Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Custom Skins => Topic started by: Greebo on December 31, 2017, 09:04:18 AM
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Thanks to Lyric1 for finding me the info for this skin.
This Panzer IV H was based in Romania in 1944, possibly with the 9th Panzer Division. It unusually featured a bird emblem on its turret sides instead of a tactical number. At some point some of its side armour plates were replaced with ones from another tank.
(http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=391144.0;attach=29085)
(http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=391144.0;attach=29087)
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Fabulous!
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Very nice.
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That turned out really well. :aok
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Very cool! Happy New Year! <S>
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stunning!!!
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Very impressive, Greebo!
With the rough exterior of cast iron tanks, you must make extensive use of the normal map for highlights? Are you running into any artifacts from compression?
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I use the normal map far more heavily on tanks than on aircraft, with greater variance of shades in the height map and with the normal generator's scale setting set to 10 rather than 3. Partly this is because details on the tanks are heavier, panel lines are wider, fasteners bigger, exhausts are rusty, there's a lot more mud and the ridged zimmerit paste and so on. Also the tank does not move around so much as a plane, it generally stays upright and only turns slowly so you don't notice the weird shadows and highlights crawling across the top of the wing that you see on a maneuvering aircraft with an overdone normal or bump map.
I find so long as I keep all the effects sharp I don't get much in the way of artefacts on GVs. I did once try to get a rough armour effect by using a layer of black and white dots which were gaussian blurred but this layer gave an odd glazed looking effect when viewed in the game. The same black and white dot layer looked a lot better with sharp dots and no blurring. The main place I get compression artefacts on planes is on the skin height variation effect I use, which is just a blurred copy of the rivet layer. Here the effect has to be blurred and it is just a question of keeping it fairly subtle so the artefacts are only just visible close up but not distracting.
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As a joke for our over sensitive GVers these days, put a high reflective pare metal skin on a tank so it reflects all the trees around it. Then post a picture of that as a joke calling it a Predator optical camouflage hunting cloak..... :lol
Wonder how many will think it will be released as a real skin....... :O
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Technically it ought to be possible to create a less-visible GV skin by using an alpha map. If I were to combine that with your reflective environment map it ought to be possible to get a pretty good simulation of a predator cloaking device. Something to think about as April approaches...... :D
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Hitech could sell it for say $5 a download and give you a royalty. That should solve the GVDAR issue....... :rofl