not sure where this problem fits, I decided to post it here.

 

[Retera]

Can you upload the Watch Tower shown to this thread, and its files, for review?

The two most likely problems to be occurring here are:

1. The program used to convert BLP2 (wow format) into BLP1 (wc3 format) even if they have the same file extension on disk, might have a bug. If the resulting BLP texture has "bad mipmaps" then what will happen is the corrupted texture might only show when the model is certain distances away from the camera. The game engine thinks that as the model becomes further away, it is optimizing computer processing by replacing the texture of the model with a lower resolution copy of that same texture (which is embedded in the same .BLP file, which has multiple textures in it). But if only the copy is bad, whereas the texture you see if you try to preview this BLP at full resolution in a BLP viewer program is fine, then it won't show up as bad until you look at it in game. This is also why if we upload a file to Hive's Model Sanity Tester (located at Sanity Test ) it will show the texture file repeating many times at smaller sizes. This is not an accident -- it is showing the smaller "mip maps" embedded in the same file. It would be possible for one of those smaller images to be wrong and be totally black, while the higher resolution ones seen up close are fine, even though it is rare that a program would create a bad texture like this:

(Above, I uploaded Textures\Watchtower.blp from my Warcraft III CD, so we can see that even the smaller copies of the texture shown are still visually fine and would look as the surface of the Watch Tower if used when it was further away.)

2. The other possibility you might be running into is if the textures are fine, but the model settings are bad. If the WoW model is converted into Wc3 format poorly, then a "specular map" which would generally be a black-and-white texture file declaring the white parts that will "shine" like metal might be loaded instead as the WC3 texture for the file, which would cause it to be black and white from all camera distances.

[opinion]
This is just my personal opinion and might not be relevant to your request, but can I ask what program you are using to try to convert WoW models to Wc3? I was playing with something similar earlier this year but in my experience I like to approach the problem from understanding instead of from running programs written by other people.

With that in mind, what I was having fun with was using a very old version of WoW where the models were in Warcraft 3 format already -- that is to say, the MDX format instead of M2.

Then I could just put that in Retera Model Studio, and dump the entire thing into the game, and then pick a model in Retera Model Studio, use "Copy Path" on the file, and then load it in World Editor.

Then I can end up playing around in my Warcraft 3 thing but using whatever WoW data that I understand, and the more that I understand the more I can use, until eventually it almost looks like I'm playing WoW or something, even though random stuff will still be WC3 like how the Day/Night cycle in this video goes super fast because it's the Warcraft 3 one that changes night to day in a few seconds:

And it can also make it more possible to do stuff like this:

 

[Footman16]

From my own experience just go to the models properties and in the materials section set the materials to "Transparent" instead of "None" which seems to be the default.

 

[Retera]

set the materials to "Transparent" instead of "None" which seems to be the default.

Similar to the case 2 mentioned in my post, Footman's suggestion is great if you're dealing with a specular map that didn't get set up correctly after the import.

"Additive" might also work well if "Transparent" does not. (Converts black to alpha, which would help if your specular layer is missing alpha channel on its texture)

 

[SoyMante]

Can you upload the Watch Tower shown to this thread, and its files, for review?

The two most likely problems to be occurring here are:

1. The program used to convert BLP2 (wow format) into BLP1 (wc3 format) even if they have the same file extension on disk, might have a bug. If the resulting BLP texture has "bad mipmaps" then what will happen is the corrupted texture might only show when the model is certain distances away from the camera. The game engine thinks that as the model becomes further away, it is optimizing computer processing by replacing the texture of the model with a lower resolution copy of that same texture (which is embedded in the same .BLP file, which has multiple textures in it). But if only the copy is bad, whereas the texture you see if you try to preview this BLP at full resolution in a BLP viewer program is fine, then it won't show up as bad until you look at it in game. This is also why if we upload a file to Hive's Model Sanity Tester (located at Sanity Test ) it will show the texture file repeating many times at smaller sizes. This is not an accident -- it is showing the smaller "mip maps" embedded in the same file. It would be possible for one of those smaller images to be wrong and be totally black, while the higher resolution ones seen up close are fine, even though it is rare that a program would create a bad texture like this:
View attachment 550561
(Above, I uploaded Textures\Watchtower.blp from my Warcraft III CD, so we can see that even the smaller copies of the texture shown are still visually fine and would look as the surface of the Watch Tower if used when it was further away.)

2. The other possibility you might be running into is if the textures are fine, but the model settings are bad. If the WoW model is converted into Wc3 format poorly, then a "specular map" which would generally be a black-and-white texture file declaring the white parts that will "shine" like metal might be loaded instead as the WC3 texture for the file, which would cause it to be black and white from all camera distances.

[opinion]
This is just my personal opinion and might not be relevant to your request, but can I ask what program you are using to try to convert WoW models to Wc3? I was playing with something similar earlier this year but in my experience I like to approach the problem from understanding instead of from running programs written by other people.

With that in mind, what I was having fun with was using a very old version of WoW where the models were in Warcraft 3 format already -- that is to say, the MDX format instead of M2.
View attachment 550567
Then I could just put that in Retera Model Studio, and dump the entire thing into the game, and then pick a model in Retera Model Studio, use "Copy Path" on the file, and then load it in World Editor.

Then I can end up playing around in my Warcraft 3 thing but using whatever WoW data that I understand, and the more that I understand the more I can use, until eventually it almost looks like I'm playing WoW or something, even though random stuff will still be WC3 like how the Day/Night cycle in this video goes super fast because it's the Warcraft 3 one that changes night to day in a few seconds:

And it can also make it more possible to do stuff like this:

I'm using WoW Converter from Warcraft Sandbox. All the watchtower files are attached.

 

[Retera]

Yes, so the alpha channel seems to be uselessly included in a way that doesn't help Warcraft 3. It was probably included in the original for specular data but Warcraft III's render pipeline doesn't use alpha as specular. Furthermore, the mipmap generator used in the conversion process generated mipmaps that are black in the alpha regions, because that program assumed the alpha would mean "not present" and that therefore color under alpha regions didn't matter (and was OK to color over in black).

These textures should have their alpha channels removed, and then when those are gone have their mipmaps regenerated. This can be done manually with many different tools from Hive but obviously life would be much easier if this could be done automatically during the conversion process you are already using.

Can you link the source code for the converter code used in the Warcraft Sanbox pipeline? I played with some of the outputs of that but didn't read the code yet. If I had the code in front of me, maybe I could tell it to remove the alpha channel prior to the export.

(I attached a fixed version of your upload as a proof of concept but manually fixing this is not good... since you would have to fix every one. And each open/save of the BLP is a lossy re-encoding, so you'll lose quality, the better solution is to fix the converter tool at the first step that you're doing the conversion.)

 

[SoyMante]

Yes, so the alpha channel seems to be uselessly included in a way that doesn't help Warcraft 3. It was probably included in the original for specular data but Warcraft III's render pipeline doesn't use alpha as specular. Furthermore, the mipmap generator used in the conversion process generated mipmaps that are black in the alpha regions, because that program assumed the alpha would mean "not present" and that therefore color under alpha regions didn't matter (and was OK to color over in black).

These textures should have their alpha channels removed, and then when those are gone have their mipmaps regenerated. This can be done manually with many different tools from Hive but obviously life would be much easier if this could be done automatically during the conversion process you are already using.

Can you link the source code for the converter code used in the Warcraft Sanbox pipeline? I played with some of the outputs of that but didn't read the code yet. If I had the code in front of me, maybe I could tell it to remove the alpha channel prior to the export.

(I attached a fixed version of your upload as a proof of concept but manually fixing this is not good... since you would have to fix every one. And each open/save of the BLP is a lossy re-encoding, so you'll lose quality, the better solution is to fix the converter tool at the first step that you're doing the conversion.)

Thanks for the help, Retera, and for your time. I'll see what to do next. I'm attaching the project's GitHub; it's also hosted here on Hive.

GitHub - pqhuy98/wow-converter

Contribute to pqhuy98/wow-converter development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

WoW-Converter: export WoW NPCs to Warcraft 3

WoW-Converter: export WoW models to Warcraft 3

www.hiveworkshop.com

 

[SoyMante]

Thanks for the help, @Retera . Although it requires manual work and checking the textures so the alphas don't cause problems, I know at least where the problem is coming from. I hope you can help communicate this issue with those in charge of the wow-export and wow-converter projects so this process is cleaner. I'm leaving the thread as resolved.