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[R-DEV]Rhino wrote:Wilkinson asked me if I would post this back into the public forums since the Canadian Forces community faction forum had been archived so here it is for anyone who wants to learn from it.

Right Wilkinson taking a look at your export now.

You need to assign a Alpha material to these bits so the cut out holes are see though.


These side racks also look like they are meant to have an alpha material assigned to them...


should assign a ENVmap material to the wing mirror if you aint already done so, can only tell ingame if you have.


Dose this shininess look right to you? Either the spec map is bad on the texture or more likley you need to assign the material with the ColormapGloss technique.


Also why do you have all these exterior faces for your gemo0, lod1? If your going to have 2 lods for gemo0, one for the outside and the other for the inside, the inside one should have nothing on the outside. You either put everything into one lod, or separate them fully. I would put both the interior and exterior bits both into lod0 myself as its simpler on the code.


Also looks to me like you have not coded the LOD distances, look like default values to me. LOD1 at 50m? 25m sounds like a better value. The trick is to fly back and forth from your model and get the lowest distance where you can't notice the lod switch from. The sooner you switch the LOD the better it is for performance but switch it too soon and its going to look crappy. Some good values from what I can see look to be 25m, 50m and 150m.

On LOD2 all your right hand wheels have there faces flipped... Invert there normals to fix this.. did you check the lods after exporting?


When you fire the main cannon, the cannon dose not bounce back with each round. If you check other APCs etc you will find the cannon flys back each time it fires a round. Look into fixing it as at the moment your cannon looks kinda artificial with it not absorbing the shell. In fact when you switch to heat your cannon dose bounce back, just not in AP, look into getting it on both.

Missing face here when your turret turns round, sure your turret is in the correct place? If it is dont worry too much about it, maybe cap the bottom of the turret and give it a quick UV onto some dark patch.


Are the guys in the back huddled up enough?



Onto your cols, your col0 looks almost like a clone of your lod0, with a few small details removed. Really you need to remove much more than this off of col0, there is lots that you dont need and really the simpler the col the better.


On col0, what is important on it is things that are going to affect gameplay, anything else is just for decoration when it gets hit. So the things that are mainly going to affect gameplay are the large bits that bullets are easily going to hit and things that are not near anything else that would be hit by the same bullet. So really all the small meaningless objects need to either go or be optimized. Here is some pics to show what you can remove etc. Red = remove, green = will go into later/optimize.





Also this col bit round your turret on col0 looks like its scale has been bumped up... Also if you look at your turret, all your turret col0 is slightly offset... most likley due to the whole thing being a little bit scaled up slightly, thou that turret bit at the front a lot.





With your front head lamps you can optimize them more some what, can remove that bit on the top, collapse some of the bits on the back etc. Most importantly is thou the material you have assigned to the front of the head lamp is currently metal thin.. You should really add a glass material to glass bits on your vehicle as it looks really awesome when bits of materiel get hit and the correct sound and effect comes off of them. It costs really no extra polys to do this, all you need to do is select all faces which have mostly glass on them and give them a glass material. You should do this to everything that has glass on it.


Such as the wing mirrors:


And view port holes like this one, which also could have it's inside faces optimizing quite a bit.


Now with this bit here you can optimize this some what and again, you can add glass to the view port holes. I would optimize this by target welding the inner bits of the viewport holes out onto the outside, getting rid of all the faces required to make the dip and no one will hardly notice that the bullet impacts a few secs before the glass but more importantly, this optimizing dose not affect gameplay.


These side cage bits really need a metal thing material, doesn't look like heavy armour to me
and there is a viewport there that needs the glass material aswell


Now with these viewport holes with the round back, the round back doesn't need to be so round on the col mesh, target weld and collapse some bits to make it less round but still keep the same profile near enough.



Think that's col0 pretty much covered, col1 now. Looking pretty good to me, nice, simple and clean, no issues that I can see.


col2 is also looking good, again nice simple and clean thou could have a little optimization on the centre bit where it has some verts that dont look like they need to be there but nothing huge.




Other than that looks good, clean up thous issues then we can go from there

Right Wilkinson, this is far from finished... Finish this before you start think of moving onto other stuff. If you want to become a dev we really do not appreciate stuff that is 1/2 done then called finished and epically in the exporting department.

First of all, you need to export this to: \objects\Vehicles\Land\cf_apc_lav3\ and not ca_apc_laviii

next your "ca_apc_laviii_MG_Gunner_m249elcan", what's a stationary weapon doing in the vehicle folder? it should be in "\objects\Weapons\stationary\" with all the other MGs that go on vehicles etc like the M2HB, QJC-88 etc. IT should also not be called "ca_apc_laviii_MG_Gunner_m249elcan", instead it should be something along the lines of "gpmg_m249_elcan" but there is no point what so ever of making this when you dont even have the weapon model...

Moving on, looking in the conceal when I load your LAV-III I find missing texture warnings, looking in your bundlemesh file, what the hell are these doing here? For a start what dose the BTR-60 have anything to do with the LAV-III and why is it looking in the full path directory into a mod which 99.9999% of users wont even have?
This will make basically every player apart from maybe you and 1 or 2 other people crash when loading it up ingame, let alone using textures on this that dont need to be there?

When looking though your max scene I can't find the exact bit this texture is applied too but my guess is that its applied to one of your wheel rotational bundles that are simple planes that you have not even converted to a editable mesh/poly.... These need to be made into editable mesh/poly before export. I also found some UV modifiers on some of your bits like the turret that where not collapsed, need to collapse these... I also multirezed all your dummy planes so they use 1/2 the tris they currently do, but in future you should try and hide them more, your engine one is like sticking out of the bottom of the LAV, should be inside it.

The simplest soultion to get rid of this texture error is to simply select all your geoms apart from your cols and apply your only material for them, since you aint setup multiple materials on your meshes yet you are lucky you can do this...

Now when I turn the physics on in the editor this is what happens...


not good....

now with your LOD3 wheels that I mentioned in the last set of feedback, still not been fixed. I know I didn't say which side the wheels where bugged on but if you looked at it yourself before you tried to fix it you would have seen that it was only the wheels on the left side that had this problem... The problem you have here is you applied the normal flip faces to wheels on both sides, so you fixed the wheels on the left side of the APC, but then screwed up the wheels on the right side of the APC...

So if you delete the normal modifier on the reels on the right side and also collapse the modifiers for the wheels on the left side, all turns out fine.


Keep in mind this stuff can all be avoided by simply not using the normal mirror tool since this is what causes this sh*t to happen.
So dont use the mirror tool pointed out with the red arrow, instead use the Mirror modifier pointed out with the green arrow, since when you use the red arrow mirror tool, it always causes this shit to happen after export, even if it looks fine in MAX, when it gets into BF2 the faces are always flipped.



Now with the Alpha stuff I mentioned, all you need to do to apply this is to crate a new BF2BunldledMesh material, set it up to use lav3_c.dds and lav3_b.dds or w/e textures the alpha face uses, then you simply name the material something like "LAV3||Alpha", like so:

Your normal "ColorMapGloss" material is still in the scene and is still applied to the model.
Now all you need to do is select all the faces with alpha, I'm just going to do this grid bit round the

Then all you need to do is go back into your material window, and with your bits selected and with your correct material (in this case the Alpha one), you just push the button "Assign Material To Selection" and then that material is applied and you have 2 materials on one model, just defined to different faces.

If you use a Multi-Sub object like you have in this case (and I only use when I run out of material space, I always keep my materials separate otherwise) that "Assign Material To Selection" button dose not work very well... instead what you need to do is to go up into your main multi/sub-object material bit, then drag and drop the correct material onto your selection which can lead to you dragging and dropping it onto the wrong bit so I really do not like this...
But now my material is applied to the selection and if I show the normal texture on the alpha, you can see where the material is applied:

Now to just do this for all faces that need Alpha materials and any other faces that need any other materials on them too. I'm also going to make a "EnvMapColormapGloss" material for all the reflective surfaces like the wing mirrors, the glass ports etc and assign it to all of them, like these bits:

You wont see the EnvMap working in the editor since the editor doesn't have EnvMaps, you have to load it up ingame to see the EnvMap effects but basically it reflects the surroundings off the surfaces the Env material is applied to.

Back to the alpha, now with the Alpha material applied to it, it still wont work on its own like it is since the texture isn't setup correctly... If we look at the alpha channel on the normal map, we can see its offset from where it is meant to be... If you have the original alpha file, you dont do a strait "copy and paste" since then this stuff happens. Do a duplicate layer and then it ends up in the right place. If not, the only way to fix it is to manually move it and hope it ends up in the right place...

The other thing is that the Opacity layer is meant to be in the Diffuse Alpha channel (the colour/_c) alpha channel and the spec map is meant to be in the Normal (bump/_b) alpha channel so once its moved to the correct place, duplicate the spec map out of the diffuse alpha into a new file, duplicate the alpha layer into the diffuse alpha layer then duplicate the spec map out of the new file into the normal alpha layer.
Now after you have done this the model will most likley turn really shiny since your normal material is at the moment setup with "ColormapGloss" which tells it to use the spec map off the diffuse(_c) texture where ours is now on the normal(_b) texture so if we just rename it to have a "blank shader technique", ie, something like "LAV-3" then it will use the spec map off the normal(_b)'s alpha
With the end result then being what we want (ignore the warnings)


Now all that needs to be done is for these materials to be applied to each alpha that needs them on the right parts.

Moving on to your interior, you still aint changed anything on my last feedback, mainly this part with why you have 2 LODs for each bit, if your going to have 2 different lods, use them well but I would have both bits in the same LOD.

Also why do you have all these exterior faces for your gemo0, lod1? If your going to have 2 lods for gemo0, one for the outside and the other for the inside, the inside one should have nothing on the outside. You either put everything into one lod, or separate them fully. I would put both the interior and exterior bits both into lod0 myself as its simpler on the code.

now with the shininess of the inside, this is because the interior texture dose not have a spec map in any of the textures, thou really you need a spec map into your normal(_b) texture and move the transparency texture into your diffuse(_c) texture. Also need to note that since this dose have a transparency texture, you do need to set parts of this model like the wire grill on the outside up with the alpha material like you did on the back

So ye I'm just moving the Opacity into the diffuse(_c) alpha and when I'm saving this, because this is an interior texture I'm going to save it with NO MIPMAPS! this helps save lots of space and also makes the texture look better since the mipmaps are not needed here. If this was a 3p texture where the player could get closer or further from it, mipmaps are VERY important but with a 1p thing like this, mipmaps are not needed since the player isn't going anywhere, he is either seeing the texture or he's not, simple as that

Now for the spec map, I'm just going to make a really temp one off the diffuse texture but really need to get the real spec map or to get Kaijleor to make one if he hasn't got one.

Also the normal map is basically blank... Need to get one off him or we need to look into removing the normal map but that will have an affect on how we setup the textures if we are getting rid of it. Again, save the normal map up with no mipmaps since its a 1p texture.

Also need to setup your interior shader technique as blank, so take off the "ColormapGloss" and just call it "Interior" or w/e so it uses the spec from the normal map.

So ye I've now setup this grid bit up with an Alpha material and you can't see much off a difference but it is there, so if there isn't going to be a normal map for this I would recommend removing the normal texture and the Opacity texture, getting a spec map and putting that into the diffuse texture and set the shader technique up with ColormapGloss.


and the rest of the interior with my temp spec map:




Right onto your col meshes, col0 first.

Looks like you have sorted out the scaling issues more or less on col0 and you have assigned some materials like glass etc to each bit but missed a bunch of them. Also looks like you aint done much optimizing like I suggested you should do on things like the headlamps etc.

First of all be really careful where you assign materials, you have assigned a glass material to part of the chassis here.


and this antenna thingy here:


and you aint assigned glass to these port holes here. You can also optimize them as I suggested in my last set of feedback.


nor to this one, and shouldn't the main body of it not be using metal thin?


and all these ones round this port hole:


Also you have taken this fuel can off the col mesh, would have it on its pretty big:


and this antenna base should also be on the col, its pretty big and sticks out, not the poll bit that's too small but the block base should be.


and this bit with the bolts on should be, the bits next to it should be off like you have done but that big bit sticks out a fair way etc.


and the MG stand seems to not have a col?


and ye there is a load more stuff that you can optimize on your col0 as per my last set of feedback you really need to look at. The cols is one of the most resource demanding things about and bad cols can really have a huge impact on performance especially on the server essentially making every player lag so it is very important they are optimized as much as they can be.



col1 now, your turret col's scale looks to be off...

other than that looks fine.



col2, looks fine other than again, your turret col's scale is off...




And I think that's about it, done quite a lot to the model but left you a lot to do with the cols etc so go though the feedback and my last set of feedback again since it looks like you missed a load of it and fix w/e needs to be fixed still. One big thing that you need to still do which I'm not going to do for you is rename all the prefixes on all the objects from "ca_apc_laviii2" to "cf_apc_lav3".

I'll zip the files up and PM them to you.

Wilkinson asked me if I would post this back into the public forums since the Canadian Forces community faction forum had been archived so here it is for anyone who wants to learn from it.

Great tut for Alphas.

Appericiate it Rhino.
Not to finish the HK Exports after I get Win XP Back D: