Reviving the Juggernaut

Reviving the Juggernaut - Part 2

IskatuMesk

Canada969 Posts

August 31 2010 19:19 GMT

I had the weirdest dream last night. It was quite vivid. Another one of our huge FFA's, but on a really weird map. I got rushed or something early on and ended up hiding in HKS' base (even though it was an FFA we somehow entered a "neutral" state, since he's my chum and all) and I slowly massed Carriers from 1 stargate and made zerg units. Weird, I know. Then something happened and our dudes started shooting each other. I had a Nydus worm, so I escaped back to my old base, but with a stockpile of resources, and began rebuilding. Oh yeah, and I killed everything HKS had in the scuffle with hydras/mutas and put him out of the game with a single remaining mutalisk.

Short story shorter I walled up, mined out, and made a ton of Odins (the big ones) and ran around stomping Bill's Thor's with them. I'm a dick.

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The fact I had a vivid dream after all this work when my mind has been dead for so long tells me that something stirs within the heart of darkness. We must push on and see this to completion. Luckily, only two aspects of this project remain until this is inside SC2.

- Finishing the unified textures for the two remaining components with their respective bump/specular/emissive (neck & head) and make the engines.
- Rig the texture materials for sc2 (easy)

However, before I start dicking with new textures I want to dramatically improve the existing ones.

I have access to some commercial texture packs they are too "noisy" for the smooth metal effect I am after. Even the simple base texture I took from TR ended up meshing into what you currently see, which doesn't really resemble metal at all!

However, the TR texture isn't the real culprit. The base texture is a high intensity brushed metal. The blending between the two materials ends up in a lot more contrast than Sarge's max materials. My entry-level skills in photoshop tell me the only way to get around this is to find new base textures to blend and hope for the best. Alternatively, I could try using filters on the brushed metal... but it'd probably end terribly.

I give it a try anyway.

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The new texture is more smooth, but it's still too bright and not very metally. I could try to blend a third texture into the mix.

Sarge did have a third texture... but most of the materials did not use it.

Yet even with that the texture doesn't change that much and it's still too bright.

Carefully studying Sarge's textures, I conclude that one of the reasons they remain so dark is because of the ColorCorrect material type he's using. This adds a level of complication to my work, for I have to remake that look without having any of the 3ds max material settings available to me.

I can throw in the specular and normal I made for the central piece but... it remains just as bright. Also, I'm curious why parts of the main body are so blurry still. As it turns out, it's because their UV's weren't really designed for detailed textures in the first place - those edges aren't even really UV'd.

I could fix them without too much trouble, I think. Just need to split off those faces and move them somewhere... I mean, it's not like he's using more than 1/2 of the texture now that the old wings are deleted and a separate mesh. If it's going to be this big I may as well make the UV use it all and become more detailed as a result.

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You can probably see the issue. Not sure how I can fix this... (The mess of big triangles are the ones I just split off and rescaled.) It's also possible that deleting the bridge caused the UV's to freak out a bit.

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There we go. It's not pretty, but it gets the job done. Ignore the stray runes - those are on the texture from the old wings. I'll get rid of them when I go back to the texture, which is right now.

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More UV real estate for the faces means they use more of the texture resolution, thus looking sharper and more detailed and less blurry. This is pretty important, because this model will double as a cinematics model both ingame and for pre-rendered CGI. It has to look its best!

Also jpeg compression seems to be making that image more blurry than it really is.

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The text is in Greek (Olympian Gods and all), and it reads;

I surrender to the edge of eternity,
For I am the shepherd of blades.
I bathe myself in your sins,
For I am his will made manifest.

"His" referring to Alkhazir, aka The Great Destroyer (devil).

Satisfied with the textures for the time being, I turn my attention to the neck and head pieces. They need optimizations and their textures need unification.

The need has a lot of needlessly wasted polies that are easy to remove.

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Luckily this is really easy and doesn't take long to finish up.

I take but a moment to pause and consider what it is I am doing. I am changing the future. It has been a very, very long time since I have done something I am genuinely proud of. Though this model still leaves a lot to be desired and could be improved in many ways, the fact is I have a nearly sc2 ready model that looks as good or better than the original variant with much needed improvements that I made with my own resources. I fixed the UV's for the rear structure and totally built the wings from scratch with nothing but Sarge's vector graphics and some base textures.

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Conclusion of Part 2

All that remains is making the respective normal/emissive/specular maps for the various textures, making a small base texture to tile on the frontal guns and spikes, and finish the side cannons + make the small thrusters. Then I can make sc2-compliant materials, add hardpoints and scale the model, and then import into Starcraft 2 itself.

But for the moment I'm going to take a breather and eat something for the first time since I started the heavy work.