Things we can do before the game is released

[Quentin Fortune]

I made bump maps for some of Oom's models and it looked quite well. Maybe you ask him for some further advice.

(Hlaalu model thread)

Have a look at this thread, especially at this door

The pattern effect is completely made by the bumpmap, for the metal texture is plain ... and plane.

Hope this helped a bit.

Greetings

Quentin

[Razorwing]

I've stumbled over that page too, and it really does make bump-mapping sound like rocket science. It's not. A bumpmap is a grayscale picture where the whiter the shade, the longer a viewer will think it protrudes. There are some good free bumpmap examples at 3D Millennium which one can play around with and see what effects they give. Quentin does fantastic bump- and specular maps, like on this one for example. =)

Specular maps works the same, except there the whiter the shade the more it will shine.

Opacity maps are used a lot in these circumstances too, and Bethesda uses them all the time in Morrowind. They only use two colors, black and white. Black becomes invisible, white becomes visible, and so you can make a model look like it's more advanced than it really is. I did that on my Roweed, which you can download and check out in Max if you're interested about opacity maps.

[Waffleman]

thanks for the pointers guys. Im sure it'll help me out with creating some nice texture

Now im sure between Razorwing and Quentin that one of you will have a suggestion of a good program to unfold the 3d models out in. Before when ive done textures they were all already done. I tried in a program called DeepUV but am not really sure what to do from there, It appears that they are unfolded but honestly im kinda lost, lol. Anyways I heard it was easier in this program than trying to do it in studio max but that doesnt really help any since im 95% clueless...
thanks

[Razorwing]

Waffleman: I haven't really gotten into unfolding meshes for texturing purposes, I just slap tileable textures on the stuff I work on. I would imagine setting it up in 3D Studio Max would be best though, as my hunch is the mesh has to be mapped exactly according to the unfolded texture.