Spring RTS Engine

I really wonder how much benefit a shadow treatment can have. I think it would be worth a try at the least.

You do know that chipped paint style is quite common on various UEF units in supreme commander, especially the ACU?

Eitherway if all the units are the same size and general shape it will be a nightmare telling them apart without putting bright distinguishing colours on the models, and big neon greon stripes tend not to looks pretty.

wat

hmmm they changed the ACU textures in forged alliance

You don't necessary have to call the dark areas shadows? What about mixing dark metal areas with shiny light ones? Different materials in general? On a scifi design, I don't see why everything has to be the same gray metal. Things like the joints machinery could easily be of a different color then the armor plates.

Ok, i'll re-bake the base tex,relax lol.

How do you do this Texture bake?

Whoever made that "cartoony" looking version of the texture, it looks too cartoony. AKA like crap. Come on.

Texture, bake, I am guessing that they are talking about an occlusion bake. Basically it determines how close faces are together and shades them darker accordingly straight to the texture map. Its a really quick and easy way of starting a texture. It also can be be overlayed onto textures (with a bit of editing) for some really nice effects like quick and easy dirt maps. Programs with decent ray tracing rendering in em like max or maya can do it.

Yep, thats it. If you have Max, use the Render to Texture tool while you have Advanced Lighting on. I'll write a tutorial on advanced texturing which addresses this later (or you could do a search on it, IIRC someone already did a good tut on it here).

I tend to just shade by hand; though admittedly I've never done a proper bake before.

...like max or maya...

...or blender, which is free, ...

thanks wolf!

Doing that in max, does it use proper occlusion rays with falloff or a basic shader to bake to the texture? Sorry for not mentioning blender, I just don't know if it has occlusion bake options from experience.

Yes, you can do occlusion bakes in Blender.

A "little" experiment here. Not 100% finished and not 100% anatomically correct, but quite nice looking so far (considering the polycount):

Looks nice. I assume this is not for spring?

Keithus: I just mentioned blender because it's the only free alternative I can think of, but setting up the model in it is a pain.

rattle wrote:Looks nice. I assume this is not for spring?

I assume it is...

Thats a peewee's skeleton?

That rocks.