HaloMods "Classic" Read-only Archive

i am a decent skinner, but i look at good skinners work and it is amazing. i have been asking around and people tell me that u can use LOD and Shaders to make skins better. i know what shaders are, but no idea what LOD is. so i have 2 questions: what is LOD, and how do it and shaders tie in with making skins look "real"? please answer here or pm me if u wouldnt mind going more in depth. thanks!!

An LOD is different permilition of a models, shader, or bitmap that loses detail the farther a way you get from it. As for skinning spend a decent amount of time on one bitmap. Remember no one is rushing you. There are plenty of sites for textures and ever google can be a great assistant/ Hope that helps.

thanks, but how do i get an LOD and apply it to a particular bitmap, or how do i make it?

When u extract a model the lower the number the less the detail like smg[3]full detail smg[0] least detail. or vise versa cant remember off the top of my head

then, is that the LOD? and how do i use that with a bitmap? thanks

ugh... why Adam why... he's skinning not modelling. Okay here we go. LOD's are as what DarkShallFall said, different versions of an object that decrease in detail...

Here, this is from google: "(LOD)level of detail - To decrease memory impact and to speed rendering, a terrain or other object in a 3D scene may be represented by substitutes of different detail according to proximity to the camera - low detail when far away and high detail when seen close."

kay so how this applies to bitmaps (Correct me if I'm mistaken...) is that there are MIP maps that decrease the detail of the texture the further you are from it...

Again, google: "A mipmap is a lower resolution version of a texture map. Many mipmaps can be produced from the original texture map, as each one is one quarter of the size of the map before it - for example, a base texture map that is 512 x 512 pixels in size could produce 9 mipmaps in total, starting with 256 x 256 and finishing with a simple 1 x 1 dot".

"In 3D computer graphics texture mapping, MIP maps (also mipmaps) are pre-calculated, optimized collections of bitmap images that accompany a main texture, intended to increase rendering speed and reduce artifacts. They are widely used in 3D computer games, flight simulators and other 3D imaging systems. The technique is known as mipmapping. The letters "MIP" in the name are an acronym of the Latin phrase multum in parvo, meaning "much in a small space".

Okay now if you don't have mipmaps when saving you get black "voids" when the detail changes (game switches to a mipmap).

Now shaders are fun. I am only beginning to experiment with them but I know that they can be a very powerful tool to use in skinning. For example the ground shader for Coagulation (and I assume most, if not all, levels) uses two "detail" textures and a "colour" texture to create the ground. Now the alpha channel in the "colour" texture tells the shader where each of those "detail" textures should be placed. This is very cool id you need to have more then one texture on something. So I guess you could say that a shader controls how textures are displayed in the game.

google: "In 3D computer graphics, a shader is a program used to determine the final surface properties of an object or image. This can include arbitrarily complex descriptions of light absorption and diffusion, texture mapping, reflection and refraction, shadowing, surface displacement and post-processing effects. "

As for LOD making skins look better I can only assume they mean disabling them which can cause some nasty "glitter" from afar...

awsome, thanks a lot. that helped a lot couger!!!

Your welcome, lol. I love Google...

Halo 2 bitmaps have mip maps and lods...Which are seperate from eachother in a way.
Ever wonder why your textures go black from a distance? because the LOD's aren't there...Yet the mipmaps are still there...zomg h4x.

There are two ways around this, a poor way in terms of map "holes" or the proper manual way (unless there is another app....).
the poor way comes from machinima companion, you can remove bitmap LOD's and make the world a better more detailed place. But it leaves holes in the map most of the time, but noone cares about that anymore, because Iron_Forge is nice
Or you can learn how to remove lods yourself, and if im not mistaken, the info is in one of the stickied threads here.

Oh, and a third, just inject the other LOD's
Since I'm not sure of the information I posted, I made it tiny, so as to not leave people under possible false impressions...So if you do care to read it, go ahead, just don't take it as fact

I did not know that... but the blackness I thought was MIPmaps because I could get rid of it by nulling the MIPs for that single bitmap...
LODs... and MIPmaps... I think I'm confused now. Why have both?

EDIT: By both I mean "Why have both for bitmaps?"

They're different? I always thought that the level of detail you have relates to the mipmap that is loaded.

I just typed a big thing and made myself come to a new conclusion on it.

When you walk further away from a object (scenery) it loads a lower detail model to take that model's place? If the object can't have a lower detail model (like a bsp) then it just has mip maps to lower the detail as you walk away?

Ok ill put it this way when you first started modding did u like shoot out a ton of hogs and the game got real laggy, thats be cause if theres fo many models in one area the gam will lag, so the game is made to load a lower level of detail the farther u are from the item thats why stuff disappears when you look away from it(bounding box) to much stuff= game lag/network lag its bungies and other developers little way of making the game alot better

I could be wrong though I only remember some little bit Aequitas once told me so I could be complelty off, I should probably have mnetioned that...
I could if you wanted, test this in the future, but yeah, I only believe this because even when I use textures with full mips in game can still go black.