Posted: Fri Jan 03, 2020 4:20 am Post subject:
[WiP] GLA Barracks
Inspired by MigEater's Chinese conversions (EDIT: one of which is shown below), I thought I would try my hand at the GLA barracks. Here's a first attempt - screenshot is from Final Alert because for some reason printscreen didn't capture the image ingame.
Definitely lots of room for improvement here, seems like I need to add some sort of light sort of light source. I'm using GMax/RenX since I don't have 3dsMax, so as I understand it my rendering options are limited - this is a snip from the view in RenX for example. If I can figure out how to make it prettier, I will probably go ahead and do the rest of the GLA stuff (unless someone else beat me to it)
I'm wondering if exporting to Blender might be the better option?
I tend to release things I create so that assets are never lost to hard drive problems, accidental deletion, or me having to pretend to care about rippers taking things from my project when it is done.
I'm thinking Blender is the better option, I'm just not sure RenX can export in a format that keeps the textures. I tried some other buildings and I ran into an issue where some textures are supposed to be see through, but instead show up as solid black. QUICK_EDIT
Set the black to Alpha in Blender or edit it in a photoshop-type software to a .png/.tga with transparency. _________________ "Don't beg for things; Do it yourself or you'll never get anything." QUICK_EDIT
I'm working on getting things exported to blender. In the meantime, I added the light to the scene so I think it looks much better. There does seem to be some missing symbols, like the GLA symbol on the ground is missing for some reason.
You're still missing internal shadows, and I would suggest more debris/dust/chunks on the damage frames, there's no way the floors would be cleaner when things have been blown up. _________________ http://www.moddb.com/mods/scorched-earth-ra2-mod-with-smart-ai QUICK_EDIT
Yeah, getting it perfect is a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. RenX/GMax seems pretty limited. I'll look into how I can export to blender in a bit. I'm wondering about downloading the 30 day 3dsMax free trial, but I probably want to have everything ready to go before I do that.
For the time being, I've attached the GLA barracks and palace .shps I've made so far. They both have snow versions and the palace has garrision/damaged garrison frames.
Has anyone converted the generals infantry to .shp before? I can import the skin, and I can separately import the anims, but I can't view the skin attached to the anims in gmax... and w3d viewer doesn't let me finetune the camera angle so it seems like a lot of work.
I made some progress in RenX, I was able to get the skin to to attach to the anim bones, but there seems to be some error in one of the leg points. Anyways, I'll try to come up with a more elegant way of capturing the frames than the snipping tool, but I should be able to get a complete rebel shp.
Thanks for the link. I gave the thread a read and Kenosis was using 3dsMax while I use RenX, so I'll see if there's a way I can get the scripts to run on RenX (Or I can find a cheap 3dsMax license). Definitely some great stuff in there. I was able to export geometry from RenX and import into Blender, but the textures didn't come with, so when I get that to work quality should go up.
Luckily there's not a ton of infantry in Generals (about 15). There aren't crawl frames, but there are injured frames, which might be a good stand-in). My mod is currently using many Civ3 conversions which don't have crawl frames either. Once I finish up the infantry I'll go back to the buildings as I will probably have to manually re-texture them.
Maybe I should have tried to do this 15 years ago, but I guess better late than never (there's also the Renegade infantry that are in .w3d format...). Part of me is thinking there might be a big boost after the C&C Remaster. QUICK_EDIT
I've never used Blender before and I must admit it is extremely confusing. Anim8or and even GMax seem intuitive by comparison. I'm hoping one of you would be kind enough to give me some pointers/a tutorial (chat on discord? I'm DaFool#5562). I was able to figure out how to wrap textures, although but simple things like rotate 90 degrees, have an object stand on origin and scale an exact percentage seem hidden.
Anyways, I started to fix some of the texture errors that you can see in the above image, hopefully this means that I should have a much improved shp coming soon.
Ok, I was able to make some progress and DonutArnold asked that I send him a DM on discord, so things are looking up. I still need to fix some of the textures on the barracks, as well as figure out how to get it to be the right size in blender, but seems easy enough with trial and error. The ingame seems vastly superior the my gmax screen capture, so hopefully a more complete result is coming soon!
Blender has been going well, here's the standard with damage frame. I'll do snow and build-up and then its done.
The GLA building stands out a lot compared to other RA2 buildings.
You should work on the textures and lighting. The textures seem washed out and the lighting is bland or from the wrong direction.
See how SW \ facing walls are usually brighter than SE / facing walls, yet on your GLA buildings they have almost the same brightness.
It also looks more like the shadowed areas in the building are part of a texture than actually correct shadows as result of the main light source.
The damage frame needs more work. Just the tarpaulins removed isn't convincing as damage. You have to add cracks, debris, broken pieces, scorch marks, parts of buildings blown away etc. _________________ SHP Artist of Twisted Insurrection: Nod buildings
@TAK02 - yes. I want to make the GLA generals challenge maps for YR so I'll be doing the rest of the GLA buildings.
@LKO I'll look into adjusting the lighting, I think a darker texture for the perimeter wall might make it 'pop' a bit more. It is a conversion so I wasn't looking to put too much work into adding new details. Generals uses two damage states (DAMAGED and REALLY_DAMAGED). The above is damaged, I'll try out the really damaged model to see if its an improvement. QUICK_EDIT
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[WiP] GLA Barracks
