So I'm working (slowly) on putting together a material mod for Daggerfall Unity that incorporates the PBR (physically based rendering) material workflow utilizing slightly modified versions of the classic DF textures.
Looks great! I also love the look of PBR shaders coupled with low resolution textures. Something about the anachronism of the retro look with advanced lighting just really pops.
I'm also working on PBR materials for my
Pure Vanilla Extract MOD, but I'm starting from my AI upscaled resolution (4x the resolution of DF).
You can download a mini-mod version of this that has just the Privateer's Hold textures done
here. (Make sure you enable bilinear or trilinear filtering).
Anyway, like you, I'm just chipping away at this as I have time (maybe a few hours per week?) so progress is slow and the library of DF textures is massive!
Would you be interested in joining forces? We could make much faster progress on building PBR materials at 4x resolution together and easily downscale the results to achieve the aesthetic you're looking for.
No pressure. No obligation. Of course you'd be credited as an artist in the PVE mod.
One of the things I'm having some issues with is the MetallicGloss textures, I'm not finding much documentation on how to implement them and I'm definitely not getting normal results.
Yeah, the documentation on this is pretty spotty. I think they changed the workflow sometime around Unity 2018-ish which made it more complicated. But as Nystul said, you store the "Metallic" data in the R channel, and "Smoothness" data in alpha. Source:
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/Standar ... allic.html
Is it necessary to create a material definition in xml for these to function properly?
I don't think you have to include the XML file if you don't need to adjust any parameters.
Another way is to use Unity with the
Daggerfall Tools for Unity package installed. From there, just create a new material with the same name as the original asset (for example: "020_1-0"), load in the albedo, normal, metallic, occlusion, and height maps if you want them. Then select all these materials and package them as a MOD. (Excellent tutorial by LypyL here:
viewtopic.php?f=22&t=277#p2380 )
The other benefit of doing it within Unity is that you can setup a simple quad and light and test how it will look without having to load DFU and have to search for that material
somewhere in the game world. This can save you a lot of time tweaking the individual maps and their parameters, especially while you get the hang of Unity's (rather odd) Metallic workflow.
Regardless of whether or not you want to work together on this, good luck and have fun!
P.S.: Feel free to PM me if you have any other questions.
