Col. Faulkner

Ah, eureka! I just worked out why the view in "buldozer" always seemed so myopic. All the lovely details I'm slaving to create are coming out much better now:

Are you going to give the Parachute Infantry the proper round parachutes?

Well, I never thought I'd actually get this far but I now have my models properly UV mapped (it was nasty and painful, but it's done now and it works great), Here is a rough "Buldozer" piccy of one of my boys from c. 1980 ready for battle (I say 1980 for cataloguing purposes, but actually he's compatible with any real world date from 1970-ish to 1985-ish):

You mean your's are 1980s? Were they really all wearing those frag vests in those days? Or are they meant to be wearing shirts (in that case you should maybe try to remove that hard line at the shoulders and try to add some more creases on the torso, otherwise it reads very strongly as a stiff vest worn on top)? Good going so far, though. I know how much effort doing this stuff requires. I was wondering about those ammo belts you see festooning addon figures. I think the rounds on the PKM are quite low polygon already aren't they (they look hexagonal in first person view IIRC)? I might have a go at that too.

Nooooo! It's the pilot that called out the colour! You could be a nog saying that, ready to ambush a heli when it comes to your smoke! You: "smoke thrown, over" Unsung: "I see green, over" You: "Green is correct, over" Unsung: "Green correct, out" (Another free gem from the Faulkner vault of useless military historical trivia. :D ) I hope you guys won't totally abandon support for Arma I even after II is out. I'm another one who'd like to enjoy this but who won't be able to migrate to Arma II for quite some time.

They sound really good, especially the Russian GPMG. I do hope you will make an ArmA I version too for those of us who can't run ArmA II (yet).

Well I never thought I'd ever get this far but I have now successfully got the SPEARHEAD soldier figures (and some of the small arms) completely unwrapped and UV mapped for texturing (albeit doing it in a laughably inefficient way - in Oxygen, often one face at a time because the UVUnwrap function seems to have a mind of its own...). All the textures are applied properly now (no more cheating by slapping on crappo textures in "Buldozer"). It's largely just a matter now of improving my "artwork". [clickable thumbnails] Admittedly, the normal maps still look a bit crap in places (still trying to understand them properly - why, for example, is the normal map I made for the puttees apparently upside down on one leg while the other is perfect!?), but I'm pretty sure I can fix it all up. The webbing and kit looks pretty authentic now. Everything fits together and moves properly on them (quite realistically actually, I was frankly astonished) as the little guys run about the battlefield. It also has an undefinable "heavy" look to it - which is great. I spent a lot of time trying to make sure it fits them right - nothing worse than those addons with cardboard-looking webbing straps. It's also all the correct scale size (although I think I'll recheck the resi haversack now that I see it there - although "Buldozer" does distort the view quite a bit). Their clothes are constructed correctly - not that it immediately strikes you with these textures and unsophisticated models. I have to say that I'm still not entirely happy with the clothing textures. The cammed-up steel toby is a total nightmare to try and texture convincingly. It constantly evolves as I try to get it looking even slightly acceptable. It's difficult (impossible?) to represent a chaos of torn scrim, bits of sandbag, strips of hessian, plastic cam' netting and sundry other bollocks on what is basically a solid lump of polys. I may have to go back and redo it from scratch. At least it doesn't have that stupid bare helmet look of the SLA troops. Wearing lightweight keks with combat dress was a common practice in the 1980s, although they were by no means suitable for that purpose. Guys liked the fact that they dried quickly (the 68 pattern DPM combat trousers took on the weight of a small planetoid when wet and took about 3 months to dry). A popular alternative was to wear the unlined DPM trousers from the tropical combat suit (which colour scheme I'm working on for one or two of the figures - certainly for the SPEARHEAD 1985 set) Getting the berets (and other regimental headdress) right is very important. Any old thing (especially those BIS "especas" berets buggered about and recoloured) really won't do. And yes, he [i}does[/i] have a nose, he's just got his cam' cream on the right way.

What era are they from? I thought the Iraqi Republican Guard wore British 4 colour desert DPM outfits and Pakistani manufactured webbing. Or was that just in the 80s and 90s? They look very good, and jundys of any description are sure to be popular addons. You've captured the sloppy way they wear berets very nicely. :) One little thing; are you sure his waist belt isn't too narrow? Dunno about Eastern Bloc kit really (which I suppose this is) but webbing belts tend to be about 6 cm wide. How do you make the length of MG link draped over his shoulder in that last pic? Is it individual little models of rounds?

He looks like a TIE fighter pilot out of Star Wars! :eek:

L1A1 was part of the service nomenclature (specifically the Land Service designation and non-operational modification number) for the 7.62mm self- loading rifle but nobody ever actually called it that. The rifle was normally referred to as the SLR (sometimes pronounced like "slar"), or "Self-Loading Rifle" if you wanted to be more formal (as in, for example, "Did you so handle the Self-Loading Rifle so as to cause it to be discharged without the order to do so being given?"). In any case, L1A1 on its own is ambiguous since there were/are hundreds of stores designated L1A1 (the British version of the "M72 LAW" was an L1A1, for example, as was the Sterling-manufactured magazine for the SMG, or the telescopic sight used on the Lee-Enfield sniper's rifle etc, etc...).

Perhaps you should have added a small caveat, so users can readjust their expectations. It isn't true night vision comparable to the in-game NV goggles, and doesn't well represent present day devices but it is just good enough to represent an old first-gen image intensifying device (albeit without the horrible blurring, noise, artefacts and blooming). Since you're just looking through a green optics view, tracers and flares still appear their true colours. and it doesn't work too well if you have those pitch black nights in-game, but it does the job well enough in "theatrical darkness". Given that nobody else, to my knowledge, has presented anything even close to this, it's still a great effort and a valuable addon. I'll certainly be using it (or adapting it). Thanks again.

Yes, it's excellent! Just what I've been looking for. Thanks a lot! :bounce3:

I've finally managed to get some of the weapons properly unwrapped and am now trying to texture them in earnest. Good texturing is deceptively hard. :( I've been working on and off on this damned SLR since the days of the old OFP NI mod (my first ever attempt looked like it was made out of bubble- gum). It's good to finally get it really going. I'm sure the addon making gurus on here would say this is shite but I'm chuffed with it so far. (clickable thumbnails) At least it's a proper SLR - a right British squaddie's bunduk, and (I hope) it'll only get better as I work on it. Got several other versions on the go too; with wooden furniture (and a mix of wood and plastic), optics and lots of other bits and pieces. The black plastic furniture was approved for service by the Ordnance Board in 1968 but was rare before the end of the 1970s. The other stuff consists of SMG, LMG, GPMG, section anti-tank rocket (with the proper British sights), APers and Smoke hand grenades and Carl Gustav.

Have you actually got it running in the game? You'll need to build a novelty racetrack too, now! :)

I'll look into it later. I'm assuming it'd just mean a face and body-size (if supported) conversion once the figures are all done. It'd be really cool to have Gurkhas in the game, though.

I would absolutely love to do Gurkhas, but the game restricts the soldier figures to one size only and that's always deterred me from considering it seriously. Your average Gurkha is only about 5 foot 3, after all. Maybe that doesn't really matter so much, though, as others now have smaller statured peoples in the game already (Vietnamese, Filippinos, etc) just using the standard BIS model proportions. Basically all it'd need then is an Indo-Mongolian face and a Kukri ("Service no.1"). Not really much of a stretch, then. So, yes, I think I will add them. They'll also be very appropriate for the figures in No.9s (ie. tropical/jungle) that I'm doing too just now.

Well, disappointingly, it turned out that "Vilas" has neither the time nor the inclination to take over the stuff I was doing. He's just doing a very basic "UK airborne" soldier unit and is not much interested in anything else. He did, however, give me some very useful help about how to skin and texture the BIS soldier models, for which I'm very grateful to him. So this, together with me returning to better health lately, has given me a little reinjection of enthusiasm to try and move my stuff on. I've also, with the help of information submitted by "Messiah" and others in the "O2 Modelling" section of this board, now worked out how to do all that arcane UV mapping magic stuff and am at last in the process of texturing the damn things properly. It all looks so much better when it's done right. The bodies are now articulating correctly in-game (well "correctly" as far as ArmA anims go - the ArmA men always seem to have very weird arms) and I managed to incorporate all the good bits from my original models. They are now getting proper textures with normal maps for the details and stuff! The graphic artwork still needs polishing in places, of course, but it's already an improvement on the crap I was doing before. Here are some quick pics of the latest sort of thing. Parts of these still have just gash textures on them, but these should be looking much better very soon. Unwrapping a little set of 58 webbing is hugely tedious but well doable (just the yoke and bumroll left to unwrap now!). Clickable thumbnails: A lot of the detail is not very visible in those little pictures, but (for example) they have proper DMS boots on (correctly laced up too - none of that bloody foreign cat's-cradle nonsense) and not just some random high-leg boot model - and their puttees are properly wound too. Lots more little details to come. The guys in fighting order have a first attempt at making them look dirty (90% of the real infantryman's job is just traversing the terrain, not fighting the enemy - and I hate all those squeaky clean addon soldiers). Uniforms, weapons and kit are still from c. 1955 to c. 1985. The Gordons are supposed to be just for me (everyone wants to be a Marine or a Para, not a Jock), but I also have beret models in three different styles (a la Paras, Marines and Guardsmen). If there are any good addon makers who'd be interested in helping with a model of an FV 432, please get in touch.

You seem to have captured the colour scheme of the latest 95 pattern temperate (not "woodland"! :) ) combat dress really well. British DPM is a bit of a challenge to reproduce well in these models (or so I've found, anyway). Even just getting the colours to come out right when rendered in the game can be an exercise. Is writing the calibre onto pouches commonly done? (why?) Here's one of my W.I.P. guys wearing (my sad attempt at) a much earlier pattern of DP smock; one of the several variants of the 1968 pattern "Smock, Combat" :

Thanks, that helps. I just looked into the .pbo and indeed the .rvmats are not being included. I wasn't binarising; just building the .pbo with the "Eliteness" tool. :o I'll use BinPbo instead from now on.

Would anyone know offhand why I can see a normal map applied to a unit in the Buldozer viewer but when I test the unit in the game the normal map isn't applied? No errors pertaining to loading the rvmat or textures concerned are thrown at runtime, and the _co texture loads and is displayed OK in the game.

Why not make the belt actually a part of the torso? That way it'd fit exactly and you could use clever texturing and normal mapping to simulate its thickness (and you'd save a few polygons, too). As it is now it looks really horrible (I'm sure you'd agree yourself); far too thick and it clearly doesn't fit him properly. I reckon unless he's wearing a shirt made out of sandbags then any fabric texture overlay is going to be out of scale. I presume his clothes are made of poly-cotton in reality. You'd not see any structure on that.

Gotta love the luminous aiming mark on his melon! :D

Good, I was hoping it meant something like that! I had a look at some of the screenshots and couldn't see any evidence of anything like it (so far - or maybe I just haven't stumbled upon the right screenies yet).

Does anyone know what "customized character animations for holding weapons based on inverse kinematics" actually means in practice?

The suggestions are all good, but these last three I would opine are particularly important. The lack of these features is a huge immersion killer in the game as it is now (and the main reason why I lost a lot of interest in it).