I tried to make damage states [... ]but with yours tutorial i would be able to work it out
Happy to hear that
And i am hoping to see more damaged units soon
If you have any question, or something is not presented in a clean manner in the tutorial, just ask, i will try to explain better.
-if i have stack of units my second,third, etc. are red in places where shoould be teamcoloured - i used setup like in sharicks screenshots (or firaxis pretorian or chokonu have). - probably it's fault of this teamcolour.bmp
-using tank as my base for texture (it doesn't contain teamcolour.bmp) i noticed that my unit is dissapearing for the moment - the team colour works fine, the glow shines, but units fade in and fade out like plane
I had similar problems underway, not exactly the same however. I strongly suspect, that this is caused, by incomplete assignment of animation sequences (E.g. the unit changes to a wrong state/animation loop, because a needed sequence is missed/misreferenced)
I did not actually pinpointed the cause, but all this went away, as soon as the animation set was complete.
At least i hope it went away - have you tried my Akula Sub ? I not have any problems with it, but who know's graphicals problems tend to be Hardware/Driver dependant on occasions.
Could you give me a hint in this matter or even expand tutorial - it would be great
I made a reference sheet regarding the settings for FX and non-FX material both having team color. I might extend the tutorial later, after i got more exprience (i.e. more people tested my units and not had any problems, so i can be sure the stuff does actually always work as expected).
What i do is basycly this:
1) Make a NonShader Version of the material first.
Use the settings in the reference sheet below.
TCiv4MechNonShader with only the
Detail (Main Texture) Map and the
Decal (Damage) Map.
Dont forget to click "Apply" after changing the custom shader.
If you are not doing damage, use a map having all black alpha chanel for decal. Or try putting your Main Texture in the Decall slot instead of Detail, like it is done in Praetorina/Chukonu.
Leaving the Decal slot empty with Mechanic Units (i.e. Units that have damage states) allways caused some kind of weird problem for me.
2) Drag&Drop your maps in separate Meterial Editor slots and choose "Instance".
3) Do all the animating, tweaking, damage and export the NonShader version first. It will have team color, wich you will see in NifViewer as blue areas on the model.
If everything went right you can move on to the FX version.
4) Make a new Civ4 material.
Choose
TCiv4MechShaderGloss as custom shader, then click Apply. Make sure Viewer and Export Technique are set to "
Best Avaiable for Hardware"
5) Drag and drop your
Detail and
Decal maps to the according slots, and Choose "Instance" (it is important you use actually the same map, not just a copy, since you have animated it for damage.)
6) Add a
Gloss and a
Glow map, if you have them. If using Civ4's "Enviroment_FX_Whatever.dds" you need a copy of it in your working folder for export, but you not need to deliver it with your unit - it comes from the shared art folder.
Assign the new material to your model and export the FX version.
If you want to deliver both the Normal and the FX version with your unit, Export the NonFX first, copy the nif and the animations into another folder, then export the FX version using the same name. (This, to prevent the animations to be referenced to a renamed version...). Now rename the .nif to _FX.nif and add it to the folder, where you already have put the non FX nif and the animations. This way both the FX and the normal Nif will use the same animations.
This should do it, at least it does for me.
The only open qeustions i have for now, are about non mechanical units. Those i did not figured out yet. (I suspect, that we could just export them using the same settings like with mechanical ones, but i did not tired it out yet)
And here are the settings i used for materials at one glance.
