Suggestions for new skins (16 skins to do)

[stfas]

yeah color bleed is two layers overlapping each other, and i don't think the skinning attempt was what caused your DC to crash.. since skins are just textures that change how units and buildings look... nothing more...

[DanTay25]

It didn't crash or anything, but I found that I couldn't use custom skins any more. Though I now think it's probably because I used SpookyRAT to extract all of the skins, so that they took priority over the custom ones.

[IBBoard]

Metallics: I think it looks okay there because it has an obvious curve and a small surface area, so the "the reflection is at the wrong angle compared to everything else" issue doesn't occur to obviously. I think that trying to get that effect all over would cause problems with a moving 3D model. I've just read a "non-metallic metallics" article in WD and it specifically said you need to think of where the light is coming from and how it would interact with the textures.

Gold and silver eagles: You can use my Clean Marines if you credit them. As for Spectre, I don't think I have an email address for him. If he hasn't included an email in his readme and you can't find him on these forums or on Relic News then you can't really re-use his textures.

Making the chest eagle a fixed colour should be fairly simple. All you really need to do is make the relevant area on the _dirt layer white so that it doesn't team colour it. IIRC there's a slight white halo around the eagle anyway, so it is quite easy to identify.

Colour bleed: The way the textures work is a bit odd. Basically, each layer has an image and that image can use the range of greyscale colours (256 colours in total from 0 to 255). 0 is pure black and won't be affected by the selected team colour. 255 is, IIRC, pure white and also won't be affected by the selected colour. 128 or 127 is full saturation of the selected colour.

As an example, if pure red was selected in the army painter(R255, G0, B0) then that pixel would be pure red. Below 127 dulls the colour and above 127 starts to increase the other colour components.

Each pixel can then exist on multiple layers, which are combined in (I think) an additive way. It allows some degree of blending, but if you start to include too much colouring information on one pixel then the maths overflows the maximum 255 for each component and becomes the unexpectedly fluorescent.

It has been a while since I worked on the code to compile a single TGA from a WTP file, but the theory goes a little like that. Basically it's just "put too much colour on one pixel and it overflows to other colour components, giving flourescent colours, but put too little on and you won't see much difference or will end up with a mucky coloured mix".

[DanTay25]

Well, I've had a shot at the eagle skin (thanks for the permission), but I can't test it until tomorrow (I think my mum disapproves of insomnia ). I think the metallic skin would look pretty good anyway... but I think the main thnig against it is that it's labour intensive... to get it to work visually, every SM unit would need to be skinned like that.

[IBBoard]

One of the problems that a lot of skins have is that they're labour intensive to get the full set. There are quite a few out there that look good but can look a bit odd when the other units aren't also re-textured, but a lot of people only bother with the one texture.

Getting a good non-metallic metallic would be even more intensive because it's just a generally difficult look to get right unless you've got some good artistic skills

[DanTay25]

Yes, metallics are starting to sound unfeasible.

Well, I tested my skin, and...



Hmm. Any ideas what causes that?

[IBBoard]

That much transparency looks like a bad _default layer with too much transparency.

The Texture Tool should detect most common errors with file formats, but just to check do you have correctly sized textures? (1MB for _default and 256KB for the rest for a normal unit) And what app are you using to edit the files?

[DanTay25]

I'm using the Gimp.

Well, looking at the files, they're all 257kb, except for the three I edited - Default, Trim and Dirt. Dirt is 261kb, Trim is 19kb and Default is 892kb. But I'm not sure how to fix this, in Gimp or any other program.

EDIT: Oh, I think I may be using Beroc's WTP tool. I'll try the Texture Tool.

EDIT 2: The Texture Tool refuses because it says the _default isn't a valid 32-bit TarGA. But I don't know how to make it 32-bit... I'm that inexperienced .

EDIT THE THIRD: It... it lives...

Turns out I forgot to turn RLE Compression off, and to set the Dirt layer to Greyscale, and that 32-bit is _normal_ . Though, admittedly, the skin looks pretty shoddy, and I forgot to remove the skull from the Dirt layer...

Is it possible to remove the skull? As in, is there a texture underneath it?

MWAHAHAHA FOURTH EDIT!: Neatened up the edges and such. (Also removed both other images from this post- I figure you don't need a photographic development diary clogging up your topic...)



That's V3 you're looking at. Or V1.2. I think it's pretty good for a first attempt...

[IBBoard]

Yeah, The Gimp enables compression by default, which the game doesn't like Beroc's tool was what I'd call a "dumb" tool in that it assumed you knew what you were doing and were only supplying it files it expected. The Texture Tool was written to be more intelligent, so if the files aren't valid it should tell you and it should say why

That final version looks good. I take it you found where the skull is - it's actually elsewhere on the texture and not just the middle part of the wings (because of the way the model is wrapped it can't be part of the same thing).

It does work quite well as gold and silver. The only thing I can see with that close-in screenshot (which might not be visible when you're not so close in) is that you've got a bit of a black edge around the top. Maybe it was always there, but if not then it is caused by your _dirt being black for those pixels and nothing being on the _primary/_secondary/etc layers.

[DanTay25]

...yeah, I should probably look into that when I have time. *sigh* Back to school tomorrow...

V2 is on the march, complete with perma-silver weaponry (and judicious use of perma-gold). The bolter is kinda blurry, but I don't know if that's down to me or Relic.



EDIT: Actually, I could just colour in the whole eagle area on the _primary file. That'd make it look neater, since it would then be overlaid by the _default layer.

[IBBoard]

Yeah, that's one way of using the _dirt layer - keep the _primary/_secondary/etc as they are and just "un-paint" the areas using _dirt. That does have a slightly different effect to un-painting areas on both layers, but it depends what effect you're trying for.

As for the bolter, it is a known bad texture. If you look at the amount of space it takes up then it is tiny. The scouts are even worse. Hangar-8 did about as good a job as could be done cleaning up the texture, but there was only so much that he could do with the small space that they used.

[chaos]

those skins are cool are pretty smooth