- Joined
- Feb 1, 2019
- Messages
- 400
Hello there, this is a small follow up from this thread
Last year I started a pretty dumb project which aimed at exporting the models from Dawn of War 2 to Warcraft 3.
It was a small challenge to myself, wondering if it was possible and how much time exporting 1 model would take.
I wanted to make this thread to share my little discovery around Dawn of War 2 army painter, in case you didn't know, the Dawn of War games allow a player to color their own unit ->
I was wondering how this feat was achievable, I didn't have much knowledge about texturing, after digging the game files & hours of research on the internet, I found my answer.
First of all, all diffuse textures for Dawn of war units are grayscaled, apparently, it's a common practice in video games to use grayscaled texture as you can color them in-game, for 1 texture, you can have multiple colors in-game ->
Dawn of War army painter can color up to 4 parts of a model, in order to do so, it uses another texture that contains 4 color masks, red, green, blue, and alpha.
Each color picked by the painter is mapped to a mask and uses a blend mode to color the grayscaled texture, I applied red, green, and white in this picture and choose the overlay blend mode.
All cool, I can do this on photoshop, but some models got 4 textures, it quickly becomes tedious and repetitive, so I thought about automating the task.
I wrote up a small GUI software to color those textures, here's a small demo video Jaccouille/dow2-texture-painter
That's all folk, I just wanted to share my research, I didn't know any stuff about grayscale textures, happy that I learned something. Maybe it will inspire someone.
For the models, I actually managed to set up a small pipeline on 3dsmax and uses neodex plugin to do the export, it's primitive but it works, only takes ~15min to export a model, but I kinda gave up because the MDX file is still too heavy for my taste (2-3Mb), the file has a ton of keyframe and I didn't find a proper way to delete them without messing up the model.
Last year I started a pretty dumb project which aimed at exporting the models from Dawn of War 2 to Warcraft 3.
It was a small challenge to myself, wondering if it was possible and how much time exporting 1 model would take.
I wanted to make this thread to share my little discovery around Dawn of War 2 army painter, in case you didn't know, the Dawn of War games allow a player to color their own unit ->
I was wondering how this feat was achievable, I didn't have much knowledge about texturing, after digging the game files & hours of research on the internet, I found my answer.
First of all, all diffuse textures for Dawn of war units are grayscaled, apparently, it's a common practice in video games to use grayscaled texture as you can color them in-game, for 1 texture, you can have multiple colors in-game ->
Dawn of War army painter can color up to 4 parts of a model, in order to do so, it uses another texture that contains 4 color masks, red, green, blue, and alpha.
Each color picked by the painter is mapped to a mask and uses a blend mode to color the grayscaled texture, I applied red, green, and white in this picture and choose the overlay blend mode.
All cool, I can do this on photoshop, but some models got 4 textures, it quickly becomes tedious and repetitive, so I thought about automating the task.
I wrote up a small GUI software to color those textures, here's a small demo video Jaccouille/dow2-texture-painter
That's all folk, I just wanted to share my research, I didn't know any stuff about grayscale textures, happy that I learned something. Maybe it will inspire someone.
For the models, I actually managed to set up a small pipeline on 3dsmax and uses neodex plugin to do the export, it's primitive but it works, only takes ~15min to export a model, but I kinda gave up because the MDX file is still too heavy for my taste (2-3Mb), the file has a ton of keyframe and I didn't find a proper way to delete them without messing up the model.
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