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[airflamesred]

From what I see John, Games people seem to do ‎  UVs then pack sensibly and magic up a texture that fits or can be shrunk to size. Looking around the net there are small images for free, so I guess you pay for quality from that method.
These new UV tools are really working out great, and thats the two from select menu. (The UV live thing had to go - kept crashing) Thiough I'm a bit confused as, did these not come as a single unit? They really are saving tons of time for me, esprcially with the higher poly stuff.
Anyway, just an incite: with the paint panel open / file / effect and I add fractal - ‎  about 6 or 7 times. Different colours, amount etc, then maybe noise, more fractals. Its quite difficult to get photo realistic without PSP or photoshop and images, but that not what I'm after.
So the rivets for example I just used a dark grey, cricled around it, then, with a smaller brush painted the fake specular on top. Normally I would paint this in the bump channel as well but using this as my specular.The alpha channel is transparency only so I tend to steer clear.The bump can be added later; ie spec done load a new grey and paint the bump.
Now I've got better control of the UVs this is gonna be my method, more or less.
I have some png images I made which I load via the 'figure' tab which would be very difficult to paint by hand, and things like text are difficult but I'm trying to get an artistic angle on it (even if its the 'pot luck' of fractals)
I've made a note with the measurements - the chair was confusing me.

[Verdite]

Just thought i'd butt in here, and add that with any type of texture work for an item that would or could be symmetrical, half the full model's texture could be used, and then once mapped to the (ideally) halved model, you can then mirror the model... So essentially if you have a 256x256 texture with only half of the blade mapped to it (and stretched as far as the bounds would allow) you can essentially create a 512x512 texture resolution with one texture. Just my input. Useful for custom enemies too. ‎ 

[HwitVlf]

From what I see John, Games people seem to do ‎  UVs then pack sensibly and magic up a texture that fits or can be shrunk to size. These new UV tools are really working out great, and thats the two from select menu. (The UV live thing had to go - kept crashing) Thiough I'm a bit confused as, did these not come as a single unit? They really are saving tons of time for me, esprcially with the higher poly stuff.

I'll have to try that UV method. I used to build plastic model kits and paint and 'weather' them by hand, so I have some knowledge about shading techniques, but it's quite different to pull it off in a digital format.

I think those 3 UV tools were made by the same guy, the 'Live' one just saves pinned vertices in memory which causes crashes sometimes. I noticed Keynote's maker has an LSMC (Lithuanian State Merchant Corps?) unwrapper plugin on his site. It might be worth trying.

[airflamesred]

And what the Lithuanians don't know about UVs ain't worth knowing!

[HwitVlf]

Added a SND converter. Mainly for converting SoM SND files to playable WAV format and back to easily hear what they sound like. Posting it incase anyone is working on SND effect files right now. Might work for other WAV files ‎  > SND. Best luck with non-compressed mono, 16bit, WAVs. Use with care (backup sounds first etc).

[Verdite]

This sound converter is great, but do i need to hex edit anything to make it show up in the system editor?

[HwitVlf]

No, you just have to open sound.dat (in 'data\sound\se') in Notepad and enter the new SND's name after a comma on an empty line. So if your new sound is a "deathcry" you would name the file 0500.SND and type "deathcry' after the 500, in the sound.dat.

Of course, the main benefit will be when we can easily add/change enemy sounds. I just finished deciphering Enemy PRFs yesterday so that point may not be too far off. The PRF has some really cool spell customization features. Unfortunately, cpgen still isn't handling CPs right so some features (multiple spells and flame) may not be available in custom models till Mick works out the bugs.

[Verdite]

Thats great news :)

Thanks alot for this wolf!

By the way i just tested this and the file is cut short by about 2 seconds. Is that normal?

[HwitVlf]

Found a math error that was making a problem- ‎  sorry. New version here.

I mainly made this for playing SoM's SND files so it isn't very tolerant of other different WAV formats. I can try to broaden it in the future, but for now, WAVs need to be in ‎  non-compressed 16bit/Mono/11KHz. The 'cut short' problem you were having Ben is probably because your source WAV was 22KHz.

Switch Sound is a very good tool that can convert your sounds to the needed WAV format.

[Verdite]

I use Audacity for all my audio needs - its free and has a long list of modifiers.

Made a really strange discovery. I changed my audio format to as stated, and by doing so my audio file - being a noise recorded from bats, sounded like a chimpanzee's laughter.