Image Properties Doubts and Problems!!!

[tuxkartdriver]

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[Anon]

1. You can't change shader settings without having a texture. All material properties are stored in relation to the image they apply to, so you need to texture everything that you want to configure shader settings for. If you only want a solid colour on a face, you could use a texture of that colour, or you could use white and add the colour with vertex painting (I think).

I'm also not sure that the "backface culling" option in the Image Properties panel actually works... you can instead use Blender's "Solidify" modifier w/ a thickness of zero and w/ "Fill Rim" disabled in order to generate duplicate faces pointing the other way on export.

2. A face is considered a zipper if it has a texture that has the zipper property enabled. So texture your zipper w/ an appropriate image, and enable "Zipper" for that image under your Image Properties panel.

3. Glowmaps are specified in the glossmap of a texture. The red and green channels control specular hardness and intensity, respectively, while the blue channel is used to add some of a texture's original colour back into the final render after diffuse/specular shading and shadows.

I made a tool a while back to preview STK glossmaps in Blender. You can download it here.

[tuxkartdriver]

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[samuncle]

Hi, some precisions:

1) Read the manual here, especially the part about materials

2) Sorry but this:

My intention is just increase the illumination for my animated object. Just for example, it is not my case, but imagine a flying saucer, flying in the evening: 1st it is animated and it shines like if it was a flying lamp with it own illumination, and not just glowing its outline!

Isn't possible. The emit map (the blue channel of the gloss map) will only affect the local object. There is currently (and probably for a long time) no way to have an object emitting light (btw this is a common restriction in many game engine).
You have to only use point light. You can put as much as you want and the engine will automatically only render something like the 32 closest light to the player.

3)

Yes, I know. But, my doubt is if I have to create it on a separate transparent plan surface to put over my textured object, or if I have just to select the whole object and apply the zipper settings to it?

Nope it's only to the texture that should "zip"

[tuxkartdriver]

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[samuncle]

I don´t know why the stk team decided to remove the possibility to uncheck the back culling option

Yes it was possible but not anymore, I updated the documentation

It is really a pitty that it is not possible yet! Because it would be a very nice effect!

Have you read what I said. That's something even engine like unreal engine have a lot of difficulty to do. It's not easy, if you want to implement rectangular lights you are welcome.
PLEASE PLEASE, don't assume what you know from maya rendering (or any other non real time rendering engine) is similar to what does stk. A LOT of modern game engine don't support that feature, they only use point lights or spots (we can't use spots light yet in stk).

I don´t know python, and neither I know if it is possible or not. But, wouldn´t it be possible to program some script that converted stk lights into emitters to associate them to 3d objects?.

I don't understand what you are asking sorry . It's not possible to convert 3D objects into light. In stk emitters are for particles. Use point light if you want something to emit light.

For example, when we add particle emitters for our tracks, we just add an emitter and decide what effect will be associate to it. And this same emitter may be used such as for fire, smoke and other effects.

Nope that's not how it works. You should use one emitter per effect, if you have a fire with sparks, smoke you should have two emitters. One for spark one for smoke.

Well, maybe the stk lights script could be used for associating a light effect for a 3d object, by transforming our objects into emitters to emit light with settings for different intensities and colors, and other effects that worked just as the same as particles scripts do! This way, we could have our 3d objects working like emitters. It is just an idea, but I think that this would be interesting. If an object could be converted into effect emitters. So, it would not be necessary to have external point lights, but a "lamp object" or a "fire object" like a comet! It would be also very important for animated objects as animated 3d sun and moon and many others too

I don't understand what you are saying sorry. Now here are my suggestions

1) Use the engine, you can already do a lot of stuff with our current engine. I don't really see were is a limitation. You can do jungle, tropical island, night haunted mansion, interior, exterior, real time shadows, image based lighting. Check out cocoa temple, gran paradiso, mine, etc. We have already a lot of stuff we can do.
2) Restrict yourself to what the engine offers (and it offers a lot of stuff. You can do pretty much whatever you want).
3) read stuff about real time rendering. Our engine is quite powerful and similar to what other engine can do. If there is a limitation deal with it, again I did cocoa temple and gran paradiso they are our most complex tracks ever made. I highly doubt yours is with that level of complexity.
4) You can associate several objects and use a proxy in your scene. For instance you can include a torch in the track and the torch is an object linked from another blend. In this other blend you have the 3D object torch, the emitter, the point light. So maybe it's something like that you want. If yes you can already use a lot of premade objects and link them in your scene
5) Check out how we did cocoa temple, gran paradiso etc. Try to learn from examples we have.
6) Upload your track so we can TEST it and see more easily what is the issue/what you want to do.