Lucky_Strike

Hehe 😁 I did wonder about using one of these or the fountains. Can we use an unused slot - so BN has something like 6 fountains and 1 large fountain, not sure it has monuments though they must be there in the engine.
Thanks for all this Harry, absolutely invaluable stuff for map makers and modders alike.
With the teeth spaced at 2m do vehicles attempt move through? Also, if using the teeth as flavor we could place real hedgehogs behind them which could put vehicles off trying to traverse them.
Heavy forest is a good texture but it's just a bit too bushy for my liking. Maybe as an alternative a single, invisible, impassable flavor object every few meters would be enough to deter vehicles. It could be done as a small weed or bush for easy placement.
Also we will have quite a few textures to choose from.
Was also thinking of these larger groups taking up 2x3m or 2x2m could that work?



That's a lot of TNT!
And those big daddy teeth maybe 1x3m?

Big enough to get one of these through ... Westwall p0rn 😉

Westwall humour

Look at poor old Churchie still wandering around like some silly old duffer ...
Very exciting stuff if you're into dragon's teeth ... 😁

Here's me farthing guv'...

Elizabeth lifts her eyes from her Whitehall Gazette and shouts "Oi! Noddlehead get in here some bloke forgot to make his copyright payment."

He did a decent job as Minister of Defence (a post he created himself) once he had Alan Brooke to hold his hand. Whilst, Atlee, Morrison, and Ernie Bevin ran the country, something the voters clocked onto.
In the meantime I'm off to play "Neues Reichskanzlei" my (very slight) reworking of Mr. Pye's recent offering.

Oh I am sorry I just notice it right now. My apologies 🤢

Panzer IVG (Latest) employing the wrong turret skirt model
This happens in CMRT but could also be happening elsewhere, haven't checked. Panzer IVG (Latest) uses the mark IV H (Late) turret skirts rather than the mark IV G skirts available for both the IV G (Latest) and IV G (Late):

IVG (Latest) - note the zimmerit, also notice camo pattern

IVG (Late) - note no zimmerit, and notice camo pattern

IVH - zimmerit

IVG generic texture bmp - note no zimmerit, also notice camo

"I don't know much about Limey politics Mr. Churchill but all of your troops that I've spoken to are voting for the one with the pipe."

Cheers bud it's the H.

Ok here's a list of my bespoke vehicle set so far, all works in progress and more to be added. What's your favorite so far?









 

It's fine, I don't mind...

Thanks Harry. 4 was the most extreme for sure, so I'm glad you can tell the difference. 
Yeah shadows between them do look too heavy, but as you point out they are hard-coded, or at least I've never seen anything obvious in Blender to affect them. Again it could be in the mysterious metadata, but I doubt that BF went to the trouble of setting shadows for each and every model, it's got to be a blanket instruction. What would be really cool is a half-way house shadow, if they could dial the shadows down to say 50-60% with a more feathered edge for overcast days I would be much happier. I really get torn between turning them off and having unanchored, floaty big objects like tanks, or keeping them on and having everyone driving around in their very own little pool of sunshine, in the rain! ☔ + 😎 I don't imagine this would break the programming budget ... 🙄

Too many good ideas coming out of this thread, not enough hours in the day🤯
I think that's perfectly acceptable given the other abstractions of the game. Falaise's 22.5º mod is great and works really well for roads in a more rural setting, but in towns and cities we still end up with lots of zigzag rows of houses since they don't align with the 22.5º angle. I think some careful use of it in places like suburban areas, where there are perhaps larger house set back from the road, in parks or on steep hills might work.
I found an online app that does normal maps really well. It's free and has plenty of options, outputs to png, jpg and tif I think. Drag and drop a bmp and mess about with the settings, dead easy. Once done just convert to bmp in GIMP or PS.
https://cpetry.github.io/NormalMap-Online/
Beats PS tool hands down.
Great info Harry. I see the CM version is there - Spanische Reiter.
I have a few ideas about how best to handle the geometry for coiled wire, it might be a mix of meshes and alpha channels. There are modifiers in Blender that do particle systems which is useful for stuff like hair or fur when doing CGI, it's used to generate the leaf branch distribution on the trees. It may be able to help with the tedious semi-random generation of the coils of wire using a simple circle mesh/texture with an alpha channel hole in the middle. I may do a concept dry run on a flavor object just to see if it would work. Coupled with a metal post we would have a start at a more makeshift wire obstacle.
I'm really starting to like the idea of invisible defensive works topped with flavor object versions to allow us to have much more variety whilst retaining the full effect of the original. I'll try it with the dragon's teeth once I've finished the first draft. Obviously placement of the invisible object will be the biggest problem so we might require two versions - the original one tagged for placement with the invisible version used in game or vice versa.
 

Dragon's teeth texture 4. Very rough finish, moulded with thinner shutters than previous. This one also includes normal maps which come into play when shaders are toggled on.

Cool! Do like a PaK 40 mounted on something entirely inappropriate - still waiting for the Raupenschlepper Ost PaK 40 ... maybe in a vehicle pack.
Speaking of wonderful adaptations. I was browsing through PanzerWrecks' book Panzers in Berlin 1945 (highly recommended by the way) and noticed quite a few Panzer IV hulks being used a makeshift bunkers similar to the commonly depicted Pantherturm.

Basically an older Panzer IV minus wheels etc concreted into the ground or hastily buried in concrete and rubble, so ... with a couple of 1m deep ditchlocked squares and some tinkering in Blender ...




Has to be immobilised for obvious reasons - can't have this driving around trashing the roads ...


Still quite a few issues to resolve - shadows from missing/invisible skirts persist, quite a few gaps at the back of her rubble skirt, play testing ...

Think you got the wrong thread Chuck ...

Wire is not something I've looked at - would need to see some examples of various wire patterns used in defensive positions. I'm familiar with metal spike and coiled barbed wire, the type we see so much of in WWI imagery. What other suggestions.
The actual wire probably could only ever work as alpha channelled bmps, though it would be possible to build a representation of actual wire in Blender we do need to consider the amount of triangle texels needed for a long run of wire. I presume that wire is more of an obstacle rather than something which provides cover of any value. It would be interesting to know what each of the field works is doing in-game in terms of cover, concealment and blocking LOS.
Can't remember off the top of my head - do the wire fences share the same wire texture? 
ARARARAGHHHH! Stupid, stupid, stupid. No you're right I didn't include it AND I can't edit the original post now 🤬
A few moments later ...
Thankfully DropBox seems to be fine with me updating the zip archive so I'v now updated it and included the mdr - thanks for spotting that 🎖️
And yes the normal maps were quite simple, I though they might involve an edit in the Blender file but the game engine seems happy to use them so long as they are in the same directory as the texture.

@Lucky_Strike absolutely. let me know. I love creative Soviet style defensive works with alternating fields of mines and barbed wire.

Many thanks for the reply and advice Lucky Strike.

i saw it as 'babylon berlin' joins the volksturm, lol.
 
cheers,
rob
 

Think you got the wrong thread Chuck ...

My scenario is up ... details on the dedicated thread here:
 

The embedded Combat (Mission) Photographer Digest...
France, 1944.
82nd Airborne




101st Airborne. The Screaming Eagles.





 

Favour time everyone/anyone interested ...
I'm messing around with the dragon's teeth normal maps and, being the decisive person that I am, I can't really decide on my favourite style. This is subtle, but looking carefully one can see the differences more or less. So, I have uploaded a quick mod set and part of Harry's Westwall map (hope that's ok Harry?) - adapted with the new mod in mind. If you would all be so kind as to download it pop it into you CMBN Z directory and add the scenario to your scenarios folder and then run it. Open it as German's then what you'll have is a chunk of Westwall with graffitied 1-4 dragon's teeth, all the same texture but with different normal maps. In one corner by the right side of the pine forest, facing you, is a bare patch with, hopefully, textures 1 to 4 in a little cluster ...

If not have a wander around the Westwall to see the various textures.
Get down close and inspect them with shaders and shadows on, see if you have a preference as to how the normal maps affect the surface, toggle shaders on and off to see the normal map pop in and out of use. Movie mode makes the contrast more pronounced but is not essential to see the normal maps, they are used only with shaders on. Move around the teeth, the normal maps are more noticeable in shaded areas rather than full, direct light. 
If you feel adventurous open the scenario in the editor and change the time so that different light influences them, or try different weather effects. You need to deploy Axis units to actually see the teeth in the editor.
Once you've decided on your favourite please let me know.
Thanks 🙏
Download scenario and teeth here

Dragon's teeth texture 4. Very rough finish, moulded with thinner shutters than previous. This one also includes normal maps which come into play when shaders are toggled on.

I think Harry explained this pretty much. What is quite clear from doing these experiments is that the game's complexities tread a fine line between simulating reality and abstraction, quite often erring towards abstraction to solve a lot of the difficulties involved. BF are always telling us that when correcting bugs they can quite often create new ones; messing with the model geometry demonstrates how easy it is to break things in a visual way even if the under lying mechanics remain the same. This of course doesn't explain why some of the visual bugs hang around for so long, nor why BF didn't put more effort into better simulating defensive works.
From my perspective what is quite reassuring is that I can't really break the mechanics of the game with all this messing about, so it will continue.
When I dust off the trench mod and see what was happening with it I'll certainly look at the pause command thanks. I always forget we've got it as a command, probably explains why my pixeltruppen are so often knackered. I really want to get the trenches at least looking better, but we may have to compromise how they apparently function, we might have the troops knee-deep in the bottoms of trenches or climbing out a bit too often. The latter is more problematic if they are more exposed so it's the one thing I'm really keen to avoid. Perhaps when they're a bit closer to a general release you would be willing to do some play-testing for us?