High resolution skins

Ombre · Post by **Ombre** » Mon May 19, 2008 12:31 am

I have recently been messing around with Halo and making skins. While testing the eof and update trick, I decided to check and see if I could upload a larger resolution skin into a repeating texture like a detail map or ground texture. So after making the larger resolution image I go to the bitmap, hit eof and update, then I inject the texture. Everything looks good. It shows up in HMT as a higher resolution and it shows up in-game, uncorrupted. I figured, cool I can make higher resolution repeating textures. However I didn't think it'd work on something like a vehicle or biped skin, so I didn't bother. After making a tank skin today, I say what the hell, I'll try it out. So I enlarge the skin to 1024x1024 in Photoshop, save it, do the while eof thing, and to my surprise, it works. So now I have a high resolution tank skin. Ok cool, but does it actually do anything? I can't really tell considering the image quality loss from enlarging the skin. So before I go trying to remake the whole skin into a high resolution version, I wanted to ask you guys what you thought about it. Will this actually do any good? (Sorry if this topic is painfully stupid, but I'm not really a modder, and it's been a long time since I even skinned).

ares-erus · Post by **ares-erus** » Mon May 19, 2008 2:47 am

Yes it would make the image quality better.
From what ive read on another website theres a CE mod being done by Wave_of_lag where their doing textures at 2048x2048 with all custom textures.
so if that works with custom textures then im sure it would with stock as long as all the details are remastered.
only problem is with the bitmaps that much larger the loading times may increase due to the extra memory used.

Philly · Post by **Philly** » Mon May 19, 2008 7:54 am

This is a cool idea, and it should work, but I would only use it for things like cubemaps or specular, if that is possible. Keep going with the research and you might make something amazing.

bcnipod · Post by **bcnipod** » Mon May 19, 2008 8:05 am

I started a project a while back where I would go out and take pictures of real rocks grass and trees, and use that in Halo to give some of the bitmaps and environments a more "real" feel to it, but it never took off, since it was just me. when i first started the bitmaps looked a little odd in the lighting and stuff that normal halo has on, but it started to look nice. all the images I used were high resolution.

CabooseJr · Post by **CabooseJr** » Mon May 19, 2008 11:00 am

I think it's a great idea. I will support you all the way. :3

kevinnnnn · Post by **kevinnnnn** » Tue May 20, 2008 11:23 am

Wouldn't it only work if you made the skin totally from scratch? Because if you edited the original skin, wouldn't it just increase the number of pixels without changing the image?

bcnipod · Post by **bcnipod** » Tue May 20, 2008 11:32 am

in order to increase the number of pixels you would have to increase the pixels per inch or cm or whatever measurement you are using in photoshop.

WaeV · Post by **WaeV** » Tue May 20, 2008 4:23 pm

If you simply resized the original textures there would be no gain.

If you improved them, however...

Pepsi · Post by **Pepsi** » Tue May 20, 2008 6:40 pm

Me and Ness dabbled a little bit with this method when doing FTW. The main thing we noticed thoe was it was just more easy to work a texture in large scale then simply reduce the size and repeat the texture as needed to fit what we were doing.

for example would be tile flooring you would see on the outside of the death island bases. it simply started out as a 1024x1024 block grid. They we cropped, mirror and replicated some parts to make it seamless. Then we took that 1024x1024 pic and downsized it 128x128 and replicated that 128x128 square in the 512x512 bitmap itself.

we found doing this the image quality did come out looking very nice and i could say i didnt notice a difference myself between the 1024 and the 512. we opted for the 512 due to concerns people have expressed with video lag dealing with rendering expecially when it comes to bumpmaps and such which to take a heavy toll on graphics it seems.

if you do notice a difference please send me a pm or something or post some pics. We never took the time to fully explore using a bigger image and just settled for 512 standard for fears of people complaining about frame rates and such. The goal was to make a semi friendly mod for all video cards so as technology has changed and most computers now should be running a 79-8800 series card i dont see what the issue would be using a more high res staple.

Andrew_b · Post by **Andrew_b** » Tue May 20, 2008 7:51 pm

You didnt notice a difference because it was a seamless texture at 1024, then you just made it smaller, and 4 parts. Still being seamless.

Cryticfarm · Post by **Cryticfarm** » Wed May 21, 2008 4:03 am

Andrew_b wrote:You didnt notice a difference because it was a seamless texture at 1024, then you just made it smaller, and 4 parts. Still being seamless.

Wait, wouldn't this method lower the amount of pixels in the texture, thus making it less quality?

Pepsi · Post by **Pepsi** » Wed May 21, 2008 7:36 am

but even when we did it to things like vehicle skins we still didnt notice a difference worthy enough to do something by working with "high rez". One of the main things we noticed was no matter how much you polished and cleaned a image to make it nice, clean and crisp, when you injected it HMT you would still get edge distortion and color bleeds. For that reason is why I did the whole tut on "How to clean up your skins before injecting" cause of thoes problems.

As I said from the beginning we "dabbled" in it. We didnt explore every aspect of it due to time constraints on trying to get the mod out in a reasonable time.

So again, ill repeat what i said before..
"if you do notice a difference please send me a pm or something or post some pics. We never took the time to fully explore using a bigger image and just settled for 512 standard for fears of people complaining about frame rates and such."