Need modeler for Evolution RTS

[rattle]

If you painted the texture at 256 it wouldn't be blurry.

Yes it looks ok in overhead, not as good but it looks pretty ok, but if you get up close it's pretty fail.

Then at least bake in ambient occlusion (MeshMapper does it in under 30 seconds!) if you cba to paint on any preshading, which takes time.

Also, it might be worthwhile set up the normals. It takes about 2 minutes a model to do that. Look at the environment and light reflections on some of the buildings, they're totally off and don't go with the shape at all.

[Argh]

Nope, it doesn't look the same, it turns into blurry mush up close which is the opposite of what I wanted.

Try sharpening a lot.

[rattle]

Nearest, bilinear or bicubic sharper can give good results. Using an overlay texture like generated noise or real materials (artifacts don't matter) to break the colors up can help too.

None of this is actual effort which you seem to avoid.

[bobthedinosaur]

shouldn't you paint at high res and then resize afterwards?

[Snipawolf]

1 pixel lines shrunk even smaller don't work so nicely... So I don't shrink anything.

[Forboding Angel]

Rattle, Fuck off.

I have an entire faction to texture, you don't like the way I do it, then feel free to get off of your fat, bulbous, ass and pitch in.

Maybe I don't want to use 256x256, have you ever considered that? Probably not. Feel free to grab some from svn and go to town.

You have this wonderful talent of running your mouth, well put up or shutup.

Then at least bake in ambient occlusion (MeshMapper does it in under 30 seconds!) if you cba to paint on any preshading, which takes time.

Also, it might be worthwhile set up the normals. It takes about 2 minutes a model to do that. Look at the environment and light reflections on some of the buildings, they're totally off and don't go with the shape at all.

Perhaps I don't give a shit?

Nearest, bilinear or bicubic sharper can give good results. Using an overlay texture like generated noise or real materials (artifacts don't matter) to break the colors up can help too.

None of this is actual effort which you seem to avoid.

See first sentence.

[Hoi]

Forb, you'd better listen to rattle, he's saying stuff in a trolly way, but he's right, you'd better do it right the first time, becaus otherwise you'll have to do everything again.

If you want stuff to look good you HAVE TO preshade it, or even just bake AO if you're too lazy, and if you want the game to work >10 fps then you HAVE TO use a 256*256 when you can.

What you should do is just forget about retexturing everything, try a few units first, post the textures and follow our advices. If you just do that for a few weeks I think you'll improve a lot, and then you should start retexturing all those units.

Take it easy, doing something right takes some time, now it looks like you're trying to replace the crappy textures in a week by a less crappy, but still crappy textures, which will result in having to replace them again.

[AF]

Regardless of wether anyone is right or not did anyone think that maybe forb is prioritising teturing everything before he refines them?

Aka, lets get the texture bareable then once everything has a texture, go back and finish improving them.

I'd sure want my models to have a texture if I had a whole faction worth of them.

[rattle]

If you hadn't this kind of attitude I'd have offered you my help long ago

Perhaps I don't give a shit?

way to go

shouldn't you paint at high res and then resize afterwards?

No you should always draw at the targeted resolution

[Argh]

You don't need to draw at the target resolution, unless you're working at 128s or so. Then you need to do hand-bevels and carefully weigh your pixels when detailing.

But... meh. I shrank all the skins in P.U.R.E. to 256s once, and it made very little performance difference, tbh, except when up against a really detailed World Builder scene, where we're talking about a huge amount of texture throughput. At that point, you start to see some choke. And there are definitely some beauty issues. There are so many other things in Spring eating up performance, tbh.

So long as Forb's using DDS, he won't run into problems with users running out of texture RAM. The only reason I agreed with Rattle's comment at all is because the designs are relatively simple, and will still look good at half the rez.

[Forboding Angel]

Forb, you'd better listen to rattle, he's saying stuff in a trolly way, but he's right, you'd better do it right the first time, becaus otherwise you'll have to do everything again.

And why would I have to do everything again? So far, what I have done looks great ingame. I have no intentions of redoing what I have already done. If someone else wants to, then that's fine with me.

If you want stuff to look good you HAVE TO preshade it, or even just bake AO if you're too lazy,

That isn't true, it helps yes, but that doesn't make it a fact of life.

and if you want the game to work >10 fps then you HAVE TO use a 256*256 when you can.

Completely untrue, I can prove it too. For example, all of the models currently ingame use a 512x512 texture. The minimum video requirements for this game are at least a nvidia 7 series card with at least 256mb of ram (or ati equivalent), I'm not going to bother breaking my back to support lower than that.

What you should do is just forget about retexturing everything, try a few units first, post the textures and follow our advices. If you just do that for a few weeks I think you'll improve a lot, and then you should start retexturing all those units.

lolno. Lets make a parallel. How far have you gotten in the past 6 months by doing the above? That pretty much makes my point. You can bitch and argue and cry out about the theory of it all day long, but it's not going to get you closer to your goal faster. The only way to move forward is to take the initiative and press on.

The interesting thing that Ive been hearing lately is people annoyed with me for the remodel effort because they believe that it is far from necessary. While I disagree, I find the pov somewhat facinating.

Take it easy, doing something right takes some time, now it looks like you're trying to replace the crappy textures in a week by a less crappy, but still crappy textures, which will result in having to replace them again.

^^ O_O wow, now that's a load of crap.

If you hadn't this kind of attitude I'd have offered you my help long ago

I wouldn't even accept your help because all you do is troll people. You don't offer any encouragement, your statements never offer a path to a solution, and when you state your opinion you go into asshole mode.

For example, your AO comments. You mention meshmapper, like I know what that is, your trollish attitude doesn't exactly make me itching to go look either. Since it takes basically no time to do, then why didn't you do it, post an image so that I could see the difference. Then going further, you could have posted some simple steps on how to arrive at the final image that you posted.

And while we're on the subject, I do use overlays. I use a lot of overlays, jsut because you don't notice them isn't exactly my fault.

Furthermore, if you would stop your trollish posting and your asshole behavior and actually contribute something worthwhile to the discussion, I might be inclined to consider your suggestions, however, you do it so often and to everyone, that I doubt you can.

^^ In the above I am trying not to be a dick, but most of what you have said was said very much like a true asshole, so it's a little hard to be objective when addressing you specifically.

I would be pretty irritated if kaiserj was spending hours upon hours upon hours texturing those units, I'll tell everyone else the same thing I told him, if you're spending more than a few hours on each texture, then you're doing it wrong.

I exempt myself from the above rule because I am not an artist, not by any means, so I do what I can, and that is that.

On a side note, if anyone has any decal type things they would like to post for me to use on models I would be pretty appreciative. Vents, computer terminals, random greebles, whatever.

@argh, not the textures aren't dds. I did try using dxt5 at lurker's suggestion, but dds borked the image all over the place (came out completely invisible... that was kinda special). If someone could suggest a good batch converter from png to dds I'd be willing to take a look at it.

All the current models use 512x512 and I haven't run into any issues, except with people running old ass out of date hardware that has no business running a modern rts in the first place.

@Moderators, thank you for ignoring my request...

@everyone else, This is an RTS, where you have tons of models to finish. Even moreso, this is a FREE rts. Contrary to the popular opinion of most of the epeen strokers here, an rts does not need to be as detailed as an fps, anyone that argues that needs a serious reality check. Next you're gonna tell me that kaiserj's models and textures are fail. Do you realize that he spent all of a hour or 2 on several of those textures? I on the other hand have spent considerably more time with less results, sucks, but I'm the only one doing it, and to quote a famous line: "It ain't gonna suck itself!".

I also find it humorous that some of you have referred to PURE's models and textures as fail... PURE's textures look fucking great! It's an rts people. If you want fps detail, then perhaps you should be hanging out with the nexuiz folks or something.

[Argh]

@argh, not the textures aren't dds. I did try using dxt5 at lurker's suggestion, but dds borked the image all over the place (came out completely invisible... that was kinda special). If someone could suggest a good batch converter from png to dds I'd be willing to take a look at it.

The Compressionator can do batch conversion.

Use DDS DXT3 for texture1. Use DDS DXT1 for texture2.

WARNING: your texture2's need to have a white alpha channel. If that borks (invisible models, etc.) then just reopen the DDS files, change the alpha to white, save, done.

[Forboding Angel]

Hmm, ok I'll give it a go,

Texture 2 needs an alpha? Arugh, that's a pain in the ass :-/

[Argh]

Meh, it's ok, just paint-bucket white, save, done. Problem going from PNG to DDS is that PNG isn't considered "flattened", it's a bit annoying. You might want to use Photoshop / Gimp to batch-convert to TIF first, add the alphas, then batch-convert to DDS.

If you're really stuck, send them to me when you're more or less complete and I'll do it, it's really pretty easy tbh, if you set up macros in PS. Like just macro Select-->Alpha Channel-->Fill (white)-->Layer..Flatten-->Save As (TIF)

[edit, forgot flatten step lol]

[SwiftSpear]

Forb, with all due respect, you're working on a graphics improvement pass right now. The better stuff is now, the less time you're going to have to spend repassing on it later. I'd take rattle and hoi's constructive criticism, and for the record, for the most part, that's what it is.

There really isn't a better time than now to see if you can't improve texture quality and/or texture efficiency than right now. The current textures I'm seeing have alot of blur on them, and could probably be done at about the same quality in 256x256. You can go through this pass with the same lazy texturing you used the last time... ya, it won't break anything... but why would you? Right now you're trying to get things looking as good as possible, why settle for "about good enough"?

[Forboding Angel]

A fitting quote, and not one from me:

sage advice, covered in troll poo sauce

WOuld you please read what I've said in the first 4 pages of this thread very carefully? Then you'll understand what the deal is.

[MidKnight]

Time is his biggest concern. Time, and getting it all done. Look at CA. We went for detail, and it's still not done! we have two to three dozen semi-beautiful models and some ota crap ruining the gameplay and features!

[Forboding Angel]

MidKnight pretty much hit it on the head... I don't even understand the amount of detail that goes into CA units... seriously, they are beautifully done, but how many times have any of use played CA on the ground level so we could admire the nice units, or gundam for that matter.

Hell realistically (following the vein of commercial rts games), zoom in on ota view should be limited to 100 elmos from the ground (no limit on zoom out), not because of the units, but because the terrain starts looking like crap up close in top down view, no matter how nice the map is.

For those of you who don't know... 100 elmos is very close to the ground, probably similar to being 100 feet of the ground.

[SwiftSpear]

Learning to do things the right way isn't a waste of time.

I'm just saying, it's worth it to practice new techniques, especially when they are recommended by people who know what their talking about.

[Forboding Angel]

Terra lightturret

Model and texture by me



I tried a bunch of new techniques on this one, I dunno if they are obvious or not, but while I have some reservations with it I think it turned out nicely.

For example, I'm not thrilled with where the turret meets the dinnerplate, but that's a fault of the fact that I should have unwrapped that part of it better, however it's a pretty minor detail so I let it slide.

@swift, yar I agree, and as I told you, it's not as if I am just ignoring everything, but at the same time, stuff gets better the more you do it and while certain things might seem a little minor, learning them takes time. At the same time though, when I do something right on one, I know to use the same technique on future ones.

So, lets have some looks at progress shall we? ;p

Here are some renders from kaiser, not ingame yet, but getting there as fast as I can possibly do them, plus I have to keep up with bumblebee on the terra side

First up we have the rather phallic Explorer geo, cause we all know that if something looks phallic it will most likely be one of the first things that gets built



Next up we have the demonic 666 pentagram mex...



And last but not least in the line of kaiser, we have an overhead render of the explorer missiletank:




Now for the bumblebee xlt-1337 series we have the Terra Binoc radar tank, capable of morphing into a radar tower with extended range and back into a mobile vehicle... what's not to like?



Next we have the all powerful, all spammable Terra lighttank!



Hehe, hope you guys like what you see ;p