Mannlicher image - The Great War mod for Napoleon: Total War

Austria-Hungary is my personal favorite.

Thanks!

We actually werent planning on doing the mannlicher either just due to taking a long time to complete even 1 new rifle, but I found a model I had made a long time ago that I forgot about for the mannlicher. Since the model was pretty far along I just did a bit of extra work to finish it up.

I actually have alot of old models like that, that are half finished. Sadly I never even started working on the Carcano.

Heres a breakdown of the steps to create 1 new rifle for TGW.

Step 1) Pre production; search for images of the new rifle. Both schematics and close up pics of the rifle from every angle.

Step 2) Import the ref pics into the modelling program along with a rifle model for reference to make sure you get the scale and placement correct.

Step 3) Create the model which includes the rifle itself, the bayonet and the scope. A TGW rifle is roughly 1500 poly where as a vanilla musket model from NTW is around 500.

Step 4) Now time to UV map the model, which can sometimes take as long as creating the model itself.

Congratulations you have completed LOD1, there are 4 LODs total.

Step 5) Create the other 3 LODs making sure that the poly count reduction between the LODs is sufficient to improve performance in game. This takes longer that creating LOD1 does.

Step 6) UV map the other LODs

Step 7) Send LOD1 model and UV map reference file to the texture artist.

Step 8) The texture artist creates 3 textures for the model, a diffuse, a gloss and a normal texture. This can take a long time to complete.

Step 9) Texture artist sends back all texture files. Add the new textures to the atlas file in TGW.

Step 10) Now that the texture is added to the atlas file its time to adjust the UVs of the 4 LODs to line up the with atlas file that contains the new texture.

Step 11) Export the new version of the model with adjusted UVs. There are 4 total LODs and 3 configurations of said model, rifle only, rifle with bayonet and rifle with scope. So 12 models total.

Step 12) Import the 12 models into the equipment file in the game. The models also have to be reversed since the NTW game engine reverses all models once they are imported into the game.

Step 13) Add them in the pack file tables and associate them with the units that should be using them.

Step 14) Examine the models in game to make sure the texture lines up with the model correctly in game. The atlas file is actually stretched to allow for more textures to be crammed into a smaller space but this means the UVs of the model also have to be stretched and they dont always line up once they are in game.

Step 15) If the UVs dont line up once in game (which they rarely do) then you have to go back to the model and adjust them then export all 12 versions and import them into the game all over again. Sometimes this has to be done a few times to get it just right.

All of that to create 1 new rifle.

We increased the number of tanks in a single unit and that fixes the issue.