Mack R model

[BraTTy 0]

Nice looking truck !

How did you get the textures like that ? Are they pictures?

[Sigma-6 29]

The tires are green because they're sun bleached and moldy. They're supposed to be like that, this is an old truck, after all.

[Sigma-6 29]

Screenshot of another vehicle from the pack.

It seats 20 plus the driver.

[GIJOE94 0]

Thats sooo cool!! How do you get your textures thet good?

[Sigma-6 29]

Quote[/b] ]Thats sooo cool!! How do you get your textures thet good?

Well, GIJOE94, the basis of one of *these* texture sets is photographic, but it's not just as easy as taking pictures and slapping them on. It starts from when you're taking your photos. You need to have either an overcast day, or an object 100% in shadow (equally shadowed from all sides). You're trying to get a photo that looks like an ambient occlusion map, with little to no reflection on it, because you're going to have to remove all the reflections and such afterward in your image editing software, so you need to minimize them at the start.

The photos must be taken orthographically, so you have several options, and both require you to pretty much have control over the placement of the object. You can use a high-resolution digital camera with a good zoom, standing well back, and that way you have as little perspective shifting as possible, or you can take smaller photos from closer in and then knit them together, which requires a lot of colour correction to get them to match up, and a lot of nifty photoshopping, or you can take your photos and skew them into orthographic position in photoshop, which you're going to have to do anyway, to a certain degree.

That leaves the 90% of the process that is done from scratch, plus the fact that even if you do get good photos, you'll still need to go over pretty much every pixel and remove or add detail, clean up reflections and specularity, match the colours of all the component parts. Also, there are a lot of parts you simply can't get photos of, and a lot of things *must* be simplified. Basically, you keep the stuff you like best, and make it look like a simple object with matte paint on it. Then you do your normal and specular maps.

For all this stuff, you'll probably need a program that will allow you to clean up your seams, and/or paint directly onto the model, instead of in an image editing suite. I use Deeppaint; it allows you to paint as though you were holding the object in your hand.

To conclude, they're photo textures; but making good photo textured objects is often more time consuming than working from scratch.

With these models:

(off-topic, but they illustrate the point) obviously I couldn't photograph them in the real world. . . and if I'd photographed physical scale models of them, they probably wouldn't have looked as good. . . You have to choose based on the project what will be a better option, but in either case, bear in mind that it isn't going to take any less time to do it with photos. It's just a question of what's going to look better for what you want your object to be.

As a rule of thumb, it's quicker to make your own textures, I find, since making photo textures look good is generally difficult and time consuming, and with scratch textures, you have total control from square one.

Then there's the material maps and building the model itself, which are totally different processes.

Basically: practice, practice, practice.

[miles teg 1]

Wow! Reminds me of the old "Blue Bird" school busses that I rode on as a child. Ah good memories...

Chris G.

aka-Miles Teg<GD>

[wika_woo 182]

buahahahah.. Funky school bus ..

[ColonelSandersLite 0]

Holy shit that frigate is awesome!!!

[vilas 477]

Sigma, maybe You will do some Tanks like in OFP, T80 ?

because Your work is very good looking, it would be very good to see Your T80 back in ARMA, the sooner, the better, it is very awaited addon

bus look very good, but You probably interested only in US vehicles ?

[topas 1]

(...) I don't think that I'll be undertaking any ambitious tank projects.  The only project I have in the pipe is this civilian vehicles pack (...)

@ Vilas

[5133p39 14]

@Sigma-6

This is awesome, please, continue with this excellent work and make more and more civilian vehicles. We need more quality civilian vehicles in ArmA.

(you could also convert the nice pickup you made for OFP)

[leptailurus 0]

Your work is very impressive Sigma-6!! That school bus looks magnificent....

[5133p39 14]

btw. any other download links besides the armedassault.info ?

I can't download anything from that site (it never worked for me, don't know why).

[MEDICUS 0]

Very impressive, Sigma-6!

The Mack is and this Schoolbus looks awesome!

Do you have any plans for a trailer, too?

MfG Medicus

[ColonelSandersLite 0]

btw. any other download links besides the armedassault.info ?

I can't download anything from that site (it never worked for me, don't know why).

http://www.armaholic.com/page.php?id=1525

Armaholic is a good place to check. They usually have any addon released listed in 24-48 hours or so.

[lee_h._oswald 0]

Schoolbus looks fantastic.

Hope to see more high quality civilian addons from you in the future.

Thanks!

MfG Lee

[[aps]gnat 28]

Lovely bus !

And appreciate your explanation of photo textures too Sigma-6, very interesting.

BTW, I seem to have difficulties with getting the truck across bridges, its gets stuck in place shortly after entering from either end (using v1.08)

[Sigma-6 29]

Gnat @ July 01 2007,06:14)]BTW, I seem to have difficulties with getting the truck across bridges, its gets stuck in place shortly after entering from either end (using v1.08)

That seems to be a common problem with vehicle mods at present. I'm not sure that I know how to solve that yet.

[M.Andersson(SWE) 4]

Dont worry about that its that STUPID bridge

bug from BIS...

They SHOULD have fixed that from the start, its

not even beta when you cant use the map itself..