Howling Stones.
 

Figured out how to import EQ zones into Blender the other day. I'm thinking of starting a side project where I connect all the zones together and maybe try importing it all to unreal with a controller. For some reason the only way I could get textures to load was under render mode, if anyone has any experience with blender and importing textures send me a PM or reply here.

http://i.imgur.com/jaPrf07.jpg

Hey! Not sure how much you know about 3D programs in general but usually only render mode will display full textures. For modeling purposes you get a much less detailed version of the textures/materials so it doesn't tax your computer more than necessary.

That said, check this out! It should answer your question: http://blender.stackexchange.com/que...ures-in-editor

It would be fun if you could print all the zones out in 3D and connect the zones together physically, too. :) But that would take a lot of printing.

You're one of the forum people that age like a fine wine.

Very cool!

Hey thanks for the link. I picked up blender about 8 months ago and self taught myself a bunch of it, however I haven't used it in a while so a lot is kinda fuzzy.

What was weird is that Blender recognizes the images under Rendered mode but does not display them under Material and Texture mode, those two modes are easier to work in than rendered mode as you stated. I selected one object that should just be grass and tried to UV unwrap it and assign the texture to it but still didn't display any texture. Also you can see that some of the textures are mapped wrong and are flipped around.

I think it's the way I'm trying to get these files into blender though. I am just taking the .s3d files from my EQ folder and using a program I got from Google (EQG Zone Importer to convert) them into a .obj files so it can be imported to blender.

I will continue to mess around and relearn what I have forgotten. Above is just a quick example of what's going on, I can be more detailed if needed. Three things are kinda holding me up from recreating EQ, one of which is the texture issue above. The other is getting the in zone objects like, houses, druid rings, tress, ect... in. The final bit being that the zone walls are in (walls that prevent you from getting out of the zone) and they show as being solid walls in blender so they will have to be removed or a transparency affect/texture/material would need to be added.

I tried looking up that converter and found mention of it being a little buggy, so that's probably the origin of your issues. There seems to be another one out there but I don't know how well that would work.

For the textures, if the unmap doesn't work, you may have to go in and change some settings for the UV mapping itself. Worst case scenario is probably going in and rebuilding the UV map by hand using (I think) the UV/Image Editor. UV map coordinates should be set to UV rather than generated.

I'm wondering if there are multiple materials applied to the original zone and that's why they're stuttering after being converted. The trails and the edge of the sand seem to be in approximately the right places when they show up, they're just flipped or copying incorrectly.

Lets see some Seb!

Hey, I remember making that tool. Feels like a long time ago... probably only a year or two, though.

The .obj export was definitely something I just slapped together and never scrutinized the output of. UVs might be backwards because I would have been looking at later versions of the zonefiles which use DDS textures -- DDS textures are stored backwards. I probably assumed they would always be DDS and flipped them around to export as PNG or whatever I ended up doing. Older versions of the zonefiles (as gotten from the Titanium install) use BMP textures rather than DDS, so they may be getting flipped when they shouldn't be. Or I might have flipped around the UVs themselves. Dunno.

Adding zone objects and excluding zone walls would be easy to do if I were motivated to do some work (probably make a new tool from scratch, my older stuff is pretty crap).


I still hope to see the day when someone uses some of my tools to add ramps between the islands in PoSky or something. The most unorthodox hack the server can't detect! (Until someone just, you know, sees you constantly falling while walking on air.)

I was bored and had a half-made zone viewer thingy that was easy enough to adapt for .obj exporting.

Link

It's not complete but might tide you over for now. The biggest discrepancy is that some zones with animated objects -- chiefly swaying trees in Kunark and Velious zones -- are currently rendered in the "jumble of nonsense" positions that they are defined in rather than what they would look like on the first frame of their animation. I'll have to look at that later -- had some success with mob animations a month or two ago, hoping that animated objects will be pretty much the same.

There are some one-off oddities too, some of them possibly things that have hardcoded fixes in the client and so would also need hardcoded fixes in a viewer. For example, some bits of things in fearplane are just... not there. Specifically the mid-sections of the pillars inside the ring of fire, there's just empty space where there should clearly be something. Never taken a super close look at that but that has stood out to me for a long while. There are also some one-off textures that are not flagged correctly to have parts masked off: have fixes for this for trees in kithikor and in highpass, there's probably others out there that'll need it.

There are also some things that EQ does that might not be expressible in .obj format. The main thing I'm thinking of is that there are a lot of places where EQ uses additive color for cheap partial transparency (pixels are opaque as they approach white, transparent as they approach black -- normally used for particles and things like that), like for semi-transparent water surfaces, rays of light coming out of skulls that decorate some zones like befallen, neon thingies in Neriak, etc. Seems like .obj expects more standard stuff like alpha transparency, which EQ does use, but not as much.

http://i.imgur.com/iRwCwd2.png

http://i.imgur.com/04ilikd.png


Also, I had to disable shading in Blender to see everything nice and textured. Hit N to bring up the side menu > Shading > check "Shadeless". Also helped to increase the clipping distance in the same menu under View > Clip > End; 10000.00 is a nice number there. I still have no idea how to navigate a huge model nicely in Blender, though...

Edit: import the .obj files with -Z as FORWARD, -Y as UP.

Holy shit Zaela, you just made this 100 times easier, thank you! This program is really easy to use and export the zones into object files. They also come in as one object instead of every plane being an object as the previous program would do. I quickly went ahead and recreated Faydwer as accurate as I could. Some zones overlap though, so you kinda have to take some liberties as how the zones connect.



Here is an overview of Faydwer without textures, Steamfont is the lower right and OOT in the back.
http://i.imgur.com/8hSafPz.jpg



With the textures turned on.
http://i.imgur.com/jVcfNxC.jpg



Felwithe
http://i.imgur.com/WaiyRh1.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/tHiBl20.jpg



Kelethin and the Wizard Spires.
http://i.imgur.com/duY9VAX.jpg



Crushbone
http://i.imgur.com/4GABBFt.jpg




Probably the coolest is Kaladim
http://i.imgur.com/zCsbRgy.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/g61OIrp.jpg



The bottom left of Lesser Faydark overlaps ontop Dagnor's Cauldron, also if you take the zone connections literally, Mistmoore intersects with Lfay
http://i.imgur.com/ScugUF0.jpg



I dragged Mistmoore out some, it would be above Dagnor's if you followed the zone line straight.
http://i.imgur.com/PxbrRy3.jpg