I'm really digging this. It looks like something a mobile army would deploy. Personally, I think the pipes are unnecessary but hey, it's Empires, and they look pretty cool. VF in the same style next please?
Well not quite a bunker, you don't sit in it and fire out of tiny holes. But I was thinking of giving it an actual defensive use, at the moment I drop armories to support attacking troops, they fight well from them and it basically gives them cover and and ammo/health supply to let them keep fighting, and survive as long as they don't get completely overwhelmed. I figure that making the armory into a rough circle of barricades and sandbags or something like that would improve the feel of it, and allow it to function better in that role. Of course I would have to actually figure out how to do sandbags, because currently I really don't know how to approach the task. I'd want to make them all one mesh because it's a continuous almost organic structure, but the texture would also need to be seamless and that's hard to do for something which isn't going to be symmetrical and has three 'sides' as it were. I did try for an easier thing, such as hesco bastions but they don't really look right, they only work in straight lines so I'd have to make the armory square or pentagon shaped, which means making it quite big. I might have to play around with the procedural textures and bake it into an image, then run it through some photoshop filters. If anyone knows how to model sandbags do tell.
You can make really cheap ones (poly-wise) if you take a a solid block and grab a stacked-sandbag texture and apply it. Unwrap the texture and bring it into a touch up program (Photoshop works, I guess) and use a sample from your sandbag texture on say 30% alpha and brush it over seams, where appropriate. Then Then find a decent normal map for a sandbag, or make one out of your texture. Overlay it properly. Voila, good sandbags. Checkout what this guy did: http://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/3d-sandbags-polys/354698 They could be better, but it gets the job done, y'know?
Actually... If I just make a burlap sacking texture, then model some sandbags I can just render some AO and the base texture/normal map from that.
much better, perhaps add some metal floor with hatches on at one side to make it seem more like the top of a big bunker like you said? perhaps a basement hatch not openable?
Already added a set of panels to the other side to make a sort of annex, going to install some blast doors in the floor tomorrow.
I think that's kind of the point. The NF are supposed to have a hastily-assembled shabbiness to their bases.
Nice work Chris, and nice use of stock NF textures! The only issue I have is that it seems quite... well, I don't know maybe the entrances need a bit more polishing?
He said he's adding blast doors in the future. Suggestion: Make steam seep from the hatch in the floor.
I was going to put steam coming out of the vents rather than inside the building, it's easier to have it come from a round thing than a complex shape.
no steam IN the building plz, steam IN the building could be useful for a rifleman with heavy machinegun to camp the rac or w/e
When I mean 'funny" I mean if you take close look at the NF buildings, in terms of style, the doors' sides are slanted inward, and there's a ramp instead of stairs.
i like the new design but some suggestions: make it not front - back symmetric, at least in how it looks, so coms can tell which way ppl spawn out of it (then for balance change the BE rax to the same thing when you get around to it) and make a way for ppl to get to the roof or remove it from the BE one. i do love the web of pipes though.
