Repaint Templates from Bohemia for Vehicles / Units

[sancron 32]

Hello,

after doing some repaintwork for my Unit, i just came to the question, why Bohemia does not provide PSD Files, so it would be easyer to create high quality Repaints. So there are good work outside. But it's hard to made a good work, when a painter need to recreate a Template and maybe loss some informations.

So the small Question is, would Bohemia maybe made some Templates for Cars and Units, to made the life of repainting easyer? And what does the Community think about this?

Regardes

sancron

[L3TUC3 32]

I don't think BIS will supply the originals in a common format to prevent licensing/copyright problems in the future.

And what good would the template be then if it doesn't show the intricacies and details of the original?

[das attorney 857]

I remember that there was provision for this in Cliffs Of Dover and it worked out pretty well.

You could download the template and repaint it, then use it as a skin in game.

I can't recall if it was someone in the community, or Maddox Games that made the template, but the engine definitely supported it (weathering and other details were added when you booted it up in the engine).

[sancron 32]

It was in Cliffs Of Dover. Also IL2 1946 provides Templates for all his Aircrafts by Maddox Games. rFactor 1 and 2 the Publisher ISI provide Templates to repaint. RACE Series by SimBin, SimBin was realease Templates for all cars they included in the Game, also pCARS. Ok this are all SimRacing games (with exception of IL2 and Cliffs of Dover). So it would be great, if they would provide Templates. And i don't think they get any copyright / licensing Problems in cause, most of the Equipment are modifyed Versions of Real counterparts.

[roshnak 41]

I don't see how UV maps could possibly cause copyright or licensing issues. That said, you can extract the textures from the .pbos and they always seemed like an acceptable base to me.

On the other hand, I honestly feel like there are way too many retextures already. I understand if you want to retexture vehicles for your clan or whatever, but do we really need dozens of repainted stock units?

[sancron 32]

You can extract textures from the PBOs, but when you start Painting you loose some important things like Shading or Small parts like Screws. So you need a lot of time to recreate these effects by hand. When i have a Model to be used in 3DS with UV-Maps i can render the Shading. And yes there are many retextures outside, but not all are on high quality, or missing some things like shading.

[da12thMonkey 1943]

You can extract textures from the PBOs, but when you start Painting you loose some important things like Shading or Small parts like Screws. So you need a lot of time to recreate these effects by hand. When i have a Model to be used in 3DS with UV-Maps i can render the Shading. And yes there are many retextures outside, but not all are on high quality, or missing some things like shading.

In some cases you can make attempts to derive those details from the _AS (ambient occlusion) and _NOHQ (normal map) materials. Converting the Normal Map to a Cavity Map in XNormal and using "Blend If" on that layer in Photoshop can provide fairly decent edge highlights for screws, panel lines etc. The _AS material's green channel will provide pretty much all the shadows you'd want, simply by applying it with a "Multiply" blend mode and adjusted opacity. The difficult part is usually sorting out the various dirt and grunge layers - particularly if the dirt shown in the _CO (diffuse/colour texture) is also prominent in the _SMDI (specular power and intensity map) and _NOHQ.

BIS has more or less supplied reskin samples for the Hummingbird/Pawnee and Mohawk helicopters already in the Take on Helicopters samples, but they are much better if you embellished them with some material-derived texture layers like I outlined above.