New buildings for GRAW2

[JohnTC02]

At last I have finally got a couple of new buildings into the game, these are both made from scratch using 3ds max8, the house was never meant for GR:AW2 as it was from a tutorial I followed so it's not to scale and I think it's a bit to big but as it's done I thought I would put it in.

This was one hell of a steep learning curve, I've never used max before until I picked up a copy about 4 weeks ago and since then I have been at it all the time, I've even put my modding on hold to get something new into the game.

Making the actual 3d model in max wasn't as difficult as I thought but the problems started when it came to texturing, making the bump map and finally finding out how to create the lightmap for the buildings.

There is a wealth of information out there for max but sadly the opposite is true when it comes to the steps needed to get these into GR:AW2, most of the tutorials I used were made by Wolfsong for GR:AW, luckily these also apply for GR:AW2.

One of the biggest hurdles here was the bump maps, there is nothing out there for creating these for the game but there are loads for other games or making bump maps in general none of which worked that well in game.

So after a lot of research I applied what I had leaned and made my own normal maps, using various settings and much trial and error they seem to look ok, I don't think my way of making these is what GRIN used but at the end of the day it works.

There are a few pics below of a new industrial building which I will be using in my maps plus the house which as I mentioned is not to scale, I have used a stock building in the pics just for reference.

Hope you like what I have done.

[wombat50]

I'm happy you got it to work for you John. Looks very promising and will be a great addition getting some of your models into GRAW2.

[Pave Low]

Wow, Great work John

looks really good

[Zeealex]

fantastic work john! i only have a tiny qualm that you may or may not want to look into:

looking at the first image, and others, you perhaps need to look at defining the roof on the side of the houses? just saying i don't think anyone will be fussed about it if i'm honest.

Other than that FAB work keep it up

[RickDekkard]

Wow John.... we looking forward to see that in your new projects....

Very impressive, thanks for make this game better for us.

[Whiskey]

Nice work John.

3ds Max is hard at first but continue u modeling and u found how powerfull max is.

Market map was modeled with sketchup and exported to max where i do the uvw ,if i had to do all

over again i do it with max and saved a lot off work.

[JohnTC02]

Many thanks for the replies folks.

All being well the new industrial building will be in my next map, the map itself is finished and the new building is in place and the lightmaps have been rendered so all looks good, still a lot of work to be done on the mission so it won't be ready for a while.

There is a downside to making new buildings though, it will take much longer to get my maps out there for testing, plus at the moment the textures for just this one building comes in at a fraction over 40mb so having a lot of new buildings in one map is not possible at the moment. I am looking into different ways of making these textures as mine do not look the same as the stock ones nor is the texture quality as good.

It's early days as yet so I hope there will be improvements to texture quality and size over time.

[Spik@]

John,

Building looks good!

As for the fact that it is not (yet!) as good as the original buildings and textures.....well that's just because you just started doing this! Wait and see in a few weeks or months. I am sure you will come up with buildings, ideas and all sorts of other cool stuff.

Ofcourse this all will take time, but I am sure that everybody here has the patience to wait for cool additions to the game!

"...It's early days as yet so I hope there will be improvements to texture quality and size over time." I'm sure of it!

Regards,

Spik@

[Tinker]

Nice work John.

As you are just playing around here, make textures as small as possible until you are finished, then include high res versions.

[JohnTC02]

Rahn was kind enough to try this test map on a dedicated server but for some reason the new buildings look very dark compared with the stock wall and building, I find that strange as they look ok on a normal or LAN server.

Rahn sent me a screenshot (click the pic for a larger image):

Has anyone got any ideas here.

[Whiskey]

When i got dark things in editor it has been faults in material script ,but its has been for me so hope this is so simple.

this works for me

<material name="U_MATERIAL_IN_MAX" src="bump_lightmap" decal_material="stone">

<diffuse_texture file="U_TEXTURE"/>

<bump_normal_texture file="U_TEXTURE"/>

</material>

or its in units file what i have with maket when things go dark in multiplayer ,then u have to remove

<network sync="bodies" />

if i remember right.

[JohnTC02]

Thanks for the reply Whiskey, the problem was in the unit xml.

Been working on this problem most of the day, spent a couple of hours just looking through the buildings from GRAW2 in an attempt to see what I had done wrong.

Turns out the problem was in the unit xml, this is the file that starts with "u_" in the name, when I made this file I was following the tutorial from GRIN which was for a static prop so the game thought my building was a static prop and not a building.

I had to add these lines:

<script_class name="editor" class="Editor"/>

<script_class name="nav" class="NavStatic"/>

Then change this from:

<xi:include href="/data/units/mass.xml#xpointer(/mass/mass_prop_medium/*)"/>

To:

<xi:include href="/data/units/mass.xml#xpointer(/mass/mass_building_medium/*)"/>

Now the buildings look fine on a dedi server and a normal/LAN server.

Back on track at last

John

[Spik@]

GREAT JOB!!

[candy76041820]

Whoa, I'm wondering how many resources a model of this will cost.

Edited October 16, 2011 by candy76041820

[JohnTC02]

Ok, on to the next problem.

Rather than taking the stock textures then fitting them to my building and saving them in my own atlas files I want to use the stock textures as they are.

Looking at some of the other custom props that have been modelled in max I noticed that some of these are using the stock textures as these are referenced in the material.xml

What I cant work out is how do I go about tiling these textures, it's not down to the atlas.xml as these custom props use the stock ones, all materials/textures are taken directly from the game so it must be something I am missing in max.

I've tried various ways to get this working but the textures on my building are always stretched to fit each part of the building or poly.

Any ideas here would be greatly appreciated.

[wombat50]

Found this, hope it helps.

notamondayfan wrote about 3DSM:

Re: Does scale of model vs texture size matter?

the best way to apply textures is to use uvw map in the modifier list, for several reasons. you can use the gizmo's inside the modifier to move the texture around, and you can accurately scale and resize the texture using the settings.

if you cant see the texture on your model, open your material editor, open the diffuse area, and press the "show map in viewport" button. (looks like a blue and white cube).

and yes, if you scale an object the texture scales too.

Post Location

[JohnTC02]

wombat you are genius.

Added a uvw map to my meshes and the textures tilled perfectly, doing it this way gives a much smaller texture size but they are a much higher quality.

It's to late for the buildings in my pics above as it would be a lot of work to change them but this will be very useful in the future.

[wombat50]

Stab in the dark on my part. Glad it helped.

[Zeko]

UVW map modifier is just for basic mapping, wait till you meet unwrap UVW modifier John

Good job on figuring it out

[JohnTC02]

Already had that pleasure Zeko.

Texture map fro the building in my first post:

[Zeko]

Ouch! Sorry to say this but unwrap looks really bad! I can help you with that if you want. Automatic unwraping is not always the best option. The best result is by doing it manually.

Also red color in there means that you have overlapping faces which is not good either unless you want same faces uses same space in texture.

Just holla if you need help

[Spik@]

Zeko,

I am doing some modelling myself and have simular UVW unwraps like this. Lots of tiny pieces. I've noticed that you can decrease the amount of parts by increasing the number when flattening, but I have no clue if this is 'best practise'.

I have made a sidewinder missile and decreased the amount of parts by this method, but after texturing the unwrapped UVW and looking at it in Max, it's safe to say it wasn't as good as I exepcted it to be. The model was fine, but the textures looked like crap.

Its seems to me there is plenty of knowlegde on this subject amongst the forum members. Wouldn't it be a good idea to bundle some more of this info into a tutorial? I, for one, am willing to make models, but lack the insight on how the bring the end-product into GRAW and this keeps me from 'delivering'!

Regards,

Spik@

Edited October 18, 2011 by Spik@

[JohnTC02]

Zeko, it's not a pretty sight is it.

I didn't know how to fix it so I just applied the textures as it was, luckily it turned out ok.

As Spik@ mentioned the texturing stage gave me more problems than making the model in max, there is plenty of tutorials out there for max but very little that relates to GR:AW2.

[Zeko]

It's not that hard just needs some practice. I can make you guys a tutorial that explains all plus some other bonus stuff for better looking textures like AO map rendering.

[JohnTC02]

Thanks Zeko that would be fantastic.

I find the texturing side of things a bit confusing at the moment so any help here would be appreciated.