[WIP] LivingMachines - Hellbound Infantry
polycounter lvl 11
Going to be going with a Bekzinski / Giger inspired skin. Thinking metal plates bound by flesh, tendons, etc. I'll sketch something up soon. It's a lot of skins to do something detailed like that in 3 weeks but we'll see.
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I suppose if you make the heavy armor version and then remove things for mid and low that may not be too bad but it's still a ton.
One thing to pay attention to is that some of the factions use vehicles from other factions, so you need to include those too when creating the mod project. The soviets, in addition to their 15 vehicles ( 13 textures, 2 are shared between 2 vehicles), use a Sherman 76mm which is under the US roster.
You only need to make 1 texture per vehicle (as each vehicle is only in 1 weight class). You can then upload this as a summer skin mod. If you have time you can then copy the frost layer out of the source files and add that to make the winter variants.
You can see here the vehicles that belong to each weight class.
http://modding.companyofheroes.com/skin-pack#vehicles
The weight classes are there because in game the inventory system allows players to use different skins on the different weight classes of vehicles. You'll be defining which weight class each skin belongs to when you finally add your skins to the mod using the mod builder.
I got the game yesterday and started picking things apart but I started painting the texture and it became clear quickly that it would take way too long to hand paint this stuff for 15 vehicles in two weeks and I just wouldn't get the normals I'd need.
So I figured I need to do some high poly baking to speed the process up but obviously sculpting 15 tanks is an even worse idea and I'm working with pre-existing UVs and all that good stuff. So I've decided to sculpt a series of panels then bake them down into texture flats...
The idea here is to essentially kit bash them into textures that work for each model. The more panels I make as I go, the faster it will get to texture the next vehicle, and the next as the library builds up. So I can cut a piece I like from texture A and texture B and combine them into a new piece that works for whatever part of the vehicle I'm texturing. I'll naturally need to make new panels to work with what I'm doing at the time and that will build the library more for the next one.
Things look mildly fugly at the moment since these are just the normals and no real texturing has happened but I think the approach is solid enough to dive into it. I'll be making a butt load of panel sculpts over the weekend and slowly piecing them all to the existing textures. Will post more as I go.
my possible food for thought would be to check how the patterns look when zoomed out to the games regular camera angles, to make sure they still look badass at a distance. look forward to seeing the rest of this one.
Yeah, I'm starting to see why the other skins are color variants. Worried I went a bit too ambitious but I'm happy with the approach and this is far more fun to me anyway. Thanks guys!
I'm happy there's actually a good deal of the original texture I can keep to save time since the smaller bits sort of blend into the rest.
I think so yeah. I'm going to try a few things. Some Giger stuff has a very cold stone feel while others are slimy. A mix should be pretty cool but the game is going to decide a lot of that. Each tank is going to be like 80% technical gymnastics making the panels work with existing UVs and 20% fun polishy map stuff when I make it look pretty in game. Looking forward to tonight and getting all the working parts of this process defined.
second vehicle done. Going to get it in game and tweak the maps. My house sprung a leak in the back so I had to emergency repair my plumbing. I swear everything has been working against me finishing this stuff haha. But I'm going to burn all weekend and get it done.
Also, does anyone know how to remove the UI?
on topic, these are coming along great. It'd be cool to get some colour variation into the panels so they stand out more from the game cam. They look great up close!
The skins looks very good inside , well done.
- for each vehicle, expand the hierarchy in the mod tool down to the entry that points to the actual directories for each skin
- from there, right-click and "edit bake settings" for the nrm map
- turn off "compress textures"
- now you just have to be sure to write the _nrm, _spc, and _gls maps to each vehicle directory. You need all three even if you are only changing one, because the bake process combines them into a single file for the game.