Artwork

From UFO:AI

Contents 1 General 1.1 Normalmaps 1.2 Texture naming 1.3 File formats 1.4 Dimensions 2 Videos (Cutscenes) 3 Tutorials 4 Links

General

There are quite some places where we need new images or textures. Some examples:

• Our mappers need more textures to create unique environments.
• Our modellers needs skins for their models.
• The GUI can always use polished background images, buttons, etc...
  • also see Proposals/New_UI

Please make sure that you also submit the sourcefiles of your images (like Photoshop's or The Gimp's xcf source files).

Normalmaps

Settings for the normalmap plugin in Gimp. They must have the same name as your texture but a _nm attached.

• Normalmap Tutorial
• Blender Normalmap Tutorial
• 3DSMax Normalmap Tutorial
• Normalmap Tutorial

Our normalmaps have the height encoded in their alphachannel. This is needed for parallax mapping to work with UFO:AI.

• RGB = XYZ (surface normal perturbation for dot3 bump)
• A = height for parallax (offset) mapping.

Texture naming

Beware of long texture names - texture relative path from base/textures/, excluding the extension, can't exceed 32 characters. Do not name your textures with filenames longer than that, they can't be used.

For example :

base/textures/tex_buildings/metalbridge06broke.jpg

is bad. tex_buildings/metalbridge06broke is 33 characters.

Such a texture should be renamed to something like

base/textures/tex_buildings/metalbridge6broke.jpg

where tex_buildings/metalbridge6broke is 32 characters.

File formats

UFO:AI supports several image formats for textures, skins and menu images:

• jpg
• png
• tga

They should be saved in RGB resp. RGBA.

Alphachannels should only be included if they are needed in that particular texture (and they should always be included in the normalmaps - see above)

Dimensions

Power of two dimensions are the best for textures as every other none-pot dimension might have to be rescaled for graphic cards that don't support none-pot textures. And the rescaling will result in quality loss of course.

Videos (Cutscenes)

We have animation support in form of roq and ogm (ogm would be the prefered file format) files in UFO:AI. You can play them with the cinematic command. You can also show videos in the ufopedia - the menu node is MN_CINEMATIC:

cinematic {
	video "filename"
}

The filename is relative to base/videos

There are tools to create roq files:

• Switchblade
• ffmpeg (svn version)

./ffmpeg -threads 2 -i moon12.xvid.avi -s 1024x512 -minrate 3000000 -maxrate 6000000 -g 1000 -ar 22050 out.roq

• Official ID roq encoder
• Quake Video Maker
• OpenVIP Non-Linear Video Editor (Open-Source, from sourceforge, supports rendering RoQ files)

We also have a Cinema4D sequence in data_source/videos. Please also note, that the Switchblade or ffmpeg encoder produces way better looking videos with higher quality.

According to Riot's page, where switchblade can be downloaded, versions of ffmpeg that encode RoQ videos are based primarily off of a port of version 3 of switchblade. At present there is now a version 4 of switchblade that fixes bugs present in version 3 and also encodes videos of higher quality.

Please be aware that because of limitations of the game engine and encoding of RoQ files that there are restrictions not only on output format (frame rate, dimensions, audio frequency, etc.) but also on the input format that the video has to be in before it is processed into a RoQ video. More details about this can be found in the Guide for making ROQ videos with Switchblade v4.

Tutorials

• Seamless textures with Gimp

Links

• The Gimp
  • Gimp Docs
• Semicuro
• MapZone Editor Free high quality texture generator
• ImageAfter
• QShaderEditor
• Texture Processor
• Wood Texture Creator
• Tutorials for digital content creators
• Open Game Art