Tinkering with making a KP unit - help outline effet?

[Pxtl]

I'm tinkering with making some KP units (just experimenting)... I use blender. How is the outline-effect achieved? Is it the usual copy-mesh + push outwards + invert polies? Is there a tutorial on how to do this?

edit: okay, I figured out how to push outwards - apparently the modifier is called shrink/fatten. But either way: is this how KP's outline effect was achieved?

And for the skins, are teamcoloured sections (incl. the outline) just 100% teamcolour 100% self-illumination?

[zwzsg]

It depends:

• For some units, it's just hightlighting the edges.
• For other, there's indeed the inverted outter shell method.
• Some even use both (bits).

I made only four KP units which are not really KP units: Rock, Paper, Scissors, Hand, and presumably my workflow is different from KDR_11k's (who uses Blender). For the hand, I use the method of outward copy with inverted polies. The tricky bit was to reshape the points into a thinner/fatter shape instead merely rescaling, but maybe that "push" method you speak of does that automatically? For the R,P,S, I just used simple edge highlighting in the texture, and shockingly I already forgot how I draw it. But it was something pretty simple like telling Wings3D to draw me huge outlines of the polygons on the texture.

As for the texture2, just look at how it's done on existing units?


If you want you can look directly at the source models:

• When you run KP full windows installer, if you tick "source", it'll copy an archive with KDR_11k's .blend files. Or if you're afraid of messing your Spring install, right click and open the installer exe with 7-zip, and extract Kernel_Panic_graphics_source.rar from \KP_Sources\.
• I left some of my .wing file inside the .sd7 of the RPS mod

Maybe KDR_11k will shed some more light, but I doubt there's step-by-step tutorials. Looking at existing KP units in UpSpring should be enough to gather how they're done.

[Pxtl]

KDR's .blend files are in the sources?

Perfect, that should do me just fine.

And yes, Push (in 3DS Max) moves vertices along the average of their related face normals, all an equal amount. So it's better than scaling for creating an outline, or clothes. I've learned that the term for this effect in Blender is called Shrink/Fatten, although it's a vertex operation instead of a modifier-stack operation.

[KDR_11k]

It was the fatten tool, not the modifier (ALT+S in Blender IIRC) but yeah, it's just the good old inverted shell. The shell is used on units where the texture cannot highlight the edges because the surfaces are round, the pointer has a shell around its barrel but that doesn't cover the ends: Those are part of the texture. Also note a similar approach on the Division Zero Worm. Blockier units just have the edges highlighted normally on the texture.

The textures are black with the lines marked in teamcolor. IIRC all units share a simple texture 2 that just turns up the brightness to the maximum.