Nice news Messyhead, welcome back and good luck! Just another question, the ah64d's textures that i've done are so ugly? none tells nothing about them. Best wishes for your job.

I've not had a look at them to be honest. I've actually not played EECH for quite a while as I've been working on this project.

The instruments are looking nice.

So I was hoping to post a positive update on this, as I have been working on texturing over the past few weeks.

But it took a bit of a blow last night, in that my laptop has died

I'm hoping to try and get it working tonight, but no guarantee as it seems terminal at the moment. The only option would be for me to try and recover the contents of the hard drive and use my wife's laptop from now on.

I was trying to get a lot done as my 2nd baby is due in a couple of weeks, so when that happens I think progress will slow completely.

Congratulations messyhead, best wishes for your daddy.

sad to hear that. I mean, about your laptop, I hope hard drive content wasn't damaged. congratulations on your future arrival! definitely, now you will have to do a lot of more important things rather than helicopters)

Thanks. I've ordered an external HDD case, so I should be able to try and recover the drives.

As for the baby, this is no.2 so I should be practised enough! (famous last words)

Woohoo! Laptop fixed. Somehow the MBR had got locked or something, anyway, it's working now.

I've been trying to keep progress moving on this. It turns out night feeds is some nice quiet time to get stuff done

I've textured the small MFDs and detailed and textured the flight instruments. I'll probably need to go back over the MFD textures as they're not very good.

I'm ok at the flight instrument textures (I think), but the MFDs need some creativity in photoshop to add shadows and details, and I'm not much good at that.

One thing that you might try is baking some ambient occlusion onto the textures, doing that can really help make things look nice without requiring you to manually paint all the shading on the textures.

indeed, bake shading will be much easier than making it manually. only thing is - it will be wise to make it after modeling is completely finished, otherwise new elements added later will be without shadow effects. also bumpmapping can be applied but it will be static and looks not really good in the game.

I take it bake shading only shows up in the renders and in game? It doesn't seem to change anything in the perspective view in modeller.

it's technically makes new textures, maybe you just hadn't applied them to the model.

I must be thinking of something different then. I was looking at this...

nope, it's no that. this is more useful:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT4zOk1TcYo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyOVJGIPl4U

actually I did it before with Cinema 4D (because I made camo skins there so it was easier to not switch from one software to another), but LW has same functionality.

Ah, thanks for those. I'll have a watch of them and experiment to see how it looks.

I know very little about texturing, only basic UV mapping.

I'm usually don't use texture for baking - so as result I get something like this :

only after I'm mixing it with the texture manually, but I think it depends on your needs - it's ok to render right on the main texture

Thanks for the info. It looks quite time consuming to get it right. I knew I would have to revisit the textures as I'm just doing basic ones for now.

But it has given me a direction. I'm just going to finish the model, then work on textures. I've been trying to do both just, but it's just wasting time.

A bit more of the instruments done. The Countermeasure and HUD (ANVIS) controls now in place. Untextured, but I'll get to that once the model is done.



The dashboard is looking more complete. Only a few knobs and switches to add.

WoW great!

I never tire myself of saying that I just can't wait to be able to play with the Blackhawk in EECH using your cockpit!

Someone should force you to work all day and night around, 24/7 in order to complete that cockpit ASAP - LoL, just joking


Keep up the great work and thanks for your hard work!