Hey hey again!
Up front, I'd just like to really express gratitude for all the positive feedback from the community and it genuinely makes me happy to see so many people excited about it. Tiberian Sun is such a dated game at this point but it holds a special place in my heart because of my dad. Seeing so many people resonating with this armor or just like it visually regardless of it's C&C relation has been pretty exciting! Plus, how can you not play a mission on Erata Prime and not think this atmosphere is perfect for C&C?
Why the update/condensed file structure?
I don't think these articles are needed but I'm enjoying documenting the process. 1.3.9 essentially is a revamp of the mod and hopefully makes file management much easier. Now instead of six files there's only two! After dissecting a mod from Ka1ser0 and checking the documentation within the tool itself, I set out to condense it so that a few things could be accomplished:
- Avoid any ability of multiple mods of the same armor could be applied
- Make it more clear what the user is selecting or enabling
- Allow the armor or helmet to be enabled/disabled to avoid issues with potentially other mods if desired
What does the manifest allow?
Setting up a manifest allows the user to not only select if they only want the armor or helmet itself, but to also be able to select what variant they'd like to use (or even use a separate variant for the helm uniquely, and a different one for the armor). I'm very much a 3D artist and this stuff is kind of beyond me, but the documentation within the tool and looking at another mod helped me understand the best way to go about this and was pretty simple. What excited me as well was the ability to create icons so I could display two things clearly:
- What armor or helmet the mod was replacing
- What variant of the mod was selected to avoid confusion between "var01" or "var02." In hind sight, those were really bad identifies and I wish I had chosen something more clear
Lean body type now supported!
Lean body type support, was clearly something I wasn't going to be able to not do. I originally didn't want to simply because managing 6 files was already a lot, and if anything needed to change it would have been frustrating to update. I also foolishly thought I'd need to re-weight the geo and just didn't want to spend the time doing it. What I discovered is that if I renamed and adjusted the positioning of the vertex groups, I could use the exact same skin weighting as the original. It was a bit tedious to go through every single vertex group between my mesh and the original mesh to figure that out, but it wasn't terrible. This allows me to edit the geo and get the lean body type relatively quickly. I probably spent more time adjusting the geometry. I'm still a relatively new Blender user but basically never want to use Max or Maya again. Was really stoked at how easy it was to manage vertex groups for this. Genuinely wouldn't have known how to best account for this to the same quality with a skin modifier in Max.
Personally, I didn't want to go over-the-top with it as that's not my intent here. Wanted to accomplish a slimmed look that made sense without being overly proportioned. I'm happy with where I landed with it but I'm open to feedback if anyone has good thoughts. If the suggestion is to make the lean body more curvy or thicker, I'm most likely just going to ignore it.
Porting over the AC-1 polished skin weighting to the B-24
Because of what I discovered with the lean body type, it lead me to realize that if I did the same thing with *all* geometry, I could port the higher quality skinning of the AC-1 armor onto the B-24 file! This was, a lot more tedious, but so much better than managing a second skin weight file. Now, a problem I ran into is these meshes were obviously skinned differently. There was more bone influence on the B-24 than what the AC-1 had. The solution? Create empty vertex groups to correlate to influences I didn't need or care about. I think on the Neck/Undergarment I ended up having to add 5-6 empty groups, arms required 2 empty groups, and I think the torso and waist needed less? Only thing that seemed to not quite work out was the left shoulder pad (and maybe right?). That shoulder or bone influence seems to be animated/positioned just a tad differently, but not enough to look wrong.
Additional optimization
Originally, I released the mod with 2k textures. It never occurred to me to attempt higher than that. After looking at some other mods and file size, I realized I could probably push it further. My asset is divided between two UV sets: Armor, and Helmet. Kinda felt bad that both the helmet and armor had the same texture resolution, but I did notice visual improvements with the material weirdness with the normals being higher.
A middle ground here was downrezzing the helmet diffuse and PBR texture to 2k, while leaving the normal at 4k. For the armor, I opted to downrez the PBR texture as well to 2k while leaving the other two at 4k. This left me with 3 textures at 4k and 3 textures at 2k which seemed like the safest middle ground while retaining quality overall. While 4k across the board was working just fine for me, I don't want other people's computers suffering performance for stupid reasons
If anyone experiences performance or optimization issues when using the mod, def let me know so I can take a look at it. From everything I'm seeing though, it doesn't seem to be giving folks any problem.
What's next?
What's next? Well, I think the mod is "done." I do have a friend who is requesting a girly-pop color variant that I may or may not release if there's interest. I could potentially release other variants as well, or a version with emissive materials. I don't want to over-bloat the project but at the end of the day I'm happy with it across the board. Unless something major pops up or there's an issue, I don't know if there's really anything left to do.
Since vertex group swapping isn't horrible, I am wondering now if I should set him up on other armors. Where do I draw the line there? It's hard to say how overboard I'd want to go there. If I'm being realistic, setting it up on the B-01 is probably the end of the line. I like the armors that it's on and how it is, but it is a bummer that it's not more widely available to folks. Going to give this some real thought, but the more I do here the more I'm kept from moving onto the GDI soldier which I'm really excited (and dreading) doing.
Big thanks to Mike from the modding discord for info on how to get started with mod manifests, and to Ka1ser0for nudging me to check the the documentation in the HD2ModManager tool itself :)
0 comments