Texturing Tricks

[Chilibird]

Well, seeing as I finally have an acceptable design for the Ramses, I'm getting around to texturing.

I've spent some time looking at other textures, but I can't figure out how all this was done.

My question is basically how y'all went about making some of the textures.. stuff like the vents, and armor plates. I've got camo working all that good stuff, but I don't know how to make all of the 'detailed' parts of my texture.

[Marco Bergman]

Here's a rehash of my previous replies on how I did the Dropteam textures.

Basically, I made a grey-scale overall vehicle texture with all the details in place, then a camo overlay was added. Unfortunately, due to the way I draw, it was all done by hand...

All the grey-scale vehicle files are still available for download. I suggest that you download them, and cut-and-paste from them to get all the details you need.

Also available are the three digital camo sheets.

I hope this helps. If you have any problems, please feel free to email me, either for help or actual texturing.

-----------------------

Here's an indication of the texturing sequence I used on the Dropteam textures. (I still had some of these old textures lurking about.)

If I was lucky, I got one of these:

These are nice because the edges are mostly correct and take only a bit of cleaning up.

About half of the time I got one of these:

(This is the cleaned-up version.)

These are not so much fun, because you have to find the edges yourself, which can be very time-consuming. Involves drawing a line for where you think the edge is, opening the game to look at the model ( I use a scenario with all the vehicles inserted as objects and everything else turned off for faster loading.), then correcting the lines and viewing the model... making sure the edges are tidy really matters.

Finally I end up with one of these:

Garish colours are deliberate, to assist noticing edge imperfections.

Now I fill each facet with my secret-blend base texture, and add shading to each facet.

(There are plain areas of this underlying base texture on the bottom of most vehicles, so you should be able to piece together a sheet. Or I can upload mine if required.)

THE SHADING IS VITAL. Sure, the game engine provides some, but preshading the faces is essential to give a proper 3D look. Shade the faces as if the light source is from above the front of the vehicle.

After shading, I go through and highlight all the edges where light would fall - a quick spray with the highlight tool.

Then it is time to put in all the detail. Most of the faces are stretched in some way, so I tend to draw or clone a detail, then apply the stretch to suit, then paste it onto the model. Repeat lots of times. Add highlights and shadows continuously.

Finally, I go through and add all the stains, then finish off with a spray of low-opacity black around hatch edges, etc, and along the bottom of the facets.

This is as far as I went. The files were sent to Gordon, who masked any non-grey bits, then applied a layer of his predefined camo. Finally he added a layer with markings (again, usually stretched.)

All my textures were done as a single layer in PSP4. Everything is hand-drawn. This method of working is a bit slow, and not to many people's taste. I'd suggest cloning and pasting from the existing textures as the best way for most people.

The existing grey textures are available for a while here:

Grey Textures

Originally posted by adzling:

I just can't figure out how to overlay the camo texture without using some form of transparency adjustment......which doesn't look right as the colors get all washed out and the details fade-out.

Two things: you need a higher-contrast mask on the camo layer to preserve the details, and the camo layer is fairly highly saturated to allow for the fading effect of the transparent overlay.

Here are the digital camo sheets:

DigitalArctic

DigitalDesert

DigitalWoodland

The splinter camo was hand-drawn on a per-texture basis because it needs to be tweaked to get the edges to line up.

[ October 28, 2006, 01:47 PM: Message edited by: Marco Bergman ]

[Toby Haynes]

Originally posted by Marco Bergman:

THE SHADING IS VITAL. Sure, the game engine provides some, but preshading the faces is essential to give a proper 3D look. Shade the faces as if the light source is from above the front of the vehicle.

This cries out for ambient occlusion texture baking. This technique sets the model up with a broad hemispherical light source and works out the appropriate shadows. These shadows are then baked onto the model and exported.

http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/wiki/HowTo:Radiosity_baking_in_Blender

It saves trying to do the lighting by hand and can give much more realistic results.

[poesel]

Originally posted by Marco Bergman:

[..]

This is as far as I went. The files were sent to Gordon, who masked any non-grey bits, then applied a layer of his predefined camo.

[..]

Any chance to get these files? Masking the grey bits is difficult because its a lot of grey tones there.

Or maybe someone can explain to me how to do it with the gimp?

The rest works out quite well. But with the surrounding grey the details look a bit dull on the camo.

[poesel]

Sorry to bump my own question.

Could the variuos textures, especially the different camos, be made available? It would be nice if new vehicle would look similar to the existing ones.

thanks

[Chilibird]

It's up there in the first post. Both the Grey textures of each vehicle, and the individual camo sheets, are up there.

[poesel]

Sorry, no. Not all. The Team1 textures are missing.

For instance compare DesertIFVChassis0.png with Team1DesertIFVChassis0.png.

Which means btw, that a complete set of textures consists of 3 (arctic,desert,woodland) * 2 (Team0,Team1) * 2 (normal&burned) = 12 textures!

And that is 12 for each chassis and turret.

Ouch.

Well, most of this is applying layers or is automated, but still...

[Chilibird]

I actually think the only substantial difference between team1 and team0 is the blood/water logo on them, but I'd have to actually compare em first

[Marco Bergman]

The Team1 textures are the splinter-camo ones, and there's a big problem with providing a camo template.... there wasn't one. Gordon had to hand draw the colour blobs and tweak their positions/sizes to ensure that the pattern would wrap around the different facets. Once he had the temperate one, the others were generated by adjusting the layer.

So there never was a Team1 camo template.

(The digital camo is so random that misalignments don't show up too badly. Well, I see it, but most people don't.)

I can try to get the RGB values from Gordon, (or deduce them myself) if required, but that's all we can actually give you?

Or do you want me to generate a splinter camo set of template sheets, and you'll just ignore the edge alignments?

[poesel]

I think I'll ignore.

I'm not an artist and won't get near the quality of your textures anyway so I can take slight misalignments.

A general splinter camo set would be a great help, thank you!

[Toby Haynes]

I've been using the basic camo images as a material in Blender. That material is then mapped onto the object and the resulting texture is baked out to the final UV texture map. The results are believably consistent with the original vehicles

[poesel]

If you do it this way, how do manage the different textures for arctic, desert and woodland? You can only have one model file.

The radiosity baking thing you mentioned seems a very useful idea but I'm not sure if that makes sense with the textures.

[Toby Haynes]

Originally posted by poesel71:

If you do it this way, how do manage the different textures for arctic, desert and woodland? You can only have one model file.

Yes - but you can have many materials. Just switch the material over for an object to another Camo texture and re-render to a fresh UV image.

[poesel]

Thats how you manage that in blender. But how do you get DT to manage that?

DT allows one model file and several texture files. If you bundle the texture with the model your stuck with one texture (for DT).

[Marco Bergman]

Okay, I've dug out Gordon's emails and found his settings for the Team1 colours ( I think )

Arctic

Woodland

Desert

The pattern is based on the one on the MBT texture, expanded to fit the entire texture.

I had a play with these in PSP9 (still trying to come to grips with these new-fangled layers) and found that much changing of settings is required to get a good final image. I came up with some saturated ones that worked well enough for me, if anyone is interested. Here's my rough arctic texture compared to the original (at left); there's not too much difference. (mostly in the contrast setting Gordon's used.)

The good thing is you can just set up a detail layer and mask once, load in the three saturated pages, and hide the unwanted ones; makes for quick camo generation.

Arctic Saturated

Woodland Saturated

Desert Saturated

steps:

duplicate the base image ( =detail layer)

sharpen (detail layer)

brightness +10% contrast +30% (detail layer)

create mask (source luminance, not inverted)

set opacity to 40% (detail layer)

copy camo as new layer

(place below mask and detail layer)

You can see the steps in the tree in the screenshot above.

[Toby Haynes]

Originally posted by poesel71:

Thats how you manage that in blender. But how do you get DT to manage that?

DT allows one model file and several texture files. If you bundle the texture with the model your stuck with one texture (for DT).

OKay - I had the wrong end of the stick. I'd thought you were asking about generating the textures, whereas you are really after managing the textures from a DT perspective.

I'm guessing here - I think it all boils down to prefixes - specifically Arctic, Woodland and Desert.

If I peer into the data directory, I note that MBTChassis0.cob does NOT reference ArcticMBTChassis0.png - it simply references MBTChassis0.png.

</font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">toby@nexus:/usr/local/games/DropTeam/data$ grep MBTChassis0.png MBTChassis0.cob

Binary file MBTChassis0.cob matches

toby@nexus:/usr/local/games/DropTeam/data$ grep ArcticMBTChassis0.png MBTChassis0.cob

toby@nexus:/usr/local/games/DropTeam/data$ </pre>

[poesel]

Toby - no need to cross - I know how that works because CZ3 includes the new 90mm Barrel, including model and textures.

Look in the Mod directory and you will find 90mm_Barrel.obj referencing 90mm_Barrel.png. The texture files are Arctic90mm_Barrel.png, Desert90mm_Barrel.png and Woodland90mm_Barrel.png. These are the textures for Blood. Water has 'Team1' prefixed and that works too. I've just tested that with the new textures from Marco.

Marco, thanks a lot for the textures. The saturated versions are IMHO a bit too saturated. They look too shiny when compared with the regular textures. I took the others.

But the saturation hint solved my problem with texture brightness. The other (old) textures were simply too dull. A bit more saturation and everything looks fine now.

If theres interest I'll put them up.

[Marco Bergman]

Glad to help.

What program you use, how you stack the layers, how you generate the mask, etc all affect the colour of the final image, so everyone might have a different set of settings. ( My settings could be really stupid - as I say, I'm new to this layer stuff )

I look forward to seeing the final textures.

[poesel]

I've uploaded 'my' version of the textures which now, when used with the gimp, resemble very much the original textures in color and brightness.

I've also uploaded the complete 90mm barrel files. That might be useful as a reference - especially the gimp file (zipped xcf). The setup of layers allows to make the various camos quite fast.

I'll do a writeup on the Wiki but not before easter.

90mm & textures