[WIP] Sub Exterior Lightmaps...

[flakmonkey]

A small eye candy mod that pretty much does what it says on the tin by adding ambient occlusion lightmaps to the external parts of the sub.
This is the same method used in the subs interiors to add shadows. See the images below for the difference...
This is also the method sh4 and 5 use to add ambient shadowing to sub exteriors.

BEFORE:


AFTER:



Still have to go through all the dats and add to the hull and the rest of the conning tower models.

[Sulikate]

A great addition IMHO. The lack of shadows in SHIII/IV was always a bugger for me.

Keep it up

[[SJ]nailz]

I want it now!!!

great work!

[verte]

Flakmonkey, I wish to marry you Great idea!

[Rapt0r56]

Flakmonkey, I wish to marry you Great idea!

I play then the Witness...
Really fantastic work Flakmonkey!

[Hitman]

WOW amazing

I hope you find time to also add it to the crew?

I have the feeling that we will soon have enough material to justify a semi-official GWX3 patch with all these new beauties coming out...while the GWX team will not reunite again, I suppose that just two or three of them could put together all this existing mods and release it as semi-official GWX3.1

[Mud]

Looks great

Mud

[Jimbuna]

Originally Posted by Hitman

WOW amazing

I hope you find time to also add it to the crew?

I have the feeling that we will soon have enough material to justify a semi-official GWX3 patch with all these new beauties coming out...while the GWX team will not reunite again, I suppose that just two or three of them could put together all this existing mods and release it as semi-official GWX3.1

Nice work BTW

[Reece]

Once again top stuff flakmonkey!! Just don't blow a fuse!

[ViperU48]

Good God! Where do you get all your creativity!? You're overhauling this sim for the best in a span of just a couple of months!!

Are the lightmaps dynamic? Do the shadows change position with the movement of the lightsource (sun)?

[coronas]

Excellent work!

[urfisch]

extremly great stuff!!!

[flakmonkey]

Originally Posted by Hitman

I hope you find time to also add it to the crew?

As far as i know it is not possible to add this to the watch crew since they already have a texture map node used for their bumpmaps and i dont think the game will allow multiple texturemaps in a single material, although ive not tried so i may be wrong.

I was all ready to release a version of this today for the VIIc, right up untill i tested it with the full campaign files.
I test my mods with empty campaign files that allow me to load the game in a couple of seconds rather than a couple of mins that it takes with the full campaign files (campaign.scr/campaign.rnd).
Ive run into a problem that i just cant explain, with the empty campaign files the lightmaps appear as they should, when the full files are reinstated the lightmap on the type7c hull gets messed up, although all others on the viic are fine.
At first i thought it was a memory thing, but after dropping the new lightmap textures to 16*16 maps and removing LMs on everything else that has been discounted as the cause. Then i thought it was because of other objects in the campaign dats using the same texture, but that also was not the problem since i could have a single mission with 10+ subs all using the same lightmaps with no issues, so long as my empty campaign dats were loaded.
In short i havent a clue, the campaign dats should not in any way interact with the submarine dats, but somehow they do, but only with the type 7c hull, all other objects and sub types are just fine.

So for now im sticking with the other sub types IIa&d/VIIb/IXb&c, Once those are done i`ll go back and see if i cant figure out just what the heck is going on with that type7c hull!

For now heres some more piccys:





+Id just like to point out to avoid any confusion, that these shadows are static, they are just lightmaps.
People have experimented with dynamic shadows in sh3 but the framerate drop was massive. This mod works by adding a second uv channel to the models and adding a lightmap texture, nothing more, sorry for any false hopes i may have given.

[LGN1]

Hi Flakmonkey,

you are doing really great work

When I added your twisty periscope thing to the VIIC I realized that it was missing when I started a campaign in the harbor. I found out that the reason was that there was an ID problem with one of the AI subs, i.e., the same ID was used in one of the AI tower dats and the player tower (in GWX). I guess there is/was a cloning problem. After I changed the ID everything worked fine. I have no idea, but maybe that is the reason why you have problems with and without the campaign files Just a thought.

Cheers, LGN1

[piri_reis]

Beautiful mod Flak
I'm sure the culprit causing the Type7 hull problem will be found soon, let's all do some brain storming on it..

Although static, the lightmaps add a lot of depth to the visuals, thanks for implementing this