JRSly's Stuff - Currently making Cemetery LODs

[JRSly 0]

The last day and a half I've been trying to just get my footing in making nice, tiny LODs for all my Cemetery Block assets and I'm starting to go a little crazy. It's already daunting enough with 30+ assets to deal with, but it's been a lot of frustrating hours trying to make things work how it feels they should be working and running into issues. Anyway...from Shroomblaze's advice, what I'm doing is adding planes in front of and behind the rows of graves and making a flat texture of each row and applying it to these planes, kinda turning each row of individual graves into one big transparent billboard. It's super efficient and looks good in game..when it works.

Here is where I'm at now. When I look at the LOD from one side it looks almost right...

 

But spin the camera around and they disappear, except for the shadow being cast from the whole rectangular plane and not the graves. 

 

What makes this even more maddening is that I actually had it working perfectly, but wanted to adjust the brightness of the diffuse texture and when I made the asset again, this is what happened. And I have no idea what I did differently to make it go wonky. I've been trying to troubleshoot and gone through the help in most of the similar threads...like, I've added all the various dummy maps for the LOD, added an alpha map and didn't rely on transparency in the diffuse map. I'm not trying to accomplish wild, bizarre feats and it feels like I've done everything by the book, including the workarounds for the bugs in there. 

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. 

[NickKerr 34]

Can you post a picture(with same angles like the picture of it in the asset editor) of the lod in 3ds max with polygon selection on and select the whole model(it will be red when everything is selected but im sure you know that). 

[Shroomblaze 320]

Its an issue with normals. This is why I said before that you need to have a front and back because what happens is if you have just a single sided plane then you will only see the front render based on how unity works. It will only show one side of a polygon unless it is a tree in which the unity tree renderer will show both sides. 

You will have to edit the normals in whatever program you are using. In 3DS max you can convert the object to a mesh and then edit normals on the right hand side panel. You can flip an whole objects normal by doing the "Normal" modifier. However, if you only want to select specific polygons to flip you can do it with the flip normal mode in the side panel in the image below. My object is in editable mesh, Im in polygon mode and have flip normal mode on. Then with f2 activated so I can see which normals are facing which direction I can just click on polygons individually and flip them. The darker polys are facing down here and so the camera would not be rendering that side so I would need to flip those. Hope this helps. 

Usually for some things I will just make a clone of an object directly on top of the other and flip the whole objects normals for that clone. This makes it look as if both sides are rendering.

[JRSly 0]

Right, that's how I've set it up. I'm using SketchUp..I know it's not the most respected program, I'm just at that point where I'd rather fight with a more limited program that I can get around in better than fight to learn a better-suited program, but I'm slowly trying to get a handle on Blender...and with SketchUp, similar to how you describe, faces are color coded to show whether they are reversed or not. I did the same method as you, I made my first "billboard, copied it and reversed the face and flipped the texture so it looked right. I just checked again, and all the outward facing faces are in the proper orientation. So that aspect of things seems fine...I might think it was something else SketchUp might do differently than other programs, but the billboards work perfectly fine in the one direction, so it's not something fundamentally wrong with using SketchUp. And I forgot to mention, it looks correct in the Asset Editor.

NickKerr, as I said, I'm using SketchUp, so I don't know how much insight any screenshots from it would provide for you. 

[NickKerr 34]

I would suggest using 3ds max instead of blender but you can use what you want. In my opionion 3ds max is easier than blender(i've tried switching to blender but couldn't) but i have been using it for years that may be why.

[JRSly 0]

I just may. Blender certainly is intimidating, every time I open it I feel like I've walked into the cockpit of a 747. I guess I was leaning towards it because it was free and, probably because of that fact, there were a lot of tutorials directly relating to Cities Skylines. I'll keep 3DS Max in mind and do some research. 

[NickKerr 34]

You can get the 3ds max education for free it has all the same features. I would suggest 2015 because i tried installing 2016 and i kept getting errors while installing it.

[Shroomblaze 320]

If you post your fbx and textures I can take a look and try to see what is happening. Also send me your .crp file.

[Shroomblaze 320]

For those who are wondering, I figured out his problem. It's because he had UVW map lines outside the 1:1 texture square LOD file. This will cause bugs when it comes to the LOD but you can have UVW map lines outside of that space on the main model for repeating textures. 

[Mr_Maison 2,426]

7 hours ago, JRSly said:

I just may. Blender certainly is intimidating, every time I open it I feel like I've walked into the cockpit of a 747. I guess I was leaning towards it because it was free and, probably because of that fact, there were a lot of tutorials directly relating to Cities Skylines. I'll keep 3DS Max in mind and do some research. 

Hi. I use Sketchup for all my non tree assets. It's a very good tool. But I use Blender for lods as Sketchup is not good when it comes to staying within the 0-1 coordinates. Blender is not hard to unwrap your models. But learning some basics about the interface will help. Look through these lessons on Blender...http://gryllus.net/Blender/3D.html

I like you used to look at Blender and close the application after 5 minutes. But that course is very comprehensive, taught by a college professor with short and to the point tutorials. You can look for the unwrapping guides in lesson 12.  But cover the very basics of the interface first. It's a dated course but the basics are the same.

[JRSly 0]

Great, thanks very much. I'm hoping that with as simple as the graves are, they might be an easier first step into Blender. I'll dive into the course this week.

[Shroomblaze 320]

I never watched these but another modder on the workshop TempleofDoom made a video series on blender too. https://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylinesModding/comments/3uj1he/blender_to_cities_tutorial_for_blender_274/