Arm Energy Storage (download)

[rattle]

Never happened to me

[Argh]

Am I on to something here? Am I actually getting it? XD

Yes. Sorry, must've screwed up saving, after flipping that But yeah, that's what needed to be done, in a nutshell.

[Kaine]

Ok, I think I can fix this myself. Thanks muchly Argh.

EDIT/UPDATE: Ive got the soft shading thing fixed, but I wanted to know. How do you / what settings do you use to export / convert dds textures? Ive tried using both my gimp's DDS plugin and exporting through upspring directly, but they all come out too lossy.

[Warlord Zsinj]

I use the free nvidia plugin for photoshop.

[Argh]

I use 8888 (basically, raw). Oh, and don't forget to make all mipmaps, Spring gets unhappy if you try and define a lower number than max.

[Pressure Line]

DXTBmp!

[Kaine]

I found the magic formula for the GIMP DDS plugin. Ill do some tweaks to the texture and upload a v2.

[daan 79]

Kaine do you use dds for your textures?

[Kaine]

Well, I guess I do now. Though this is my first and only texture.

(For now )

[Kaine]

V2 up. See first post.

[Warlord Zsinj]

much better.

Now that I can see the edges properly, can I suggest baking in some occlusion on the inward-facing edges?

[Kaine]

Well I was planning on moving on to my metal storage texture in progress, but If I need to change it enough to warrant a new update, I will do so.

Thanks though.

[Warlord Zsinj]

Yeah, maybe move on to a new unit. I'd say that texx is maybe 85% done, but it still looks heaps better then what was there before. You can always come back to it.

Lots of 85% finished textures > one or two perfect textures

[Kaine]

Is it mostly the preshading that's holding it back from perfect? I wasn't really sure what I was doing in that area, and the metal storage is a more complex mesh so I'm having trouble preshading it as well. Do you have any pointers regarding preshading perhaps?

[Warlord Zsinj]

Well, it depends on what you're struggling with.

Basically for preshading you need to think about the light source.

In the energy storage it's a little complicated because you've created your own light source on top of the sun. It' sunlikely that this lightsource would outpower the sun except for very close surfaces, so a bit of baked-in bloom, and putting a tinge of the glow colour onto surfaces facing the model-light is sufficient.

For everything else, you need to light as if the light source is coming from above - so all top faces are brighter, all semi-facing faces are mid-tones, and all hidden faces are darker.

This also means that highlights should only be put on edges facing the sky. Don't forget to not make highlights just lines - real metal highlights are speckled.

Finally, you want to include some baked-in ambient occlusion. What this means practically is that you need to darken edges where two faces meet, as well as between the bottom of the model and the ground.

Note how in that pic the far corner is darker, even though it is technically facing the lightsource in the same way as the rest of the wall.

Edit: Seeing as it's been asked, no, I had nothing to do with that image, I just found it on google image search.

[Kaine]

Good stuff Zsinj! That clears things up for me regarding preshading. Thanks again.