Problem with art I bought from dexsoft-games

#1 Have you tried using them on an unmodded exe?

#2 yea I tried them in 1.0.1 1.1 and AFX 1.1 all the same...

FIXED!The materials are all broken, need to change the tga to a png and then map in with materials editor.

#3 Had the same problem with as good as all their tree & foilage packs. needed to change a lot to .png. A couple of the trees arent in as .dts, and another couple are broken models. Would be cool if the packs was systematically cleaned up. And I'm still waiting in 2nd week to hear back from their support, on a purcase issue.

#4 Yeah it's annoying that all the good game art producers make it so hard for us to get the art (that is "Torque DTS ready") into the game. Hope they at least rectify the problem for future content...

#5 Yes, this is something I've noticed; not-'Torque Ready' assets being sold as
such....this does neither party in the transaction much good[well, except the vendor....if they want return traffic]. We[BAG] have a building pack soon to be published and are working on a second asset package...stay tuned. These shapes ship with proper bitmap formats for the engine, duh!

We, at Brokeassgames, make sure our products are 'DragNDrop' ready for the target engine. We send all content thru the engine..and past the eyes of "Rex, the Amazing Compliance Officer of BAG".

If it takes hours correcting art, I fail to see how this is 'Torque Ready'/'GameReady'....churning our 'nearly' usable art in high volume....what a 'BigBox-store' approach!

Take a look at our line of products! We strive very hard to make them as easily deploy-able as possible. Along with this QA, we take the time to 'educate' our customers on the finer points of Torque asset creation methods....how many vendors provide this type of support? We utilize many web friendly communication methods to stay in RealTime proximity to our clients.

Rex @ Brokeassgames

#6 I bought some Dexsoft packs as well and they take some modification to work correctly in Torque. Converting the tree materials to .png files is no easy matter in Photoshop 7. Maybe the newer versions are better.

The buildings were fairly straightforward, but the trees and foilage were a PITA.

I probably won't be buying anymore of their packs unless they really make them "Torque Ready."

#7 I have also bought some of the packages of Dexsoft. It seems there might be an issue regarding the tga textures. But there is a very strang thing here. Some of the tga-files work fine and others are giving results like the picture above. But.... when I convert them to .png and try to load them into T3D 1.1 beta 1 it is still a mess. Very strange.. and yes I save the materials ;p.

@Rex:
I have an issue with the MACK. When I use the stock medieval character it is way to big. When I export them again from MS3D I have noticed that there is a scale-factor of 1.4 applied (in the exporter) to the character. Changing it to 1 and export it again gives me a floating character (Sorry, it is getting a little of of-topic).

#8 I rendered a lot of Dexsoft's models in T3D. It looks exactly like this, when I forget to convert TGA into PNG. T3D has problems to read a lot of TGA files. But it can read PNG images fine.

It is very easy:
- mark all TGA files in your folder and drag them to TheGIMP (free)
- save each image as PNG
- delete all TGA files after this (this is important, otherwise T3D still uses them instead of the PNG files)

Another easy process is to use the free software IrfanView. It can batch-convert all these textures in one run.

To support all engines we had to offer all different textures like DDS (Leadwerks), TGA (C4), PNG (T3D). This would make a pack 3 times as big. So it often makes sense to assume that an engine user is able to convert textures on his own into the right format.

#9 @Richard: That scale was to make the avatar more in line with the standard KORK character. Nothing more, nothing less. Some like the larger than life scale KORK is to a the 'real' world; others strive for more accurate representation of objects as the are in the Real World...it's up to the individual developer. We, at BAG, certainly assist where Art Education is requested...but we're not mind readers, ;)! We don't know what we are not informed of.

Scale is a touchy matter...in that what might be 'accurate' and true measurements inside the engine, may not be to a Producers' liking...

As long as all objects in the Scene are the same scale[and this is a large part of 3D 'Indy' graphics-getting all objects in same scale], things should look the same across the board.

Yes, if you scale a DTS shape[without scaling the animations created at that scale of the DTS export] transforms will not align very well. You need to export the animations at your 'new' target Scale Factor to get sequences rendering well...this is a fact no matter what product you purchase. So, if you changed the DTS Scale Factor, you would indeed need to Scale the animations files as well.....Don't ever expect to change Scale of one component, without matching this scale to other files, and expect to see the same results! :) No matter whose content Pack you purchase....

@Richard:Now, I hope you're not saying that the MACK Pack was not user friendly and ready for instant swapping of assets, out of box....I will see about clearly stating the 'unit' size of the Packs avatars to avoid any future confusion. Give us a email at BAG, if you've edited the Source files and are having difficulties getting things to match up, as they are in the Pack. If possible, post at our Home Page any questions about the packs to get a quicker response, than here in an 'off topic' Thread.

#10 The only reason why we are not providing PNG files is to save space on server because providing TGAs and PNGs we are doubling space of the pack.
Converting them to PNG is veeery easy. You can use XnView also to Batch convert them in one sec and simply delete TGAs. I didnt think that someone will have problems with that.
So really preparing our packs to be fully compatible with Torque takes about few seconds to batch convert texture before you load models.
Simply as open Xnview (f.e) select Batch processing, select all TGAs and select PNG format for output and press GO.

#11 @Rex:
Sorry if I left the impression that MACK pack isn't user friendly. I am using MACK (and FACK, although not yet implemented in my game) and also using artwork from Dexsoft and it serves me well (at least it saves me a lot of time). The only thing I tried to say is that you always have to adjust bought artwork to your own needs, and not be surprised that you have to do so. In any case thanks for the remark about the scale. I didn't modify the source code, I scale the models at loading time and this is working for me.

So just to make sure I am not misunderstood ;), both BAG and Dexsoft are making real good art work and every game developer who is not an artist has to be prepared to make some minor adjustments. Keep up the good work (and keep the price reasonable ;p ).

@All:
Sorry if I misused this thread.

#12 Frank and Dejan:

You do realize that none of your vehicle packs are Torque compatible? Dexsoft product problems don't end with texture problems.

Also, some textures need to be mirrored to work correctly (met this in your industrial packs I think).

Another issue is LODs. They need to be in one model for Torque.

Vehicles - like the Viper (my favorite) - do not have separated wheels, dts nodes, etc... I wonder how many people buy your packs for Torque. I'm sure if you had an idea, you'd pay more attention to your packs to really be Torque ready. I'm willing to offer you a free studio license for my DTSViewer tool to make QA faster if that's any help - but please, do not neglect your Torque customers in such a manner with such sloppy packages.

Your art is top notch. Why would you want to ruin the experience with a crappy export? Perhaps you should somehow get a better idea about what Torque ready is. Would you need help with that, I'll be happy to point you to the right sources of information.

I am a die hard fan of Dexsoft products, but every time I get something from your site, I do that with a bad taste, knowing that there's a chance that I will not even be able to use the pack. Do not expect your customers all be artists and do the work that you ought to - and that you suggest that you already have!

#13 Thanks Konrad, for this offer.

Actually our first car pack has special prepared DTS versions. I made nodes for camera, fps view, wheels. I tested it in the good old racing mission of TGE and in Showtool pro.

I also made this for a vegetation pack, where I included each lod file in the DTS models and added low poly collision models for the trees.

Maybe we make some special Torque packs in the future. And we could indeed use and showcase your DTS viewer as our Dexsoft tool. Currently I still use Showtool or just the tools from T3D.

I would be glad to talk about this with you in more detail.

#14 We have problems with DexSoft tree packs not having collision meshes built in, we purchased a few hundred dollars in DexSoft stuff and even sent support emails about this problem.

It also seems like characters are on the wrong axis when put in Torque.

#15 @Frank: Thanks for accepting the offer. Please give me an email address or send an email to any of the addresses at www.bitgap.com to discuss this further. I hope to find a solution that will benefit both parties.

#16 I have bought several art packs from DexSoft and I love the art in them all but I can definitely say that prepping the models (in my case the Oasis 1 and 2 model packs, the Black Knightress, and the Arched level pack) is not a trivial thing :(

In the case of the Oasis packs I have had no end of trouble trying to shoehorn the mesh LODs into one mesh. On the upside, texture issues are quite easy to resolve from my experience (and I love the textures as well!).

I only have a few mesh tools available to myself so it's hard to get the 'right' one for the job. Mainly I have to rely on Blender, Milkshape, and Fragmotion to get my models done and in-game.

I would definitely like to see more of the fantastic models from DexSoft made more T3D friendly.

#17 i always have problems with dexsoft art, paths are alway not relative, even had the problem you are having.

@frank,
your artwork is gorgeous, but you need to spend more time cleaning it up before saleing it.

also stay away from TGA, its nothing but trouble along with larger files sizes, use dds and png

#18 No, actually TGA is a fine format. It gets compressed well in a rar or 7zip folder, it is the only format C4 can import. Unity and Gamestudio can read it fine. And it can store alpha channels.

DDS is fine also but only a few can read it (Leadwerks as an example). And PNG is a bit of Torque-exclusive.

But batch-converting textures is very easy.

Maybe we will release a Torque-only pack soon to test how it gets accepted.

#19 I've picked up about 8 packs (two foliage and I believe all the medieval based stuff) and I've found most of them import alright. I would have to change some parameters, like disabling the lerp alpha, etc. Similar with everyone else I've had to rescale the models as well. Some of the *.DTS files don't work properly; I can't assign further textures to them (normal, spec) or they'll have the wrong texture assigned. I tried the *.DAE files and they'll sorta work as well, but I'll have lighting issues with them, where they don't receive any light or only part of the model will be lighted.

I've been importing what I can into 3DSMAX 2010, retexturing and reexporting them to *.DAE and reimporting them into T3D (I use Binary 1.01) which seems to work fine.

It's been munching up a lot of my time, but I am willing to send you my fixes so that other T3D users can benefit.

#20 Having the original textures in a lossless format like TGA is a must for me as I use them alot to make variations. Batch conversion into DDS is pretty easy anyway with the ATI Compressonator so I don't see it as an issue. Personally I'm a big fan of their stuff.