Vehicle thermal signatures

[[R-DEV]Mats391]

This is a short tutorial on how to edit the thermal signatures for vehicles in PR.

What you need:

• BF2 Meshviewer
• Photoshop or similar to edit and create dds files

The thermal signature can be added to vehicles through a new invisible DXT1 texture. That texture must have alpha of 0% and uses the green channel to define the heat or brightness of that part.

The process is rather simple:

• Select a vehicle you want to update
• Open the bundledmesh in Meshviewer
• Identify the parts you want to change
• Open the _c.dds texture for that part
• Start painting the thermal signature

Example:
This is no way finished and more a quick POC I did for the M1A1

Open the vehicle in meshviewer and find part to edit. Click the "SpeculatLUT_pow36.dds" texture for that. It will turn the part the material applies to red




- Paint thermal signature


Ingame result:


The texture created:


Some more tips:

• Normal heat brightness is around 0.55 in the green channel, so should make your painted parts darker than that.
• If a part should be completely cold, dont make new texture, just apply "objects/common/textures/dummyblack_tis.dds" to it.
• Keep the heat texture as small as possible. 512x512 MAX, the smaller the better. These do not need high resolution. I saved the one above at 256x256.
• You can find references for heat signatures on a lot of vehicles on the steelbeasts wiki. E.g. the M1A1 http://www.steelbeasts.com/sbwiki/in...rmal_Signature

[[R-DEV]Mats391]

This is just tutorial based on a proof of concept after understanding how Mosquill created the shaders. Please someone with real texture know how make a good looking POC

[LEGIYA]

Anyone working on this?

[[R-DEV]​mectus11]

I was messing around with this a few days ago, I did everything up to editing the texture but when I saved the bundledmesh for some reason it overwrote the 1st layer and my tank came up as a green mess.

Everything up to painting it went fine.


It looked like this ingame


This is the texture in the 4th layer


This is my texture, not accurate I was just testing it on different parts or attempting to and seeing if I can make thermals stronger on the back and fainter on the rest.


I feel like I missed something in this tutorial that was crucial, maybe I fucked up my channels when saving to dds from Photoshop?

The parameters I used to save it as a dds

[Rhino]

Unsure why your texture isn't working, mats should hopefully be able to help you with that, but rather than save the texture in DXT5, if you have a flat alpha like yours, save it in DXT1 with a 1 bit alpha like so and that saves the texture at 1/2 the size with the same alpha info you need.


Also I wouldn't have all the cold parts of the tank be 100% black by default, as when looking at proper refs of tanks, you can see even the coolest parts of a tank are well above the ambient temperature of its surroundings, where if its 100% black on the texture, it will be the same temp as the surrounding ground and other objects, which aren't made out of metal which is far less heat conductive etc as we all know. It also gives you some more play for things that might be super cold on a vehicle for w/e reason, so would have the minimum default temp be something like 25% green, possibly higher than that even but will take a bit of trial and error to get that perfect.




It may also be easier to make these textures in the full rez of the main textures, then downsize them later, tbh think they can go lower than 512x512 even for a tank that is going to have a max texture size of 2048x2048 and this will also help you with painting in small details which even when downsizing, won't totally get lost, but easier to paint in high-rez. You may even want to take the diffuse, spec and normal to influence the thermal texture a little too so it isn't totally flat

[[R-DEV]Mats391]

Nope, you didnt miss anything, I forgot to add something
Meshviewer and also the editor cannot display this correctly. The will only show the TIS texture normally. In Meshviewer you can try to switch to GLSL shaders, I think those work. For editor you have to switch to color rendering mode, but you lose lighting etc then. If we go through with this we have to update shaders for both so they stay usable.
Also like Rhino said, the texture should probably be DXT1 not DXT5.

[sweedensniiperr]

Wouldn't the barrels of the MGs also be a little hotter?

Is this going to be in the game? How's this going to work? The thermals in PR is really not good. Wouldn't it require a shitton of work? I mean the ambience(ground) right now has a substantial amount of heat signature now.

Would this only work on vehicles or is it possible on soldier models?

[[R-DEV]​mectus11]

Steel Beasts is a good reference for this stuff like Mats linked in his first post. Also, I'll mess around some more and show what I get.

http://www.steelbeasts.com/sbwiki/in...egory:Vehicles

[[R-DEV]​AlonTavor]

Yes, it would require a shitton of work.

[[R-DEV]Mats391]

Originally Posted by sweedensniiperr

Is this going to be in the game? How's this going to work? The thermals in PR is really not good. Wouldn't it require a shitton of work? I mean the ambience(ground) right now has a substantial amount of heat signature now.

Would this only work on vehicles or is it possible on soldier models?

Thermals right now are pretty darn good. Anyone trying to hide from hovering Cobra in bushes will know that. Hiding vehicles is almost impossible. Then again there are still other bugs like the road markings on Marlin going completely black in thermals, but in general I would say thermals right now are a bit too strong.
Sadly this wont work on soldiers. I already tried to do some other things to make kits not show up on thermals so it doesnt look like every soldier is carrying a nuclear reactor in his backpack, but had no success so far. If anyone has experience with DirectX 9 shaders and/or BF2 rendering, please give me a call

Originally Posted by [R-DEV]AlonTavor

Yes, it would require a shitton of work.

Yes it is, but it also is rather easy, repetitive work. Thats why I want to community to do it