Mobile/tintable/take image, How come?...

[writerly]

I love the Moviestorm props I have purchased, but I get annoyed when many of them can't be tinted, or take an image or be mobile.
Would ticking those properties cause them to be larger or some other issue unbeknownst to the rest of us? The more flexible the prop, the better it would seem to me...
C

[Chris Ollis]

I love the Moviestorm props I have purchased, but I get annoyed when many of them can't be tinted, or take an image or be mobile.
Would ticking those properties cause them to be larger or some other issue unbeknownst to the rest of us? The more flexible the prop, the better it would seem to me...
C

Tintable:
Tintable materials only work well if the texture is very bleached or mainly white (a pair of white jeans for example). It does not work well on dark textures which in reality most things are, and would come out muddy and ugly.
The textures we make tintable are deliberately bleached and colour corrected to work well with the tint system this takes a little extra time on top of the other texture creation so if an object doesn't strike us as really requiring it for the purposes of why we made it, then we won't make one or tick the tintable tag.

User Image:
Like it or not, Moviestorm is aimed at a middle ground of user, people who want to make films but don't necessarily want to deal with mapping coordinates or poly counts. So when we think "this T-Shirt would be perfect for a user image" we unwrap the geometry specifically to as simple a mapping coordinate system as possible and set the required area to a separate material ID so that it doesn't effect the rest of the model.
To do this for every single object in Moviestorm would take forever, it would also stop us from being able to make use of various UV shortcuts and ways of maximizing texture space.
We could just tick the User Image box and let you deal with working out what on earth we've done with the textures, but that just causes headaches, but that would make new users think that everything could easily receive and imported picture of their dog and just work, which it obviously wouldn't and it would leave the model looking a mess, and ugly.

Mobile:
Again, Mobile is usually only tagged when we something logically should be mobile. I appreciate if you are making a haunted house movie then you may well want everything to be controlled by poltergeists, but seeing as our current mobile system works on the old car principal (slow start, follow a path, slow stop) I don't think that makes much sense. Until we have standard keyframed XYZ translation and rotation I think things being set to mobile tends to make a bit of a mess and highlight what I consider is a flaw in Moviestorm.

So to recap. We don't because the last thing we want is a load of really ugly Moviestorm movies and new user experiences. It is better to suffer a handful of requests for more to be User Imaged than people to be turned away.


And finally History:
In a lot of cases, the reason that some objects have some options tagged and others not is not down to the confused and tortured minds of staff, but simply due to the fact that a some of the options weren't available when that pack was made. Being an ever evolving base program this is always going to happen, and being a small team we can't always remember to go back and re-tag the thousands of props we have in stock.



And Armanus, if that is the case, it is clearly a deliberate fix to make Moviestorm better, even if it does sadly have a negative effect for a few people.

[writerly]

Chris, thanks for the great explanation of the hows and whys. I shall now stop grumbling...uh...about that one thing. SMILE
Don't get me wrong I LOVE Moviestorm and I'm happy to bash out my own props where necessary and 'ghost' your props underneath to get the animations working correctly.
Keyframe animation would be WONDERFUL. I hope it happens someday. That would make my life SO much simpler!
Keep up the GREAT work guys.
C