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shiftysean

Texturing questions (GIMP)

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Hello there :)

 

Not sure if this is the appropriate sub-forum, as there's none dedicated to just texturing.

 

My first question is for some basic retextures. Say I retexture a vanilla vehicle, I look ingame, and vehicles have a tendency to look very...shiny and glossy. Specially with the Altis sun on tanks I feel like they are fresh from the factory (shiny and chrome hehe). So is there a way to reduce that? 

 

My 2nd question would be about dirt and wear on vehicles. How do you do it? I read about some ways while searching on google etc, but they don't really partain to arma, and so it's often about blurring/dirtying pictures which doesn't really translate well to arma ingame (yes I have tried some of these methods)

 

I'm still a novice, and while I am getting adept at texturing the skin patterns etc. I'd love to not have vehicles look factory new, but battleworn and dirty :D.

As the title implies I use GIMP for all the texturing.

 

Thanks in advance! :)

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I am more of a scripter so I am not entirely sure about your first question. I believe that the glossy effect is related to the addon itself, so it cannot be changed through a script command. However, I may be wrong.

 

Secondly, you can assign a material to the vehicle to give it a dirty effect. You can do this by using the setObjectMaterial (or setObjectMaterialGlobal for the DEV branch) and finding a dirt.rvmat file in the PBOs.

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I'm by far not an expert, more of an amateur who is slowly making his way through graphic editing. As for very simple dirt, I use the fog filter. (Filters > Render > Clouds > Fog) Adjust the fog colour, distribution, and opacity. For uniforms, I rely on rendered fog and patterns (stains mostly). You could try airbrushing dirt as well. As for tanks in particular, you'll find a lot of scratch textures by browsing through the game's PBOs. For example, the textures for damaged vehicles are just overlays of metal scratches. This UN hunter here was a quick work. White background, two layers of these scratch textures from the game itself, a bit of rendered fog, and a few bullethole patterns applied to it. It's not perfect but sufficient for my needs.

 

2015-04-13_00006m4jh3.jpg

 

Rendered dirt particles also reduce the shinyness I think. Oh, and you can also change the light reflection of an object by altering it's SMDI texture.

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Thanks for the fast answers. I'll have to look at some of those dirt rvmats and see how those work.

  Quote

As for very simple dirt, I use the fog filter. (Filters > Render > Clouds > Fog) Adjust the fog colour, distribution, and opacity. 

 

Using a sandlike color for this lightens the entire texture though which is fairly annoying. Setting opacity higher to actually show the sand texture lightens it a lot.

 

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Oh, and you can also change the light reflection of an object by altering it's SMDI texture.

 

I guess this is were my noobishness comes in :P SMDI layer makes the entire texture really dark, and playing around with brightness distorts the original colors I have. So my solution was to disable that layer as I saw no change between having it on or not :P.

Can you explain a bit how I can change the SMDI to fix te light reflection?

 

Thanks!!

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Anyone else with better knowledge of textures and such is welcome to correct me. The SMDI tells the engine how parts of an object reflect light. For example, the flag patch on the BLUFOR uniform is the shiniest part of it. As you can see in the corresponding SMDI, the flag patch rectangle and other metal parts like zippers are the most obvious elements. The SMDI must be set up correctly in the object material (RVMAT) file.

 

clothing1_smdigcqs1.png

 

 

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Oh, and if textures appear too bright you could try to reduce the brightness and / or contrast levels. It also depends on under what conditions you test it. Things appear quite bright in the VR map. Maybe you could post a screenshot of what's bugging you?

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Ok so took a ss and got an old one aswell

 

http://imgur.com/e4ZjBg2

http://imgur.com/DDS2rVD

 

The turret in the first shot and the sideparts are pretty shiney ^^

2nd ss has the frontal armor plates of the turret all shiney and a bit on the part halfway on the front body.

Also on the 2nd ss you can see the difference between having smdi on and off.

 

Edit: I learned most from googling and youtube vids, and these stated to desaturate the extra layers and put the color to alpha (the smdi, as, and nohq layers). Hope the guy in the vid explained that right xD

Edit2: I love how realistic it looks on for instance the bwa3 mod http://media.moddb.com/images/mods/1/27/26669/1.jpg http://media.moddb.com/images/mods/1/27/26669/3.jpg  Looks like specks of sand build-up and muddy down by the tracks (guessing though this is done by hand).

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If you check out my YouTube I did a few tutorials on how to retexture base vanilla units and how to create weathered/wear effects as well as adding layers for dirt and scratches. I believe it's in part 2 that I cover that. It's by no means and expert guide but it gives a good idea on how to get started. The link can be found below my signature.

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Have you compared your own textures to the BI ones? I did that with mine on Stratis here and they're just as shiny as the original Kuma to the right.

 

2015-09-21_000012kue1.jpg

 

@Ma77h3hac83r: Thanks for your tutorials, quite entertaining for breakfast. ;) It would be awesome if you could share your sources. I've tried to find the arctic Multicam pattern (and the others as well) in decent quality but google wasn't able to satisfy my needs. I've seen mods with it so the source must be out there somewhere.

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Thanks for all the answers everyone, appreciate it. Fiddled around with the fog layer etc. they look a lot better and dirty now.

 

  Quote

 

 

Have you compared your own textures to the BI ones? I did that with mine on Stratis here and they're just as shiny as the original Kuma to the right.

Indeed the vanilla vehicles have a lot of this going on aswell so that's ok. 

Also you probably know this already, but there's a lot of camo patterns on camopedia. 

 

@Ma77h3hac83r: Watched the vids aswell, very informative. Guess the next thing for me to do is learning the configs, and I see you have a tut for that to :D.

 

Thanks all! :)

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