PUBLIC ALPHA OF BMD1

So here you go peeps. Happy Holidays! I am proud to present the BMD1 public alpha.

>>GRAB IT HERE<<

This addon is NOT meant to function as nor does it represent the quality of the finished product. It is only meant to test out the basic workings and provide the player with something to mess around with during the holidays.

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INSTALLATION
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To install this addon please put the SA_BMD_PACK_1.pbo in the \Addons\ folder of your Armed Assault installation. If you would like to use it with a MOD that is already installed on your computer then put this pbo in the @MODNAME\Addons\ folder.
After a successful installation the addon should appear in the editor under OPFOR>VDV VEHICLES>BMD 1.

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KNOWN ISSUES
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There are a number of known issues with the current version:
- The AT3 proxy does not disappear after being fired. Neither does it when all ammo has been depleted.
- Gunner optics are not correct.
- No damage textures as a proper damage model is yet to be developed.
- No interior textures as they are yet to be done.
- Not binarized.
- Not signed.
Please do not report these issues.

COPYRIGHTS

The contents of this package are distributed openly and free of charge for the purpose of education. You are welcome to look and dismantle it as you see fit. However, reproduction and release of any of the content contained in this addon without the permission of the author is prohibited. Armed Assault is a trademark of Bohemia Interactive.

DISCLAIMER

This addon is provided as is and the author is not responsible for any damage it may cause to your Armed Assault installation or your computer.

BIG THANKS TO

- Jarek “TOPAS” – for his valuable texturing tips.
- Vilas – for answering a few oxygen related questions.
- Uralaz – track texture.
-       Gedis - for invaluable info

Enjoy

Shootin' with the PROJECT

Topas, a very talented texturer and action photographer took these pictures for me. One of them features a peek into Project '85. Oh btw, did I mention that the BMD will be featured there? We're pretty busy with all sorts of stuff but I have not forgotten this baby :).

The shots have been color corrected a bit. A bit on the progress: right now I have added the correct shadows and geometry lods. I have also fitted the AT3 rocket (missing form the shots as I still have some problems with it). Optimizing the resolution lods right now and getting ready to start on the interior. Oh yeh and got the dampers and all the other animations working ok.

Thats it for now!

Cheers

TEXTURING HOW-TO RELEASED!

I'm proud to release my texturing tutorial. This 'how-to' will explain my texturing workflow abit with some techniques I use. Durring the tutorial I will be making normal, color and specular map for a tank armor plate.

You can grab the file here. It is a PDF file of about 3MB.

Hope its usefull to somebody!

Regards,

Alex

Redux

Time for a little update :),

After a bit of pondering I decided that I really wasn't satisfied with the texturing that I did previously so I sat down to re-do it. And thanks to some tips here and there I think i got it better this time :). Besides the old textures were way too dark according to alot of people. So, here's the result:

Hope you people like what you see ( ignore the number alpha errors :)) Still loads to do as usual but getting the hang back of 02 including the blasted shadowLod.

Btw I am working on a comprehensive texturing tutorial which will cover all the techniques I used above like getting the specular and normal maps + setting up the basic rvmat. I would expect it to be done next weekend.

Cheers

GameOn

After just a bit too much swearing at O2, configging and the whole lot and banging my head about RVMATS I managed to get the thing in to the engine. Here's some proof:

If today is of any indication then this stage of the process is going to be painful. Need to figure out why I get weird specularity errors on some parts while not other; get the numbers in, change track textures and then move on to the rest of the LODs. Overall I'm very happy to see it in game finally and that on some parts of the model the normal and specular maps look fantastic.

I'm also working on writing some info on normal and specular map creation for ArmA, so stay tuned.

Ciao.

AbNormal Maps

Howdy folks!

Its been a while since I typed anything useful but then again uptill now I didnt feel like I had some substantial progress to show. However Im glad to report that between a heavy workload of my final year at university and the harsh realities of real life, I've been secretly dedicating some time to this project and here is what has become of it:

From the preview you can tell that the diffuse textures are almost done. Normal Mapping is also quite far although not there yet. No specular maps made yet and thats because Im planning to have this beast in game before i start on them so I can tweak the specular in the engine.

Few changes to the workflow: I decided to scrap Zbrush due to limitations of the low-poly topology. Also made a few miscalculations with the uv layout, but hey you learn from your mistakes right?

So whats next? Well, aside from finishing off the normal maps which by my estimation should take no more than a day of work (whenever that day will come), I need to setup O2, which by my further estimation should take few weeks to install ... :S. Can't wait to drive her around.

PS. Oh yeah, I know the tracks are missing.

Baking Cakes

First of all wanted to share that I finished uvmapping and rendering out all the Ambient Occlusion (except for wheels). Now that that's done I can move onto the nice part: sculpting and texturing :) Here are my labours:

Could have used more sampling but i think this will be enough.

Secondly I thought I'd share exactly the method I used to do it as it isnt that straight forward. This is a little step-by-step tutorial to help people improve their models and textures. N.B.: The object that receives the baked occlusion texture has to be ALREADY UVMapped so that the UV face coordinates DO NOT intersect. So the cube in this tutorial has a UVWUnwrap modifier on it and its uvw coordinates have been manipulated. Also this tutorial is for 3dsmax with MentalRay.
Here is the layout:

I usually like to assign a grey standard materials and change the wireframe color to black. Just personal preference. just make sure that the cube has a seperate material from the other objects:

Open up the Environment... dialog by pressing 8 on the keyboard or Render>Environment... . Change the "Ambient" Color to white:

Close the window and select the cube. Now open the "Render To Texture" dialog by pressing 0 (zero) or in the Render menu. Scroll down a little and click the "Add" button. A popup should ask you what you want to bake so choose "Ambient Occlusion (MR)". Probably a goot time to mention that you have to have MentalRay assigned as your primary renderer. Press "Add Element".

Choose a folder to save the file to and press "Render" and voila:


To get the picture exactly like my previous one, go back to the cube material and assign the texture you just saved to the diffuse map slot and turn its viewport visibility (blue/white box in the Material Editor).

But hang on there's more! You can tweak how the AO looks like in your bake...to a certain extent. You can choose the texture size. But more useful are the AO controls. In the next screengrab I increased the spread value to show what it does:

CLICK TO MAKE BIGGER

Essentially what it did was take the calculated shadow (or more correctly the samples) and started stretching them over the specified spread. A note on samples: the higher the sample value, the higher the cuality of the AO pass, but be ware...render times will suffer above 256 for large textures.

In the below screengrab you can see the effects of Max Distance value:

CLICK TO MAKE BIGGER

Basically it is the distance at which it will stop calculating the shadow from the contact edge. So the smaller the value the smaller the shadow (BUT not 0.0!! a value of null will mean there is no cutoff!). Basically you should tweak these values for best results according to your needs.

I hope that was clear :).

Cheers!

Ambient Oclussion amongst other things...

A little progress report. After a bit of tweaking with topology I think I got it a bit better then it was before, in terms of useability in ZBrush. The mesh is a bit cleaner but between optimization and all there are still quite a few triangles in the mesh (ZBrush hates triangles) but I think I will work out. Next I devided the mesh into seperate logical texture groups (see different colours on the figure below).


This gives you a head start on planning how many textures you going to have and how large. Here 3 texture sheets will be used + wheels. Then came the UVWMapping. In my opinion its the most unenjoyable thing out of the whole project but once it comes together you have a strange sence of satisfaction :). So far I just managed to unwrap the chasis (pink) and since it was the biggest one i think the bulk of the work is done. Tommorow the rest will be done too. Once I unwrapped it I just couldnt resist a little test:

As you can see the Ambient Occlusion baking went ok (pic shows viewport view with applied AO pass as texture, this is not a render). For those wondering: Ambient Occlusion refers to the fenomenon of omnidirectional light hitting the object and illuminating it evenly producing soft "contact" shadows. This effect is still not possible in games real-time so for now we just "bake" it into the texture. The pass comes out as a monochrome image overlayed over the UVs of the mesh. As illustrated below, if you then put it on top of your base colour or texture in Multiply mode it will create the illusion that there is a shadow there. Opacity is used to control it. The Texture Baking feature of 3dsmax is by nomeans perfect and seam errors will be corrected in post-production in photoshop.

By no means does this mean the texture is finished but it gives that extra push to photo realism. AO is one thing that alot of modders miss.

Will show complete AO pass by Saturday hopefully.

The Flow

Here wanted to outline the planned project pipeline so that you could understand how I intend to work. Having worked on many commercial projects I know that having a plan is always useful. This workflow is for modeling/texturing only for now:

Hope it's clear.

BMD-1

I always wanted to return to game modding as I always beleived it was the purest form of CG art as it allows you to share your work on a completely different level then say just renders which I have spent the last two years being busy with. A couple of days this came to mind. I decided to make a series of addons for ArmA connected with the VDV (Russian Airborne troops). For now I will focus only on armour and then who knows maybe the air transports and support stuff. For the first batch I'm planning to make the BMD series: 1, 2,3 and 4 and some modifications like the BTRD.

At first I was thinking of keeping this quiet until release, however keeping a dev journal seemed like a much better idea as it allows people to follow the progress and allows me to share some of my techniques. I hope to share some tips and tricks along the way. Well for now have a look:

I have thought of this for quite some time and then 2 days ago finally decided to sit down and do something about it. So here it is: the beginning of the first chapter of ArmA VDV. The BMD-1. LOD 0 exterior model completed with the exception of tracks and wheel finalization which will be done in Oxygen. So far pretty happy with it. After all, after a year of only high-poly modeling it was quite challenging working on game content again with polys in mind.

Next up the unwrapping and then off to normal mapping on the menu. Hopefully I can take it over into ZBrush as that would make it a hell of a lot easier, however it is yet to be seen how it will handle smoothing. In eaither case, as this is a dev blog I will try to make sure I update it as soon as I have some developments.

MODELING DETAILS

The model was done using the simplest poly-modeling techniques, with some details added as splines and primitives. Basically alot of cutting/extruding. To make my life easier I first modeled one half of the body and then flipped the symetry to start modeling the details that make this one of the most interesting personel carrier.

Alot of details have been left for textures and normal maps but there were alot of things I wanted to represnt by geometry.