Spring RTS Engine

I'm starting from scratch here, since although I have past experience modelling with Strata3D, 3D Studio and Photoshop/Gimp my skills are out of date and never included UV mapping or Wings3D.

I have a model created for Metalstorm by 'John'. John doesn't have time atm to figure out the complexities of Upspring, COB, FBI, etc.. so I have taken on the task of bringing his untextured 3DS models into Spring.

I've got all the tools and read a couple of tutorials here and elsewhere, however my model is more complex than the cubes and cylinders generally used to demonstrate the techniques. Anyway...

I broke the model into 3 named pieces, chassis, left_track and right_track. When I select the 'UV Mapping' option it opens a seperate window for each piece. This suits me because it makes selecting and cutting the faces a bit easier than doing the whole model at once.

So I got the left and right tracks UV mapped as seen in the screenshot and I'm about to start on the body but before I do I need to know whether the 3 seperate UV maps can be loaded and/or merged by Wings or Upspring. Or do I need to do the whole thing as one map and then rebuild the named groups? How should I go forward from here?

Also what texture size is recommended? Is 512x512 normal for a spring unit or should I go higher or lower? I'm planning to have a LOT of units but I don't want the units to look too ugly, bland or blurred either. What's a good compromise?

Finally to reduce poly count some faces of the model are left open and have the _hole_ texture in Wings3D. Is this ok?

All my files are uploaded to http://warriorhut.org/spring/mods/metal ... s/testing/ if that's any help.

I don't know if I'm doing it the right way or not, as I'm just starting out as well, but It seems to me that you need to combine all of your pieces before you UVmap your model, so they all fit in one map.

There might be a way to combine UVmaps after the fact but I don't know about it. If anyone knows if there is I would like to know too!

If you start out with a larger texture size, you can always make it smaller; not so if you start out smaller and want to make it bigger after it is unsatisfactory. You can start out at 1024x1024 and make it smaller quite easily if it needs to be smaller.

- Spring only supports one uvmap per unit, so you will have to select your unit's objects, and then combine them, and then uvmap (seperate before you export the model you want to use in upspring)
-overlay stuff in the uvmap:



Here you see my (very ugly) box which I made some time ago, the uvmap is in the right top, what I'm trying to show you is that, all sides of the cube have exactly the same texture, I just got all the sides in the uvmap, centered them and made them the same size (object mode in the uvmap>scale>normalise sizes), then I scaled them up till they were as big as the whole cube thing, you basicly do this when you want something to have the same texture, you will only have to paint it once, and you will save texture space.

- Hole materials are a good idea, what you should do is, after you've uvmapped deselect everything, en then in the model select the faces with the hole material (make sure the uvmap tab is in face mode!), then go to the uvmap map part and go to edge mode>cut, then deselect, put the uvmap tab in object mode and select the hole faces again, then in the uvmap part right click>delete.

About the texture size, I'm not sure, 512*512 and 256*256 are common, but if you have thousands it could either not matter, becaus the texture is loaded and cpu/gpu power needed does not depend on the amount of units with that texture (so you could use a 512*512, or a 1024*1024, ect), or you should make it smaller, 256*256 or 128*128 (maybe even less) to prevent massive lag.


Well, that was a lot of typing if you have any other questions ask me, and show the uvmap when you're done if you want a crit on it

After using the automatic UV tool I found that the layout of pieces was rather confusing. It also seems to rotate some parts in strange ways. I was wondering if this is normal or just related to the way I set the cuts and AuvChart groups?



I sorted it out like this, rotating some parts and arranging them into a close approximation of the correct spacial layout. It was pretty time-consuming and some pieces are probably mis-aligned or overlapping so I was wondering if this is something worth doing?



Hoi. Thanks for the tip on overlapping. I wanted to do that but I wasn't sure how or if it was done. Most of my models will be symmetrical so it could be worth doing.

With the holes I just didn't assign them a UV map in the first place and it seems to have safely ignored them. Is this the same result as you described above with the cutting and deleting?

Also are you saying that if I do a combine followed by a separate my named groups are preserved?

With the holes I just didn't assign them a UV map in the first place and it seems to have safely ignored them. Is this the same result as you described above with the cutting and deleting?

Yep, same thing.

Also are you saying that if I do a combine followed by a separate my named groups are preserved?

I think not, but the only thing you will have to do is rename your objects after you've seperated them.

also the best thing is to not autouvmap, but do it yourself, tell wings what edges to cut, ect.

All done, for now.

That was an epic journey. There were quite a few details that the various tuts glossed over or got wrong so it took a lot of trial and error to get it all done. I've also been taking notes and screenshots as I go to include in my Spring Modding Guide.

All up about 8 hours to get the original untextured model model in-game with teamcolor and basic texture.



The model here is a rough draft. I'll be updating the geometry and textures in the future but for now I have all I need to move on.

BTW. This a just a mobile chassis (medium tank class). The weapons are mounted later as fireplatform units.

nice job! it took me 2 days to make my first spring unit