PK_Azlon

That is a TERRIFYING idea! No I don't think I'll be doing that. In fact I think I'll be retiring after I finish this. This temple has ended up being a lot more work than I ever anticipated and I don't think I ever want to do this to myself again.

Decided to take a quick break from modeling and make the generic/multi-purpose room which will serve as the base for several rooms in the temple such as barracks, holding cells, offices, etc.

UPDATE TIME! Work has been progressing much better since moving to a more focused, modular building approach! AND I HAVE SCREENSHOTS! So these are the "Sith Master's Office" and ONE of the "Sith Barracks" rooms!. Churning out MD3s that are similar enough to SWTOR to maintain the overall aesthetic feel is still a huge pain in the ass, but it's coming along.

I'm well aware. The hosting site that they were on is gone. BUT....I HAVE GOOD NEWS! I got another! But I won't be reposting old outdated screens.

Yeah actually! Work on the project has been slow. (It's really hard doing all this by myself!) and I've had a few setbacks. Every time I've tried to start this project, I hit a wall trying to fit everything into the overall design I set out to build. So I'm taking a completely different and modular approach, building individual rooms separately that I can combine into a single map later. This should allow me to stay focused on designing, building, and decorating things one room at a time so I don't get completely overwhelmed. I'll save the "great hall" for later once I have built all the rooms, and then I can place them and connect everything. I'm still struggling with solving some technical hurdles such as how to do a proper kolto tank that works more appropriately than my last map's bacta tanks. Currently the first room (A Darth's Office) is done. I'd post a screenshot but I don't know where to upload it to since postimg is gone.

UPDATE TIME!!!!

This is precisely why I've been leaning against the idea. With as large as I am hoping to make this, it's better to avoid such things.

Perhaps when it's a bit further along.

Yes actually! After a nice long vacation to recharge my batteries, I'm back on the job! It's easy to burn out on a project this big. I wish I could get it done faster, but I'm only one woman, and there is A LOT to do! The temple apex is nearly done, but I just hit a creative block designing a fitting Sith Alchemy altar model, so I took time off so I could look at it with fresh eyes later, and honestly, it's one model, so it can wait while I work on the rest of the temple. Also if you're curious why I'm talking about an alter for the apex, that's because I realized the apex is too small a room to make a suitable throne room as it is in the above screenshot. I decided the throne room should be massive, so that's going in the sub-level. The good news I just "broke ground" on the main floor! This is the area that will be most reminiscent of the Korriban Academy from SWTOR (but still different). I can't wait to show everyone what it looks like once it's far enough along for another preview! However, since it's New Year's Eve, I think it's only fair I reward everyone's patience with the latest screenshot of the Temple Apex!

First look at the progress on my new redesigned Sith Temple. As some of you might know, my previous work on this project was completely lost, forcing me to start over from scratch. I took the opportunity to redesign the temple more efficiently and approach the build armed with the experiences of the previous attempt, allowing me to avoid some of the pitfalls that held up development, and generally do things better. One major difference is I decided to start from the top. Previously I started at the bottom and by the time I got to the top, I was struggling to come up with a layout that was as good as the lower levels. Additionally I am building in pieces, allowing me to really focus on making every section the best I can. Once all the sections are polished up, then I'll assemble them as prefabs and tie it all together. (I used this approach on my Phantom Knights Training Academy map.) Now this first preview is still unfinished, but it's close enough to the final look to give you an idea of what to expect. As usual, expect future updates in this thread.

So I have an md3 model of a light. But the problem is, even using a light image, the model seems to emit light in every direction. This is not what I want. I want the light to only come from the faces containing the "light" part of the shader. I this possible?

Both of these techniques work! Thank you both!!!

after modeling and uv-mapping, I typically merge verts unless I have a specific reason not to. Then I convert the quads to triangles. I export as a wavefront obj, then import into blender, where I set up the md3shader and export the md3. For the model in these screenshots, I went back in and tried selecting and sharpening the edges where needed (most of the model frankly). However I was doubtful that this would affect the final md3, and I was right. It didn't help. The model in question is this approximation of the door-frames in SWTOR (I've since come to question making them so similar to SWTOR's and might rebuild similar to my previous map version's frames.) As you can see, the edges aren't sharp and the shading on flat surfaces gets weird, making the triangles more obvious.

I still remember my first foray into mod creation. I was feeling festive one Christmas Eve back in the late 90s and made a Santa skin for Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight. Later I made Jedi Knight skins of myself and my friend as Jedi Knights. I never released any of them though. When I learned that Jedi Outcast would launch with modding tools being released, I was determined to learn mapping. I was so excited about it that I had a dream that I was a Jedi running around this imperial-like base. Once I had learned how to map well enough, I created the place from my dream and released it on jk2files as Phantom Knights headquarters v2 (the first version was an awful, amateurish release that shall never be spoken of again LOL!). The map was named for my old Jedi Knight clan that I attempted (and failed) to resurrect for JO. It's in part for nostalgia that I keep my clan tag after all these years, the other reason being the possibility of running into one of my old JK clanmates again. Azlon I took from my favorite manowars 2 skin, a purple mandalorian. Of course when JA was released, I was eager to continue improving my mapping skills. I discovered my PKHQv2 map didn't port well to JA so I decided to partially rebuild it. Then I decided to expand and redesign it. I had a lot of false starts and setbacks and would walk away from it frequently until I could come back to it with fresh eyes. It was 9 years from the time I started it to the time I finally finished and released it. (It's called Phantom Knights Training Academy, you can download it on this site). Graduating design school was what inspired me to finish it. I finally had the fresh eyes I needed to draw out a floor plan that would work. After that it only took a couple weeks to finish. More recently I had the necessary inspiration to tackle a project I always wanted to build, tried numerous times before and always failed at for lack of good ideas. That inspiration came from playing a ton of SWTOR. I finally had the inspiration to build a decent Sith Temple. So I started working on it, and to keep myself motivated, I announced it and teased it on the forums here. Things were looking good, but unfortunately, being a divorced mother of 2 with a lot on my plate, I've had to take a lot of breaks, and then after a clean install of Windows 10, I forgot to copy over my Jedi Academy backups, didn't realize I forgot, and deleted the old backup to recover space. I lost everything I was working on. On the plus side, the positive support I got for the previous version I lost was enough to keep me motivated. I vowed to redesign the whole thing in a way that was less troublesome to build and script. In particular, that damned 4-floor diagonal elevator had to go! I was proud as hell that I pulled it off, don't get me wrong! As a first-time script writer, I was amazed by how long and complex it was. A four-stage selector switch, activation switch, inner doors that traveled with the elevator car and outer doors that sealed the shaft, and 4 call switches. And let's not forget that the elevator moved diagonally. The amount of conditional scripting was insane because I had to account for every combination of conditions. Out of curiosity, I copied all of the completed Icarus script to MS Word and it amounted to roughly around 30 pages. Needless to say, this time I am aiming to keep it simpler. Multiple vertical elevators instead of one multi-floor. I'm also working from the top down to avoid running out of ideas when I get near the end of the build Just talking about it all is exciting. What's worse is I keep having ideas to add to it! I'm afraid my reach will eventually exceed my grasp. I'm still not sure why I love doing this so much, but I do, and the fact that I get to eventually share it with this community when it's done makes all the work worth it. Ideally, I'd like to blow this community away with the biggest, best, most feature-rich Sith Temple ever released for this game. Because that is the map I want to see. That's the map I feel the JKhub community deserves. I only hope it doesn't take as long as my last map LOL!

So I have been making models in Lightwave and sending them to blender for md3 export, since nobody makes md3 exporters for newer versions of LW3D. The problem I run into is that the shading on the models while testing the map looks weird, similar to how they tend to look in blender without the proper smoothing/sharpened edges. Does anyone know how to fix this problem? Would simply unwelding the verticies at sharp edges help, or is there something I'm missing?

As I lay here pondering how to solve the latest challenge in my endeavor to build the largest Sith Temple map ever released, I can't help marveling at the fact that it's been 14 years since JA was released and we're still going. I can't explain why I still have such a passion for creating mods for this game. Sure there has never been another SW game quite like the Dark Forces/Jedi Knight franchise, but is it more than that? Even though it is so limited in what we can realistically do, we never seem to stop trying to push this engine and its tools to their absolute limits in the quest to create something awesome, something beautiful, and of course, something fun. I invite anyone to share their thoughts on JA mapping in 2017 (and beyond), what it means to you, and what keeps you going.

I am very happy to announce that work is finally underway on the redesigned Sith Temple! And here is the initial concept drawing! (please note, many details were not included in the drawing because it is largely for my own use as a reference)

I'm not going to use the screen shots. I'm going completely back to the drawing board. Literally. I'm redesigning the entire thing from scratch in a way that lets me do everything I want to do without any guess work later when I'm building it. That also includes changes to the layout. Last time, I tried to lean more towards heavy homage to the academy in SWTOR, and while I'd like to be reminiscent of that aesthetic, it was way to limiting. I still want this thing to be massive, and include all the features I intended, but I'm going to lay it out in a way that makes sense for MY goals with the project.

Thanks! This will give me a head start on my assets. I've decided to learn blender to streamline my MD3 creation workflow.

I do intend to create a Dark Council chamber. Perhaps not identical to the one in SWTOR, but inspired by it. So yes that would be immensely helpful!

I appreciate that. While I hope this doesn't take as long, the PK Training Academy map took me 9 years to finish. Mostly cause I kept hitting a wall with it and walking away until I could look at it with fresh eyes. Ultimately I ended up redesigning the whole layout, keeping only a couple rooms from the earlier work. And that last redesign only took about a month to finish. The end result was much larger and more attractive than the other attempts. I want to say that my hopes for this redesign are equally as ambitious. I was running into loads of technical and design difficulties with the previous version of this temple, largely because I'd been slavishly trying to cram everything into a perfect pyramid structure. These constant challenges caused me so much stress that I had to take a hiatus and focus on other areas of my life. This time around I can take what I learned from the previous attempt and apply it towards avoiding those pitfalls. For one thing, there's a reason nobody does diagonal elevators. Radiant already doesn't play nice with diagonal brushes as it is. I got it working, but building the shaft around it was masochistic at best. Plus it severely limits the interior space, and designing around it is a hassle. So the redesign will include vertical elevators. Beyond that, I can't go into details just yet. But I have a good feeling about this. When the force closes a door, it opens a window.

It is with great sadness that I must report that due to a careless mistake while managing my files, my ENTIRE Sith Temple project and all it's assets were completely wiped out. I know many of you were looking forward to this map. I'm deeply sorry for this disappointment. I myself am personally crushed. However, I am dedicated to completing and releasing a map worthy of your patience. Since I have to start from scratch, I'm going back to the drawing board (literally) and will redesign the entire thing in a way that will streamline the development while making it every bit as impressive as a Sith Temple truly deserves.