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solviper

Anyone know how to make the TI_ca file?

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Just wondering if anyone has any experience making the thermal imaging file? I can't find any tutorials on it.

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I haven't done one yet, but I have thought about my approach for when I will. I would start with an ambient shadow map as a base layer, and maybe drop the contrast while adjusting the brightness up or down to your liking. If you are making your own textures hopefully you made an AS map, and you can grab the B&W image from the bake-render. If you only have the bright magenta/white AS texture to work with, you can grab the B&W image from its GREEN channel.

 

Add a layer (or many layers) for heat spots. You can paint them in, or maybe you blend an overlay copy of the part of the AS layer where heat is and blend out the unwanted edges. Whatever your method, try not to wash out the detail completely unless it's intended to be blazing hot. Low heat areas should look darker with a mild degree of contrast. Medium areas will have a little more contrast and a little more brightness. High heat areas will be much brighter and back to low contrast. Extreme heat = all white. By now you should have the thermal image, but there's another step.

Copy the image (in Photoshop it's ctrl +SHIFT+c to get all visible layers), and paste them into the alpha channel. Go back to RGB and hide all layers. Save to TGA as you would any other map, except with the ending _ti.tga (you can also save to png and jpg). When you convert it to paa, the engine will know what to do with it.

Note that TI maps can be much smaller than their _CO counterparts. Common dimensions are 256x256 and 512x512.
I believe there are or were muticolor maps. I'm not sure they are in use, and I haven't looked at how to make them.

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