Decals - Pasting on textures

[Forboding Angel]

I had a thought... You know all those little decals that you make While texturing a model? Would it be possible to have a thread with useful decals for other not so talented people (myself included).

Vents, airways, electrical lines, etc etc.

Of course it is somewhat trivial to do all these yourself, but I just thought that it was a neat idea.

[smoth]

I don't have decals, I draw all my work. Otherwise if you want vents, do what argh does, just use stuff from real life. He has an air conditioner vent on the top of his soap dispenser turret.

[SwiftSpear]

I had a thought... You know all those little decals that you make While texturing a model? Would it be possible to have a thread with useful decals for other not so talented people (myself included).

Vents, airways, electrical lines, etc etc.

Of course it is somewhat trivial to do all these yourself, but I just thought that it was a neat idea.

They're all manually painted, because with UV mapping it's difficult/impossible to use copypasta to make good decals.

A thread with good tutorials for decals would be nice though.

[Forboding Angel]

They're all manually painted, because with UV mapping it's difficult/impossible to use copypasta to make good decals.

That isn't true... Difficult maybe, impossible hardly. God forbid you have to do some painting to make it fit correctly, but at least all the groundwork is already done for you.

[smoth]

Just remember forb, adding lots of rust is not realism. Large copy-pasta panels and over rusting is not good texture work despite how realism PUREIST feel

[Warlord Zsinj]

I have been sampled greebles from Vassago (a professional texture artist that did 3 textures for us before disappearing) in a couple of my textures. It's helpful and saves time, especially with techno-junk that adds technical noise to an otherwise flat texture. Obviously it needs to be done with care, and often I spend more time integrating a greeble into a texture then it might've taken me to outright draw a new one, but it'll still look nice.

Also, I regularly raid flickr photos for textures and greebles. I've got a nice shot of an open engine that I regularly use for technical junk on my textures.

What'd be nice would really be for people who have done textures to indicate whether they mind scavengers like myself raiding them for bits and pieces to use here and there.

[KDR_11k]

Bioshock Zgok!

[SpikedHelmet]

I C&P all the time. I find it very useful if there are duplicate parts. Usually I will draw one in its most basic form, C&P as many as I need, and then individually add details like shading and whatever, so they still look different.

But any bolt, screw, hole, vent, exhaust panel, hatch, etc, that's the same, I will C&P.

[Pxtl]

Wow, Smoth, you're not bitter about Argh's texturing AT ALL.

[smoth]

Realism people seem to think rust and crap make a good looking model.

arghs texturing makes me think of this:


That zgok is one of my favorite examples of idiotic wear and rust. a mech that is that rusty is likely not running.

[Guessmyname]

True. It does look like it's been left underwater for a few years.

[smoth]

yep, but the most important part of all of it is that he is at least consistent. I don't really care for that style but hey, it's his project.

[Wolf-In-Exile]

Just a note, that space marine there looks like its a follower of Nurgle, Chaos god of decay so its 'in-character' for the rediculous amount of weathering.

Anyway, alot of people love to put rust in their textures in an attempt to make it look more 'realistic', but its actually a rather tricky effect to use properly. On well maintained military hardware, you'd rarely if ever find anything rusty.
You'd find a marginally higher amount of rust on seafaring units though, due to the highly corrosive environment (salt+water+oxygen), but you'd probably find more water stains than open rust.

Signs of wear however, will be very visible in places with moving parts, and where people interact with them, so i'd say this is the most important part of weathering a texture.

A general rule while aiming for realism is: keep the weathering visible but subtle, and placed in logical areas. Too little weathering and it looks flat and boring; but too much weathering makes it look out of place and unrealistic.

[Warlord Zsinj]

I think in an RTS weathering needs to be exaggerated. This is because typically you are not viewing units from a close enough position to be able to appreciate subtlety for 95% of the time. If as a designer you want to create an immersive quality about your game - say as a grungy post-apocalyptic wargame - you need to be able to get that across in the 95% of time when people are playing normally, not the 5% of time when they are zooming in to watch the fireworks or looking at screenshots.

[Tribulexrenamed]

Realism people seem to think rust and crap make a good looking model.

arghs texturing makes me think of this:


That zgok is one of my favorite examples of idiotic wear and rust. a mech that is that rusty is likely not running.

Well, in addition to what you are saying, since when are BRAND NEW FRESH MADE units FUGLIFIED WITH RUST?

[smoth]

when they serve the lord of disease. For my part I prefer to be just as planned.

[Warlord Zsinj]

Trib: The immersion break from seeing battered unit roll out of a factory is minimal, in my opinion, compared with seeing armies of pristine units battling it out on the battlefield.

[Tribulexrenamed]

What Spring could use is a dynamic set of textures, that are applied at different health states. A more complicated idea would be to have the equivalent of ground decals, only on units.


Sometimes cool "pristine" shiny units fighting is more fun than fuglies fighting. Its a question of player preference I guess, but what I said above would be the ideal situation.

[[Krogoth86]]

What Spring could use is a dynamic set of textures, that are applied at different health states. A more complicated idea would be to have the equivalent of ground decals, only on units.

Well I like the idea of flexible texture assigning (although I'm sure the "you can fake that" faction will show up soon ^^)...

Decals on models are no good idea though. There just are too many units firing too much stuff in order to have decals that adapt to the surface running at a decent framerate...

[Warlord Zsinj]

I actually suggested a similar system a while ago, but it fell on deaf ears. Essentially you would assign a third texture to a unit, which would be a 'wreckage' texture. This texture would increase in opacity as the unit took more damage, so that when it has 10% health left, it's wreckage texture is 90% opaque*, so it would look fairly beaten-up.

An interesting twist on this would be if Spring can then use the wreckage texture to dynamically generate a wreck for the unit (unless a specific wreck is specified, as is done currently), where it just takes the existing model/texture and applies the wreckage texture over it. That would reduce the workload for a lot of mods (while still allowing custom wrecks to be made as it is currently).

Still though, I don't think this would replace worn and used textures, though it would be nice to see battered armies actually look battered, and buildings that are about to blow look like they have taken a pummeling, etc.

* well, it would probably be a lot less so that you can actually read it as a damaged unit. greyscale Alpha transparency like what is being used for ground decals would be excellent for this as well.