A Path Beyond Improved textures for buildings

[A4R91N]

Here are some textures I have been working for a while. These are inspired by another set of custom textures I made back in 2010-2011 for various equipments found inside de buildings. These are up-scaled 1024x1024 compared to the old ones, to accomodate more details.

Anyway here are the ones I made thus far:

 

That fuse box you find the war factory, next to the doors.

This is that panel that is in the back part of the war factory.

This panel is the one inside of the room with the MCT, in the war factory.

Bottom floor of the power plant.

Radar dome fuse boxes.

Same texture as the fuse boxes, this is the electrical texture used in the power plant.

Missile silo terminal

Bonus: new door texture

I know there are some edges where the textures are not aligned, or are stretched, or too narrow. There is nothing I could do there, because that is how the original texture was applied on. Anyway, I'm planning to continue with fixing the lights and those monitors from the radar dome.

Edited May 21, 2017 by A4R91N

[Pushwall]

Oooooooh. Mind if we make some of these official when they're out? I find it hard to justify keeping all the low-res building equipment at this point, but I kind of have a soft spot for the current door texture, plus its lack of colour works well with using vertex painting to make the blue/red team-locked variants you see on some maps.

[Raap]

Hah, yeah, some of the textures on buildings are quite outdated, but so are the models themselves. They have become somewhat iconic though.

But I suppose this is the nature of any old project, look closely enough and you spot the age in quite a few places.

Edited May 22, 2017 by Raap

[NodGuy]

@Pushwall While we're talking about textures, I feel that the Soviet Airfield's brick colour should match that of the Soviet Refinery. Right now as it is, when placed next to the latter on Guard Duty, it looks... out of place. I dunno, maybe it's just me?

[A4R91N]

@Pushwall I'd be more than happy to send them do you once I have a few more completed! 

In regards to the door, the vertex coloring works with my texture as well:

The color feels less saturated, maybe because my texture is much darker then the original.

[Einstein]

I like those doors

Also, that brick texture nodguy mentioned reminds me of one of the APB alpha textures. Those buildings were so hilarious back then

EDIT: Please don't take that to mean that I think the texture used is as bad as those were back then!  

[Pushwall]

8 hours ago, Raap said:

Hah, yeah, some of the textures on buildings are quite outdated, but so are the models themselves

We can try to carve some of the textured parts out to add more depth to the models. I'd rather wait on that for when these new textures come though in case there's any subtle changes to the positioning of certain elements of these textures.  

[Raap]

12 hours ago, NodGuy said:

@Pushwall While we're talking about textures, I feel that the Soviet Airfield's brick colour should match that of the Soviet Refinery. Right now as it is, when placed next to the latter on Guard Duty, it looks... out of place. I dunno, maybe it's just me?

That airfield model was triggering me quite a bit. Low detail mesh, low detail textures, no damage animations and emitters, and a hilarious Battlelaf voice line edit. @Pushwall @ChopBam is there a possibility Battlelaf can return to do some of the lines properly that we've been voice splitting so far? I think we're around 20 to 30 lines right now that were edited and not recorded properly, and I can easily think of an additional 20-30 lines for future-proofing.

 

Edit: By the way, the airfield was created along with most of the buildings in like, 1977. This was the high standard back then!

Edited May 22, 2017 by Raap

[ChopBam]

We'll be sorting a few things out with the Airfield, especially with damage animations/emitters. Enjoy Yaks anyway in the meantime though.

[A4R91N]

Here's the monitors from inside the Radar Dome and the Airfield. The texture on them is nothing too major, just made it looks less bland. I also changed that scrolling text to something that looks like it would be on an old computer, and used some of my dry humor on it. I'll probably put something else instead of that text.

I noticed that in tunnels under the Soviet base on Siege, some of these textures look weird:

I don't even know you could access those, considering they're behind a glass panel.

[Raap]

4 hours ago, A4R91N said:

Here's the monitors from inside the Radar Dome and the Airfield. The texture on them is nothing too major, just made it looks less bland. I also changed that scrolling text to something that looks like it would be on an old computer, and used some of my dry humor on it. I'll probably put something else instead of that text.

I noticed that in tunnels under the Soviet base on Siege, some of these textures look weird:

I don't even know you could access those, considering they're behind a glass panel.

Ah, the problem is, you edited existing textures rather than creating new ones and applying them. No cause for alarm though, you can export your textures under a new name (like t_electrical_XXX.dds), and a designer/developer can properly assign them within the assets.

You should avoid overwriting existing textures because many of them are used in several different assets using verried UVW coordinates, so you get weird results in unpredictable places!

[A4R91N]

The thing is, there are only a few of these prop textures that are used in multiple places at the same time. Making a new texture isn't really the problem, it's the way the textures are applied on the models which is the issue. Some of them look pretty terrible, with textures disproportionally stretched or enlarged in certain areas.

The best solution IMO would be to take all these props I made custom textures for and re-apply the textures on them the proper way. However, I understand that it's too much to ask for, given how small the dev team is.

In any case Raap If you would like I could make some custom textures for the tunnels under the Soviet base. But I'd need to know what generally should be there.

[Raap]

What exists there right now is fine. The UVW coordinates on these meshes were set up with the old, unedited textures in mind. 

You cannot really go about and edit existing texture files, it causes unpredictable problems. You have to make new ones and then properly apply them on the assets - I know you cannot do that part yourself however.

There is no file limit or anything. The only thing another texture does is increase the download size, but in 2017 that is not a problem (if it is, I'm sorry but the rest of the world moved on!).

To explain a little why UVW is applied differently all the time, it's mainly due to different artists having different styles, and also back in 1977 when those buildings were created, the concept of stretched textures was acceptable. Nowadays we use more strict format ratios (for example any 1024x1024 tilable terrain material is applied at 5.0 x 5.0 x 5.0. Exceptions always exist however on a case-by-case basis, for example when a material is supposed to perfectly fit the scale of a mesh, or when more manual UVW's are applied such as when drawing on surfaces, or up-scaling for level backdrops.

So no, what you're seeing now is normal, and the way to work with it is to create new files and applying them in 3DS... This is also the only way to remove outdated stretching.

Edited May 25, 2017 by Raap

[Raptor29aa]

I like the text as is. It has a curtain Easter egg manner of hiding in plain site. Only those who have a high attention to detail would notice.

it reminds me of the fun stuff I found in APB's EULA

Edited May 29, 2017 by Raptor29aa