Images - Hatchet mod for Deus Ex

This shot of the brass (it's not gold, I swear) tank gust bow with a more seasoned looking set of limbs and a scope is showing off some of the new tech.

Technobabble: We used to use unmapped UVs (which was a forced result in the old blender method), which became known as the "Universal Texture Pool", or UTP, and we had 1 color per 1 skin index on the model.

This had 3 benefits:
1. more modular reskinning than vanilla, in regard to palette
2. Reduced file size for textures
3. No pixelation visible on polygons, making the game feel much less aged, when combined with a higher poly count.
However, this was inefficient and not as flexible as one might desire.

The new method, to contrast, is the "UTP Map" style, where we actually UV map select faces, but each "map" is a single texture with several colors. It's still compact on file size, and each polygon will only ever contain a single color, preserving the same texture style and lack of pixelation, but this allows 3 major upgrades:
1. More potential colors in a model, as we're not limited to 8 on a model, or 5 on a gun/6 on a non-gun weapon. Any time we'd break 8 skins, or sometimes for other reasons, we'd use an overlay to expand feature depth/animations/effects/skin count. We have to do this much less often now, luckily. This bow has 3 textures for its entire palette, including its scope reskin effect.
2. More dynamic part reskinning/polygon masking, as we can change not just a color out, but colors specific to an exact part out, and customize the palette of every part of a weapon. Hence this bow contains both brass and polymer colorization, which is not possible on old weapons, and the scope variant is still the same model.
3. Finer model detail. We can add more details without worrying about running out of skins, and also reskin things more in depth. Meshes can be more vivid now that they have a longer leash. The only constraint now is polygons, which we can use more of on modern machines.