Spring RTS Engine

The stumpy looks good, the chunky styling fits it nicely. However, the samson doesn't look as good with that sort of styling. Maybe it will look nicer with a texture.

HeavyLancer wrote:Maybe it will look nicer with a texture.

Not likely, my texturing abilities are minimal at best:

Not bad at all, sheekel.

Your tank tracks could use similar weathering treatment as the top of the turret though, looks too clean as it is now.

Yeah, and try to detail the edges of each coloured section so that they feel like related materials, rather then very individual elements not related to the other segment.

It looks too dark for an arm unit, it looks more core-ish because of the dark olive-ish colour on the main body, which is also the main flaw in the colour scheme clashing.

Make it much much lighter, infact give it a more metalic steel iron look. Take inspiration from the textures of the other arm lvl 1 units, not Mr.Ds core models, afterall these aren't core units.

However this unit would make a good replacement for the leveller.

that looks pretty spiffy to me. A bit on the low res side but with a good reflective map it could be awesome!

smoth wrote:with a good reflective map it could be awesome!

so, how to make a good reflective map?


I'm beginning to think my problems lie in my UV maps...i have a difficult time organizing them and although I, for the most part, overlap areas that will look the same. This one, for example, has a lot of wasted space and i think is why it looks so low-res:

Yay that stumpy and samson look cool. arm is more beige than olive tho, and the stoompies look downright metallic ingame.

sheekel move all squares near each other leaving maybe 3-4 pixels between them. After that start puzzle piecing around those squares and then see what you will have as far as space.

Also use less seams, there's no reason you have to make so many UV groups.

Thanks for the help guys

KDR_11k wrote:Also use less seams, there's no reason you have to make so many UV groups.

I'm not really sure what you mean by this

Stitch the UVs together, they don't all have to be seperate isles.

Dont 'puzzle pieces together', just re-uvmap the whole thing.

Dont rely on the autouv! Its not very good. Make your own cuts and uvcharts.

I had do all my uv seams but I still arrange them like puzzle pieces until I get a good usage of space.

No need to remap completely, really. Stich what ever you can together in a logical way and only leave seams when there's a hard edge or something. Project unwrap, in face mode while having at least one but not the only face selected, does a decent job. Then scale -> normalize everything, scale bottom side down to 50% and then scale everything up as long it all still fits in the square map and. This way the texture resoultion is about the same for all objects except bottom sides which are unimportant.

4th try, other 2 werent worth posting. I'm having a tough time getting a metallic look in my textures. I can produce a pretty good grainy/concrete texture but I cant seem to make anything shiny-looking. Is this done through the illumination map?

Green on texture 2 = reflectivity.

Copy the texture onto the green and red channel and see what happens ingame (place the camera between model and sun and tilt it to see the effect). You can break the all shiny effect up by blackening parts of your texture out - masks can be a good help there.

I would suggest copying the parts which are supposed to be team color from the texture too but adjust contrast/brightness by a good deal. Breaking it up by removing certain details (like outlines etc.) from the team color channel can really help too. However strong team colors are needed if you want to identify it from a distance.

For very easy coloring in Photoshop I use gradient maps with masks. This is a very easy way to color the entire texture (except team color, they should be grayscale). Multiple gradient map layers with different blend modes are good for a less monotone look. Of course hand coloring most likely will look better but I'm lazy. :P

I preferred the greater contrast of the original. I think you'll find that the original one looks much better from standard 'TA' viewing distance, too.

a lot of the Arm units use a sandy yellow colour mixed with grey in a camo pattern. perhaps making use of something similar to break up the grey panels a bit may help...