Some more tips on A:M + gamestudio

[Emilio Le Roux]

This was started on another thread, but the posts were getting a little off-topic, so I decided to start a new thread.

 

Some hints on working with A:M and 3DGS were post before on this thread.

 

 

I just wanted to share some more information on this:

 

 

1) The MED (model editor) has a simple but nice SKIN editor/painting utility. It is not any automatic UV unwrapper, but it remembers the old LithUnwrap functionallity.

 

2) Because of this skin editor, I found out that you should NOT check the "Shift Y to 1" option. UV coords exported from AM with this option will be located OUTSIDE the image. Since skins repeat, the model will look good, but it will be hard to edit in the MED skin editor.

 

3) I like to use AM patch images (group images) for quick decaling. For instance you could texture all the patches of a tree trunk with a single 64x64 BARK.BMP tile, with no need of complex UV techniques.

The problem is that .X models only accept 1 skin image, so you won't be able to add other texture images for the leaves, etc.

 

Fortunately, later in MED's skin editor, you can find all UV coordinates generated by patch decals as a single group of overlapping faces. So you can select a point of these UV triangles, then 'select connected', and scale / position the UV 'mesh', for example, to one quarter of the image.

 

Every group that is patch-decaled in AM generates a different connected group of UV triangles in the skin editor. So it is easy to use, say, four 64x64 tiles in a single 128x128 image.

 

 

4) One more tip, pretty obvious: If you are going to make double-faced geometry (like tree foliage, sheets of paper, wings, etc...) before exporting, you can group ALL the geometry to be double faced, then just COPY, PASTE and FLIP. (it is required to set the copy offset to 0,0,0 in am->options).

 

 

 

-Cheers!