(Vehicle) Stryker MGS - M1128 Mobile Gun System

[Hokunin]

Maybe rotate some wheels a bit to avoid wheels identical texture to stand out so much, to break the pattern. If left like that it would be imported like that.

[LangMaster]

Maybe rotate some wheels a bit to avoid wheels identical texture to stand out so much, to break the pattern. If left like that it would be imported like that.

Oh yeah i had that in mind aswell. But i feel like i am far from this being imported, i have some skills with pr but i never touched importing vehicles yet so i dunno.

[Mats391]

I removed the AC and changed the shield, of course i have both versions saved modern and the old.
and gave wheels some love.
i've seen some pictures of this vehicle being used with camo nets, what is the reason that we don't have them on vehicles in pr?
I would like to make the rest of stryker family like the ATGM version but that one uses the in game body so i can just do the turret, i would like to try and make the M SHORAD version though that one was not in any action yet. I will definitely make a cage for the 50cal version that is already in game so it's complete.

Camo nets can be done, but they should be separate from main mesh. They need skinning and should probably be done as skinnedmesh. I think main reason they arent used in game is that no one bother doing them

As for more versions, that would always be nice. Regarding versions using normal hull, yours seems to be higher quality. So if its doable could think about remaking the normal hull? Either way, lets focus on getting one vehicle done before starting off new ones and potentially repeating issues that only get spotted once vehicle is exported.

[Rhino]

Nice work. One thing that I think would be worth doing is on your side racks that are holding a few fuel cans, right now they have just some black holes painted on them that really don't work very well at faking what I'm guessing are meant to be cut out holes?

I would really suggest you do these with using a transparent "Alpha" material, at least for the first LOD or two, then it can be replaced with a non-transparent texture later to help performance.

There are two ways I would suggest going about this here.

The first is making an "Opacity" texture sheet that holds all/any textures for the object on one, efficiently packed sheet. The downside of this is it is another material to load but much better than adding an extra alpha channel to the whole of your main material, effectively doubling the memory usage, when only a small portion of it is being used for transparent textures.
This is what I did when I optimised the Lynx Helictoper series which was wasting lots of memory before: https://www.realitymod.com/forum/showth ... ost2194707

Spoiler for Lynx:

...the main thing required to make it happen for the Lynx was simply moving the opacity map off the main sheet and onto its own unique sheet, so the diffuse could be saved to DXT1 and upped without having double the memory usage from being saved in DXT5 with an alpha channel for the opacity map, which was most unused. This was the old opacity map / _c.dds texture:



Compared to the new one (most of it is the glass)

Also what I did with the Waffle / Mud Ladder on the Panhard

Spoiler for Waffle:

(8 different maps, Top Left to Bottom Right: 4 Diffuse, Opacity, Specular, Normal, UV)

The second method, which doesn't get quite as good results, but can only be used for fully opaque or fully transparent, transparency, with nothing in-between (ie, not for glass etc which is semi-transparent), then you can designate any "100% Black" parts of your texture that material is assigned to as fully transparent, anything else will be fully opaque. This is quite a good method for saving memory as you do not need a dedicated Opacity Map / Alpha Channel in the texture, so it is the more memory efficient method, but the results aren't as good as you get with a proper Opacity Map but probably good enough for your needs and much better than what you have now. The main big advantage here is you don't need to re-map the textures to their own sheet to avoid wasting memory. The biggest disadvantage here is you can't have a normal map applied to this material/part of the vehicle and you also need the spec map saved to the alpha channel of the colour texture.
https://www.realitymod.com/forum/showth ... p?t=140159

Spoiler for Alpha_TestColorMapGloss - withOUT "*_b.dds":

Alpha_TestColorMapGloss - withOUT "*_b.dds"
This Shader Technique, withOUT it loading a "*_b.dds" Normal Map, loads its opacity from the RGB channels of the "*_c.dds" texture. To be more specific, it looks for any areas on the texture that is on the faces of the material that have this material applied to it, for any 100% black areas and anything that is 100% black (or close to it), becomes fully transplant, where anything that has any other colour on it, is fully opaque. At the same time it loads the Spec Map from the "*_c.dds" Alpha channel. This material is really good for saving on texture memory since you do not need any specialised Opacity Map and its simply just integrated into the main Diffuse/Colour texture. On the down side however, you naturally can't have any Normal maps but that might not be so much of a big deal to have this material simply not load them even if the rest of your model loads a DXT1 normal map.
One simple example of this would be the Lee Enfield No.4 Rifle's Ammo Clip which has this type of material applied to it, to make the holes on its sides transparent, while saving it from having to potentially double its texture memory usage if it was to have its own specialised Opaque map, just for a few tiny holes.

BTW for the glass on the MG Shield, you can have your own custom texture for that as well which does allow you to do custom dirt on it etc but again, that should be mapped to a separate "opacity" sheet and not be part of any sheet without transparent parts on it. The other option is to use one of the generic glass textures such as the "\objects\vehicles\Common\textures\window_idf_c.dds" (a bunch of others in that folder too) which are most likely already loaded by other vehicles ingame so no extra memory usage etc than there is already and what I would recommend unless you need something custom and/or the existing ones really don't work.

[LangMaster]

Camo nets can be done, but they should be separate from main mesh. They need skinning and should probably be done as skinnedmesh. I think main reason they arent used in game is that no one bother doing them

As for more versions, that would always be nice. Regarding versions using normal hull, yours seems to be higher quality. So if its doable could think about remaking the normal hull? Either way, lets focus on getting one vehicle done before starting off new ones and potentially repeating issues that only get spotted once vehicle is exported.

I am sure i just have a higher resolution since i can down scale that whenever i want to in case of need. I started with 2k since i am sure you don't use anything larger for the game it self. Though the wheels and cage have 512x512
But yeah i will want to finish my vehicle first before moving onto something else.
And y'all gotta slow down a bit i don't even know what in the f am i doing my self.
The worst thing right now is that i don't have much experience exporting this into a game, you know i can make this vehicle look as nice as i want to in blender, i could make the vehicle even CGI ready, but of course i am limited by the tris and what can be used in the game it self. Right now i just use Texture with normal map and ambient oclusion, i suppose you can put ambient oclusion straight on texture to save resources.

[Rhino]

AO being part of the diffuse is the best way to do AO on the BF2 engine. There is the "Shadow Map" texture but it's not like PBR textures where it will affect how the thing is rendered other than making the diffuse darker so best to have the AO as part of the diffuse to save memory and you really want to keep the Shadow Map free for vehicles anyways as its used for the wreck texture being applied ontop.

Don't worry about exporting the asset, that will be handled by someone else, just needs to be ready for export is all and made in a way that the game can handle it.

[LangMaster]

I took a bit of a break, since i had slightly more open projects than i wanted to, so i finished the ai support for fields of kassel and i should slowly starting looking at the stryker again.

[LangMaster]

About that opacity, i know i used similar thing when i tried making scratches on turret, i made a edgewear opacity texture it was basically black and white, and i had 2 shaders, one for a color paint of green and then second for the metal under it which was a bit more shiny, it final result it looks absolutely amazing if you combine it with normal map, but it requires two different shaders for one model, which i am not sure is capable in the game it self, i am still not very experienced from what i can use in game or not.
I lost the screenshots of the turret edgewear i did but i used it on this example model i made aswell.

[LangMaster]

Alright, to those out there i wanna post some update on the vehicle, obviously i am a bit slow, but i think it will pay as i am trying to find as much things i can possibly upgrade my skills with. I used the opacity map and tried making a camoflague net which actually worked out perfectly and it should also be without a performance drop.


The wheels have been upgraded a bit with better AO and normal map.


Some colors may be off but everything will be corrected later on, i will for sure make weathering for every season woodland desert and winter. Sadly the vehicle was always using the woodland green color even in desert which means you will see sand color camoflague nets with bunch of sand dust over the dark green color making it a bit more blendy into the iraq kind of maps.


So far i am pretty close to finishing actually i am missing a specular map which will determinate glossyness on the vehicle, also i am missing the other diffuse textures for winter and desert maps. Then we will add antennas onto the vehicle aswell, but that will be later into the exporting.



As someone who has never done anything like this before, i see this as an absolute win for my self. It's absolutely amazing seeing all those pictures and the path i went through learning all the things.

[Mineral]

Awesome work!

[Mdx00]

will this be added in the game?

[LangMaster]

Yes, it will. You just need bit of patience.

[anantdeathhawk]

Looks very detailed, has substance.

[dcm]

How will this vehicle be classed? APC? IFV? Something completely new? Personally I see the 'Mobile Gun Vehicle' being an appropriate term or designation.

[Smol Shrum]

How will this vehicle be classed?

Probably a light tank, like AMX-10.