Hi everyone. I’m working on importing some Cryengine assets into Blender for Star Citizen, and I’m having some issues with the materials. They are rendering very dark for some reason, instead of the nice, bright colors. I think I have the node layout set up properly, but it’s all dark magic and the node editor scares me. So I’m hoping someone can identify what is going on.
I have 3 images I’m using: Diffuse, specular and normal. They have an alpha channel, and I’m not sure if that is a factor. But, here is what the diffuse map looks like (with alpha on and off):
As you can see, the colors are a nice, dirty white. When I look at the object in Texture mode, things look nice and bright:
Just weird. I tried changing the mapping around as suggested (added a bright/contrast node and tweaked with the settings, changed the layout, etc), but even when I just make it as simple as possible (image texture -> Diffuse shader -> material output), I get a pure black material. See below. I put in a brightness node to make things a bit easier to see, but you don’t even get the blue bands around the missiles this way. I also flipped the normals to see if that made a difference, but no luck.
I checked the UV Map, and everything is lined up properly there (of course, I have to uncheck Use Alpha, or all I see is the alpha channel as per the first image in my OP).
It would be nice to have larger images so we can actually read what it says on the nodes.
Do you have an actual normal map plugged into the normal node? I cant really see, but it looks like the image has disp in the filename and if you used crazybump, that would be the wrong one to use there.
You can also post a blend file for us to look at.
Along with the other helpful answers here’s my off the wall suggestion - (BTW what version of Blender are you using?)
With this object selected open the materials properties. click the diffuse node. When the menu pops up select anything other than diffuse (within reason! ok just select glossy or aniso…) does it immediately render (if you have it on rendered display)? Now you shld be able to switch it back to diffuse and have it be OK.
I mention this because I had an identical problem - I was all ready to upload it, screenshots and blend etc. and then just said the heck with it - right before I saw your post!
Any ideas why the UV’s do not stick on texture? I have to add significant Y shift to get it where it needs to be?
I’ve checked normalmap so far; if spec, diffuse is the same, no wonder lights do not help.
From blender UV editor save diffuse color image, sandstorm is 100% right, there is nothing except rgb dots on it when seen in external image editor after Unpack it . Blender saves it out ok though. So Save it, despite it’s unpacked, then reload. I had to ditch and recreate cycles material.
It was the issue with the .png. I saved it through Blender as suggested, then reloaded the saved file into the Diffuse channel. All good now.
The original file was a .dds, which I believe is Photoshop. I used Noesis to convert it to .png, which saved the alpha channel, but yup, as my original pictures show the only thing that gets through the alpha seems to be those 3 dots.
Even when I open up the original .dds file in gimp, I see just the dots. The only time I see the proper image is when I uncheck the Use Alpha in the UV/Image editor. I know with BI I have the option to not use the alpha channel in the Textures panel (and it’s necessary for another Cryengine game image files which does the same thing).
For the record, I’m using v2.68.
At this point, I think I’m going to blame photoshop for this. Or maybe Autodesk. At least Blender can fix this issue! Thanks everyone!
At least Blender can fix this issue! Thanks everyone!