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NPherno's GL Viewer

by rogue13 - Download it here

Tools needed for this program

Npherno's GL viewer

A Quake 2 model

A video car with good Open GL support

Skins to put on the model

Time and patience

Overview

This is to be a help file / tutorial / read me text for the GL viewer. This viewer is pure GL. It will not run on sub standard cards, nor will it run on 3DFX based cards that use the proprietary Glide drivers. It needs to be the real thing.

If your running a TNT based card, you are set. That's what it was built and tested on, both in Win 98 and NT4. Other cards may or may not be able to provide the proper platform. Next is a list of cards that we know of after beta testing, if you have another type and have success or not, we'd love to hear about it to add to the list here:

So now you're asking me "What is this thing and why should I use it?" Well that's understandable, plenty of people use Skinview and find this sort of thing useless. Fine, this app is about creating some excellent views of your model with colored lighting and a 4 pass rendering system. Yep, that means four skins per model. This is what id has say will be available to us for Quake3 models. If it doesn't happen for Q3, it is somewhat already part of Half Life, which does offer specularity texture maps for the models. So you can sort of "practice" now plus getting some superb images for your models which is always an excellent thing.

The Installation

1. Unzip the two files into a directory. How about "c:\NGLV"

2. Make an icon for yourself in the appropriate spot, I chose my desktop.

3. Double click on the icon of love and you're in.

Using the Viewer

On this first edition of the readme for the viewer, I'm basically going to call out what everything is and then refine later.

I also suggest you get at least the [../../../models2/unit01.htm Unit01 model] that is shown above as it was released with all 4 skins in .bmp format already. The other two Unit models 00 and 02 were not released with the GLV skins, but they were made. Here's a link to get them separately if you already have those models and would like to test the viewer with more that just one model.

• Unit 00/02 GL skins for the Nglv

||LGT Transfer ||This is the light exporting and importing section. Once you get a set up of lights that you find works for you, you can export each one to a separate LGT file and reload them with other models. There will be another version of this that will do an entire scene, but its a bit manual at the moment.

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||Texture ||How the program will filter the textures. worst to best from top to bottom...although the worst isn't too shabby

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||Multipass ||Fast means you could get some errors, in what you see but its fast. Safe will be perfect but very slow. Fast is usually fine.

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||Background color ||Change the background color in RGB format. The numbering system is 0 to 1 with decimals in between. you can use higher numbers if you like but its unnecessary.

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||Wireframe ||Displays the model in a textured wireframe mode.

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||Environment Map ||How do I add an environment skin? Set a map for both the diff and spec...set the lights to 0,0,0 amb, 1,1,1 diff, X,X,X spec, X being more than 1, but can go _really_ high...then, set the main texture for the glow map. Say I want to do a cloud environment map... it doesn't give me the option to pick one. Load a model, load the base texture to the glow and normal channels. Load the cloud to the diff and spec...set the lights the way I said. Then, under Rendering choose Environment map...

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||Setup ||The 3 buttons for each are left from right "Add" "Subtract" "Toggle" Add - Adds a new item. This will a different function depending on the row you are using at the moment. Subtract - deletes that item from the scene Toggle - when you see the asterisks its on, if the button is empty, its not. The windows you see are then the models you load in, the lights with the name you give them, and the below is the skins.

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||Models ||Each model when set as the current model will then effect the rest of the command panel below it. The skins and lights will display as to what's applied to the model.

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||Lights ||This is the lights. First you add a light by hitting the add button above the "Props" button and you just threw in the default light. But if you've Added a model already, you're not seeing it. That because you have to tell the program which lights to cast on which models. Simple have the model you want to add the light to, set at the current model, then hit the Add button on the second row. The light is now applied to that model. If you look into the Props dialog box, you'll be able to tweak the light settings. If you hit the Subtract key on this row, You will not delete the light from the scene, you use un-apply it to the model. If you want to remove a light completely use the Subtract button on the last row.

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||Texture ||If you're viewing the Unit01 model, you'll find the skins in BMP format and named appropriately. The viewer will read 24 or 8 bit images in .bmp or .pcx formats. You might also look at the maps in a paint program to get an idea of what you're applying to the model, and can then do your own appropriately.

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||Specularity ||2nd row of the skins. This could be called the chrome map or the shininess map. It basically is used to describe the color and strength of the highlights for the model.

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||Diffuse ||3rd row of the skins. This is used to describe the areas that will not reflect light or have a highlight. This doesn't mean you can't have one in the area that you paint in, but it will suck the strength of the light down.

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||Glow ||If you want to use this viewer to get a good idea of what it will look like in game a'la Skin view. Load you base texture map that you're going to use with your model in this slot and that's it. This will duplicate it perfectly.

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||Props ||Location - X Y Z X - the first is side to side. Y - is up and down and Z is the location of the light in and out of the screen. Direction - supposed to be the general direction that the light is pointing. Its meant to be seen as a large cone light. This doesn't do as much as you'd think, and I currently ignore this row, as the lights seem to act as sphere lights. Ambient Color - The general light or darkness of the scene. You can also effect the color as the columns for this row and the following stand for RGB. the general parameters are from 0 to 1, but you can set it as high as you want, however once past one, you're looking at full bright. Diffuse Color - The strength and color of the texture from the diffuse skin. Usually you'll pump this one. I often have it at 5 across all of the RGB settings. Then if you want to tint the light do it with the ambient row. Specularity - The color and strength of the highlight. You could set the light to be red with a green highlight if you wanted. But then this is effected by the spec map as well. This can get complex, but very powerful. I use this to simulate glowing sections of the model. See the shots of the Darth Vader model and his lightsaber in his review.

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