jagheterjan

Edge padding is applied to an UV to avoid bleeding between UV islands when the engine mipmaps your textures. In a nutshell - if you have one UV shell containing only black texels and one containing only white texels, and they are directly bordering each other with no padding applied, the colours will bleed into each other along the border, creating a grey seam there because of aliasing artifacts introduced by the renderer. These artifacts get more pronounced the lower the resolution of the texture gets because as texture resolution decreases, texels in the texture 'grow' and cover more screen space. Same applies to UV borders that are not perfectly perpendicular to the texel borders. To reduce/avoid the aliasing artifacts and colour bleed, UV islands need to be moved away from each other in order to have the bleeding happen where there is no 'useful' texture information stored, as far away as possible from any UV border. I came here to ask the more seasoned content creators for their experiences as I'm still fairly new to the whole low-poly modelling thing and want to do it right the first time.

For how much padding do you set up your UV maps? I'm currently working with 2 texels for every 1024 texels of file dimension where needed and try to stack and mirror UV islands whereever possible, but having that much padding makes the finished UV map rather ineffective imo. Mods, please give me a good slapping if the question's better suited for a separate thread.

You tell us if it's gonna be awesome, Mr company president.

Could you post info with each file where you got it from so authors can give proper credits?

Doesn't even have to have OFP-quality meshes, just some placeholder geometry and a set of thoroughly annotated configs.

Source

3ds max 2011 plus a whole slew of 3rd party plugins - saves me from boredom Photoshop + nDo + xnormal + Nvidia plugins for PS - see above Marmoset Toolbag - because 3ds' viewport sucks big time The Windows Calculator - because

Thanks again for your dedication, much appreciated!

Since it was 'really flashing the point', I was thinking more this kind of deterrence maybe?

Another teaser from the CryEngine3 dev team. Me likey.

Funny, the IDF says the exact opposite is true: http://www.idf.il/1086-14000-EN/Dover.aspx

For a vast variety of reasons: http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?115256-Steam-opinions-and-experiences-survey

He already stated he never touched A2, so who out there could be better suited to comment on the details of how efficient the A2 code is written?

A3 Alpha won't be out for at least another two weeks, the finished game not before October this year.

Jamming everything is - apart from being next to impossible when stuff needs to fit into a helicopter - the exact opposite of what stealth technology wants to achive. When you don't want anyone know you're coming, why broadcast it on ALL THE CHANNELS before you are even near?

So you don't like reports that go beyond just showing off ingame material? Pity. Feel free to move along then and busy yourself with other things. Don't come here and act like the developers owe you. They don't. /endofstory

Yep - why not post in the thread created to host all community wishes? http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?125819-ArmA-3-Community-wishes-amp-ideas-NO-DISCUSSION

I somewhat doubt there will be another BWmod release since the team disbanded quite a while ago and most of them seemingly quit the scene. The future of the German armed forces in ArmA looks splendid though as there are a whole slew of groups and individuals now that are working on Bundeswehr addons just like the BWmod team did. Check the ArmAtoren Modding Team, the Task Force 141 and (some random website) for just a few of them. (Plugging fully intended.) I still hope though that I won't have to redo the Fennek because the vanilla one turned out to be the dog's bollocks!

TBH, I haven't touched Blender since 2.4 came out, but knowing Maya, Blender could hardly be more basic in terms of feature completeness. It almost seems like Autodesk stopped all development on Maya when they bought the application along with Maya's original developers Alias some seven years ago. In any case, I'd advise having the UV maps finished and the high poly details baked down into the low poly mesh before even starting with the diffuse and specular textures. Shading errors that can occur by wonky soft/hard edges in the low-poly mesh and faulty normals maps caused by bakes gone wrong are much faster spotted on a mesh with just a simple glossy material applied IMO. It would be kind of like climbing a horse from behind trying to establish all the diffuse and specular detail first before having the normals map cleaned up and finalised. Plus, I find it easier to come up with the basic specular maps when there's still only the least amount of information present in the diffuse map (Like, a solid 50% grey across the whole sheet). As far as the basic workflows involved in painting diffuse and specular maps, there are a couple tutorial videos available on the web to get you going. From personal experience I can recommend the tutorials on 3dmotive.com by Alec Moody (Link and Link) and basically anything by Laurens Corijn (Link, Link and Link). Edit: Cheers Pufu, I didn't advise the unemployed option since I was under the impression that Autodesk reserved those for people that had been using either a commercial or educational license before. And tbh, why bother with a license you have to renew once a year when you can have one that works for three years straight?

Educational licenses for any Autodesk application can be had free of cost, and they will come with the full set of features and functionality (as well as all the bugs and design quirks). All it takes is a registration at students.autodesk.com - set up a student's account and when it asks for the school's name, select Homeschool. If that's too much hassle for you, then there's still Blender. For modelling and unwrapping alone, it should do the job just as good as Maya, 3dsmax or modo do.

Release day.

Why did you do that?

Does work reliably for me. In any case, with the hints given you should be able to find the file you're after without further assistance. Arma2.com isn't hard to navigate ;)

http://www.arma2.com/index.php?Itemid=20&option=com_rokdownloads&view=folder〈=en Scroll down to 'Arma 2 Patch 1.11', download, install, enjoy.

Knowing these modelling techniques is a smart move for all the reasons already stated. But since you want to get the learn on - even more important IMO than having a hi-res mesh to bake from are properly set up UVs on the lo-poly mesh to prevent those pesky shading errors in the baked output.