Matrix Games Forums

Very cool, Motomouse - your work on this is much appreciated, you're breaking new ground here.

Yes excellent work MM!

Once you have finished could you please write a little tutorial on how it all works in blender for those guys that want to model but don't want to purchase MS3D.

Well done [8D]

S.

Some texturing progress on the tires.

The rest of the bike still needs some texturing work. Engine will be tackled next.

onwards



P.S. something is wrong with the lighting, light´n´shadow sharing same side [:-]

Too bright,
but normals right,
and ready for the fight.
Not yet.

Sensational MM!

Do you have it animating yet? By having your riders part of the vehicle mesh you can have them lying about dead when the bike blows up. You can also tie their head and body movements into the wheel rotation cycle (you get 60 frames to play with in that case). The other benefit is that you won't get the dead TC bug! You will have to have a null TC however.

Great job!

Animated? Yes a bike with a textured, rotating, animated lump of vertices (controlled lump) exists on my harddisk.
But the shown version moves still (pun intended) inanimate through the landscape, but its already good for a laugh when it goes poof [X(] ... [:D]

Next I will have to work on the damage messages. The TC will be reserved for the sidecar guy wielding some hot metal, not due soon [8D].

Motomouse,

Looking good!! You're all over that blender!

Question ... Would it be better to not have a commander and make a bike gang of 3, aligned with the infantry models so they could mount them?

It might look funny though, since there isn't a "mounting mesh" for the infantry. Perhaps in the next version, I dunno.

Rob

Haha! Brilliant work, love it! I can see some suicide scouts coming up.

Can you add Steve McQueen pls?

finally ... whew, after removing some nasty normals problems during the animation resulting in an ugly flashing effect on the tires ... a bike with an animated and correctly lighted front wheel drive [8D]

Probably a dumb question, but as Infantry can mount and dismount trucks. Is there anyway to link the rider graphic to the infantry model?

ORIGINAL: 433tom

Probably a dumb question, but as Infantry can mount and dismount trucks. Is there anyway to link the rider graphic to the infantry model?

You could but you would still hav weird effects like the bike riding by itself and a whole squad of guys fitting on to on bike.

MM,

If you make the rider of a bike part of the export mesh for the model you may have a issue of the normal map being applied to the rider texture (if you make that texture seprate from the main bike "body" texture).

Thanks for the advise Stridor (already experienced this after changing my texture setup [:)])

But it is not a big problem anyway with my Blender Gimp Toolchain:
Its possible to use textures as you like, there is a nice blender script packaging all your textures in one. (Took me a lot time earlier to think about a good layout, fear you have to change it for additions is gone now)
There is a nice gimp plugin for creating normalmaps from the textures (the easy way out, advantages and disadvantages)
If I would like to create local normal maps I would just scale them to my packaged all in one texture section.

But before thinking about normal maps, I will have to hone my skills in creating one [;)]

Beneath an example for a blender one-in-all texture, imported into the gimp normalmap plugin:

By the way a few first things learned on texturing during this project:

* There are a lot of good tutorials on the web on texturing
* Layers are your friends aka non destructing editing
* Texturing takes a lot more effort than modelling [8D]
* There are a lot of cool approaches to texturing, you have got to choose
* you will choose the wrong approach first
* Fire up blender and use it for a quick render of a bump map / depth layer if you cant find what you need in gimp

* You can have quite some fun doing this [:)]

I agree MM,

Modelling at this level is pretty straightforward anyone with enough patience to learn can do it.

Texturing is more akin to art. Whilst you can learn some tricks to get by, in the end it helps if you have an artistic bent.

Regards

S.

Sorry, I thought some of the infantry graphics displayed one man.

dont have the game (old CMBB gamer) but always digs deep in modding communities, and this is very interesting indeed!
 
Perhaps they should have sidecars though, as IRL i think the passenger can fire with an MP40, ofcourse it might be abit weak for a game as this.
 
Or they are cheap so they can only be used as suicidal scouts?
 

What happened to this?

Did I miss a link up there?