The ai Frontier - My ups and downs

[ai]

AI- why are there two images of the flag in your UV map?

I have two planes, one from the 'front' another from the 'back'. So that the Nexuiz character always will be in the correct manner, with other words, not mirrored.

[torus]

Seems like a waste of polygons to me. You could just make the flag a separate object with a separate shader which is viewable from both sides.

[ai]

I have no idea how to do that so. This is much easier, plus, not so many more polys either +32 tris.

[ai]

Btw, have anyone an idea what to do with colors/textures that would change color depending on the team? For instance, how do I setup the red and blue flag and the lasers. Should they use a separate .tga for the color of the flag or should I create two different set of models?

I read that they use the pants and shirts color but don't know how it's worked out technically. I.e. if the flag and the lasers should be included in the UV texturing process or a separate file.

And to get up to speed: I've made a little more on the texture:



EDiT:
Two more screens of the progress:



If you've got any suggestions then I'm willing to hear what you have to say. Otherwise I'll just make something till I'm satisfied.

EDIT 2:
I've actually changed position of those blue lights. Instead of being above those triangle thingies it's now between them. Looks better that way, and too small of a change to actually post an image. You'll have to use your imagination for that.

[ai]

Ok, so I think I'm as good as done with the texturing process of the diffuse colors for the flag. Unless anyone have any other suggestions they want to throw in here or if I see something I wanna change, but this is pretty much the final one.

I'm going to start off with showing you the actual unwrapped texture, then below is are some screens of the complete flag.
There are no glows, bumps, normal maps and such yet and didn't want to add any from Maya as the actual ingame result might differ. But it still gives a good representation of how the flag looks like.

I have now questions on how to break this unwrapped texture into different categories, so that certain parts of the flag gets the color of the team, such as the cloth and some lights. Or do I just need to change the colors to red/blue and have different models altogether?
Any help with this process and how to actually export this model with the texture is greatly appreciated, I know nothing about that, I'm just a 3D guy after all.

Enough talk, down to the pictures:

Unwrapped texture:


Flag pics:

[C.Brutail]

Iirc there are flags for both red and blue, so simply duplicate the model and the textures.
And in case you want animated textures too, you'll need to re-UV map the model, to be able to use different textures/shaders for different parts.
Eg. a glowy, 50% transparent animated shader with 4-5 frames would be cool for the laser legs.

[ai]

Update, I'm going to describe my steps on what I did and how I did it to anyone who might be curious:

Ok, so I experimented with exportation to an .smd. Looked bleak at first, but I didn't give up. I just tried a normal export once the texture has been applied on the model in Maya but that didn't work and have me a gray model.
However, I opened some files and changed some stuff in them, but I don't think they had anything to do with anything. What I did instead was skimming through Milkshape and on the 'Materials' tab, below the two sliders is actually the path to the texture. So I loaded the texture I wanted to use there and then right-clicking in the 3D view and choose 'Textured' (almost at the top) I could see the texture on my model.

So afterwards I created a .qc file but I had to change the path to the texture and model inside it. I used the Nexuiz path, meaning where it says '$model' I changed that path to: 'models/ctf/flag_blue.md3'
I'm using the 'flag_blue' as it is hard coded by the engine and I don't want to compile my own.
I did the same thing where it says '$skin', there I changed the path to: 'textures/nexFlag_blue_diffuse.tga'

Then, after changing these settings in the .qc-file I exported the model to a .m3. Note, Milkshape will need you to name the .qc-file exactly like the model you're exporting to. With other words my .qc-file had to be named 'flag_blue.qc' if I wanted to export the blue flag.
Once that got exported I just simply placed the model in the Nexuiz folder (described above) and same thing with the texture. And viola, it worked. I didn't actually believe it to work so well so quickly.

Now down to the goodies:











Next up I suppose will be animations and whatnot.

[Alien]

Standalone flags of course look nice, but, imo, they are too big/static when attached to the player (looks unatural), eg. first screenshot/

Flags are great, but ai could post his screenshots in 90 fov. That would be even better

[Dokujisan]

I agree with Alien. The flag looks ok on the ground, but it looks bulky when carried by a player.

[ai]

Here's with fov 90. And two with chase_active 1
Yeah ok, it looks big when carried by a player. So how would one counter that? What are you suggesting?