Action VI Transport image - Rise of the Mandalorians mod for Star Wars: Empire at War: Forces of Corruption
The Empire has fallen and a New Republic is born out of the conflict. But in the ashes of civil war, yet another life stirs...
The Action-series of transports were designed by Corellian Engineering as a commercial hauler. The reliability and essential value of the ships attracted many buyers and the popular craft soon filled trade routes across the galaxy, transporting cargo of all kinds.
However, because it was designed for commercial use, no defensive measures were installed on the ship. Therefore, any Action-series craft that had to haul through dangerous parts of space would depend on armed escort for protection. As a result, entities that couldn't afford armed escort often saw their Action IV and VI ships attacked by pirates, who usually commandeered the ship along with all of it's cargo.
As they were easy and common targets for pirates, many pirate factions would then use the ships to bolster their own ragtag fleets by modifying them with armor and weapons.
Damn fine work, excellent model and texture. Makes me wonder, if you ever decide to reskin your models, could they with a simple texture change be converted from cartoonish to a realistic look? If it'd be as simple as tweaking a few values in photoshop you could have an entirely different looking mod on your hands with relatively little tweaking.
What might you do to make them look more realistic?
See the thing is that I keep my poly counts quite low, intentionally. The game supports a high poly count yes, but there are actually quite a few people who still play this game on potato computers. I want the mod to work for those folks as much as possible as well. Besides, a lot of detail can be expressed in the texture.
That said, I keep the textures somewhat simple because lots of detail gets lost when you scale down your original 4096^2 to 1024^2. Therefore, you only draw the details that actually make a difference. There is no point is putting effort into details that can't be appreciated in the end format anyway.
One solution that some modders use is to have one unit that pulls from multiple textures that are all 1024^2 but focused on a specific area of the ship, ergo, more room for details. The drawback to this is that each one of those textures needs to load when that unit spawns. This is why some mods seem to hang or lag spike when you spawn a unit. I didn't want that in RotM. One texture per unit (with few exceptions) will prevent that from happening and also helps to keep the resolution of all unit textures uniform.
The end result is that you have a texture with fairly bold and specific panel lines, rivets, etc but not a lot of the fine paneling or "generic paneling overlay" that is tiled over the base texture. That does tend to make it look comic book-like but I think that's the best place to be with this engine. I think that style works best within the limitations of what we have to work with, personally.
Sorry I should've specified, I meant opening each existing texture in photoshop, and making a few alterations such as maybe neutralize the blacks and whites a little, maybe something with the contrast. Perhaps with a few tweaks you can make a ship go from the shellshaded style to a more "realistic" style, since all ships were textured with the same artstyle you could transform the entire mod in one go, without having to actually reskin ships from the ground up.
I see your points, and they're all good as far as I can see. I just figured with the uniform artstyle one could use a single formula and apply it to each texture, and have a uniform effect upon all units. I didn't mean to reskin every ship. If an effect can be made to turn a texture into a more "realistic" looking one it could easily be applied everywhere and transform the entire mod, no other mod has this potential since no mod has every unit built from the ground up by a single artist to one specific art-style, so I was just wondering what might be done with this. If there's no intention to ever do anything with this that's alright of course, the mod already looks very unique.
Oh I see. Yes, in theory this could be done. Actually, each time I start a new texture for a ship, I just build it using all the same layers from another ship (delete layer content but preserve styles, save new file...). That way the art style is fairly consistent. Obviously there has to be some exception.
There isn't a plan to do this now. However, I will say that ReShade does up the contrast via it's "fake HDR" and sharpening filters. One could turn those off and get closer to what you're asking. I think the ReShade filters are a little overblown myself, to be honest... I need to fine tune them still.
Last note though could be normal maps. I think if the depth of the normal maps was reduced slightly, this could also help. I personally really like them how they are but if you wanted to achieve something like what you're describing, many of the very harsh darks come from the normals I think.
First of all, very nice piece of work indeed.
To answer the original question: sure, some decontrast here, some desaturation there, pasting "realistic" looking textures on top with 50-90% opacity and a lot of smudging and it's done.
No automation though, all made by hand.
It would have to be, yes. I suppose one could create a photohop action to lower contrast/levels automatically but that's about it.
And thank you both, btw for the feedback and stuff. Always appreciate your comments.
This is beautiful
This ship is certainly a Wild Card
can't wait to see this in action
See what you did there ;)
I expected nothing nothing less
Speaking off is Talon in the mod he should be
Nice work as always. So will these be native pirate units as well as buildable via the merchant dock?
Both! They'll appear on some pirate and Hutt worlds but also be buildable in skirmish where the right captureables are present.
Hello !
That looks great. I love your models. The textures are amazing, they are perfect as they are. Your work is unique and I can not wait to finally play the new version of the mod.
Take as much time for your project as necessary, so that everything is perfect. But do you already have an approximate release date ?
Greetings from Germany.
Hallo!
Ich habe kein Veröffentlichungsdatum festgelegt.
Was my German ok?? I'm passively trying to learn, though I admit that I had to look up Veröffentlichungsdatum. WOW, what a word that is! Lol
Perfekt.
Alright, keep up the good work.
Ja, das war korrekt. German is a difficult language. Good luck with it, lol.
Will it be the correct size? Most mods that include this ship (and its pirate modified variants) tend to make it too large. They make it frigate sized, when it should be corvette sized.
Really cool looking model by the way. I can't wait for the full release.
I am making it smaller than the vanilla model, that much I can say. However, it will be slightly larger than the corvettes in game. I know that it is actually quite a small ship (just slightly smaller than a CR90, actually) but I needed it to be just a tad larger for gameplay reasons. Since it functions similar to a frigate, it needs to be large enough to see and select easily. Corvettes in the mod are paired in squadrons of two so that they can use the fighter locomotor and also so they can be scaled down a bit, so that the larger ships don't have to take up as much room on the map. This helps with pathfinding.
I love the idea behind this. It makes me think of what i would do with the rebel alliance. When i think rebellions i think not only material from backers, but also stolen weaponry, salvaged old tech etc. Applying it to pirates makes even more sense. It's just that little extra touch that makes it way more fun
Glad you like it!
stunning
Action is coming!
sleekest looking action vi transport ive ever seen. damned impressive.