Well it is a mesh I made, but it's the 'coloring' bits that are driving me batty. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong/missing. I made a little 2D sculpted wall lamp cloned off the base game neon flamingo.

As with all projects before, the shadow eludes me. I actually DID have a shadow for a bit, but it was backwards, so I thought if I flipped the texture that'd fix it- instead, it pretty much did away with the shadow entirely other than some black bar thingies and ugly fuzzing of the wallmask.

The other textural problems with this piece are that it doesn't look very solid. At night it's kinda pretty in its own way, but not what I had in mind, and during the day it's.. well.. horrible. You can see the brackets through the lightbulb/neon bits clearly. I can't find any other texture files to alter... are they hidden somewhere other than the main texture location where the alphas are?

I do know it'll have to (I think) be a squared off sort of neon light instead of a tube/rounded one. I couldn't smooth out the mesh without adding far too many polys- unless there's a trick for masking squares to look like rounded curves....

Also, once again, the recolors don't work for me, though in this piece I am absolutely POSITIVE I updated all mmats and committed once I got my new GUID.

Attachment rar includes all the images seen as thumbnails, plus the package itself if anyone wants to tear it open to get a better look.

Have you looked at your shadow in SimPE? Your screenshot shows exactly how it looks (I believe that's what you mean by "ugly fuzzing" -- the grey stripes -- that's your texture). The "black bar thingies" are probably leftovers of the original mesh. I don't know what you mean by "wallmask" in this context.

Your mesh is non-manifold, I don't know how well SimPE can cope with that, in any case it tells me "too many Faces" (in the gmdc plugin view) -- I would think that's the reason your mesh looks broken in-game.

I believe there are ways to get around that (do a site search for "too many Faces"), but before you do that, the mesh is insanely high poly indeed so I'd reduce that first. This amount of detail is pointless, because nobody will ever see it. I'm attaching a quick sketch of how I'd approach simplifying it, perhaps that helps you to see how much unnecessary detail you have in there. You could probably skip one or two more vertices without anyone noticing a difference in-game.

You should probably look at some other meshes too for comparison -- I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "it'll have to be a squared off sort of neon light instead of a tube/rounded one", but if you want it to look similar to the original flamingo (made of round "pipes"), look at the original flamingo to see how it's made. That looks convincingly tube-like in game, in my eyes, while still being quite efficient.

Have you read HP's tutorial on low-poly meshing?

I believe you need to check your objects much more often in-game -- perhaps consider a much more bottom-up approach: make a quick *very basic* sketch, import it, make note of any parts that look *obviously* boxy, then refine those. Instead of spending hours making something ridiculously complex in blender, only to discover it doesn't work at all.


ETA, also, this isn't the base game object. Or did you change the catalog sort and add the light emitters? I believe the flamingo has been changed into a lamp in one of the later games and there's also custom "lamp" flamingos .. but the original is a painting and emits no light.

Last edited by plasticbox : 10th May 2009 at 12:44 PM.