Information about Creating 3D Content

Introduction

This Text is a help for people who want to create new high-quality models and textures for the game. It isn't a noob tutorial. We're going to use ​Blender, and ​GIMP I presume that you've already know them a bit. If not, then there are excellent tutorials available on the internet.

Process overview

We use ​Blender for modeling and unwrapping the UV-Mesh and baking ambient occlusion onto a texture. Then proceed over to ​GIMP and add wall, teamcolours, mud etc to the texture.

In my opinion unwrapping the UV-Mesh is the most time consuming and boring part of all. But after that it goes very quickly.

Blender

To get the right scale, you can adjust the grid in the 3D view as follows (view -> properties):

spacing = 0.51
lines = 6
divisions = 10

This will give you a grid of 6x6 squares, which corresponds to 3x3 in-game tiles:

• red: a single warzone tile, used for editing units and defenses
• violet: 2x2 tiles, used for editing most structures
• blue: 3x3 tiles, can be used to edit the largest structures in stock warzone, which are the factories.

Modelling

• I generally start with a cube and do some loop-cuts with [STRG]-R, delete parts, make faces with F again.
• You don't have to have only triangles, i mostly work with quadrangles. The exporter will automatically triangle it for us later. In my opinion, it's easier to work with quadrangles.
• Try to keep the polygon count down on a reasonable level. To check the Polygon count go in edit mode, select all vertices with A, triangle the whole mesh with [STRG]-T and look at top-right. After you've seen the polygon count, undo with [STRG]-Z to get your quadrangles again.

Exporting

The PIE export plugin needs the following model structure:

• An Empty named PIE_XXXX (XXXX will be used as the default file name) that is the parent of the whole model with the following children:
  • A Mesh named LEVEL_NN for each LEVEL in the model
  • An Empty named CONNECTOR_NN for each CONNECTOR in the model

You also need to make sure that each of your LEVEL_* objects has, when viewed in the editing panel (F9, or that button showing a box), two items under "UV Texture": one called "base" and the other called "teamcolor_meta".

Unwrap the UV-Mesh

Blender has some excellent features for this. I mostly use 'Project From View' so to not stretch it unnecesary.
​Blender Documentation about UV-Unwrapping

Bake ambient occlusion

​Blender Documentation about Ambient Occlusion
Take also a look at ​Blender Documentation about Baking

Finish in GIMP