What do you mean with "plan your UV map right"? I don't see how that involves special planning. If you got issues with mirrored parts putting different data on the UV map then just cut the UV coords from one half of the model when you do the bake, that also works for normalmap baking.

If you're mapping, say, gun barrels and leg pieces to the same part of the texture, you can't bake UV to one without making the other look weird. Doing that may be bad practice to start with, I dunno, but it's what I had in mind with "plan your UVmap."

Reusing uv space is generally a bad practice when you are doing shadows on units but.. *looks around* most of the stuff in this community doesn't do a lot of pre-done shadowing.

Knorke care to share your cluster weapon code?

i might make a detailed post about it once it is done.
basically it spawns a unit that becomes the bullet, which then flies over to the target, shots the cluster weapon and kills itself.

Re-using texture space (like the barrels here, or the legs) is always good, and while a naive auto-UV might lead to some odd dark patches where they shouldn't be, cleaning it up a little bit by hand isn't hard. If you look at Crems models they all reuse UV space and have heavy AO baking.

Anyway Benz, the model is so supremely gorgeous. I can't stop staring at it. It is so good. You use a lot of tiny details which look great up close, but it's against a fairly uniformly grey background. These will tend to sort of fade into the grey at a distance.

It's good that, say, the upper torso is dominated by blue and white panels while the guns and legs are dominated by black panels, but since it's against the same uniform grey, you will lose some of that.

So if you're worried about contrast, try using larger blocks of shade:


Here it is with just upped contrast:

Both combined:

Here is another variant, more closely following your established pattern of light/dark patches:


Anyway, point is, it can help to have variation over several scales. The tiny scale plating for variation up close, but also the difference in color between the gross detail such as arms/legs/head/torso. Varying your 'undercoat' beneath all the plates, as it were.

Smoths untextured models he just posted are actually a really good example of this on the gross scale, as all they have right now is the large areas colored-in without any detail painted on top of them yet.

side comment, clever of you catching what I was doing with that. It is exactly as you said. i am working out the larger details before I do the smaller.

this is why you delete overlapping UV coords but keep the geometry intact for any baking

Yeah, you wanna get the distance recognition down into the design, being able to identify the individual pieces of a unit (the knee joints, weapons, head etc, especially so you can see things being animated against each-other, the animated piece has to stand out against the background), tell one unit from another, get cues on things like like facing (often turret facing and movement facing independently, so you have to have directional cues for both the legs/chassis and the turrets).

Smoth has put a yellow pad on the front of that one mech so you can tell its facing, and made all the joints a darker colour so that the articulation points (what it will be animating around) can be seen more clearly. Another way to do this is to make the shins, forearms, chest, hips a different colour than the upper arms, stomach, upper legs and feet. So you have an alternating scheme of colours for each component (Which you can see is what I was doing).

I think it'll look fine in game because he does reflections on those grey panels.

It's also massive and rare so in this case recognition is not so important.

i haven't done this myself!
but for those of you who enjoyed warhammer, this pick rly turns the fast moving eldar into something completely different.

Finally got round to finishing the textures for the transport ships, construction aircraft and the rapier for ZK.



click for Big: http://i49.tinypic.com/2j3rxol.png

Now for some zzzz

remodelled, but yet untextured j_watergate..

pump,pump it up

heh well some stuff im working on
lets see if i see it trou this time heh

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aG3n5DtoaL8
I wish GLC didn't lag so much when recording stuff, sorry.

Unit or map feature?



Simply awesome

Really nice, gajop!

i allready here the "stay a while and listen"...

hm not a feature
well the work continues
btw just the gate part of a barracks building


Perhaps if i add standards and banners i can improve these wretched buildings.
The more i keep making these , the more i want to return to tw center -_-