Hello, and welcome to another installment in the First Strike Dev Diary series. Sorry about the slight (6 month) delay since the last diary. I'll be your host today, my name is- <crackle crackle fuzz fuzz> -but you can call me Ramseus. I am one of First Strike's humble texture artists. I come from a small planet in the vicinity of Betelgeuse... wait, wrong sci-fi. 42. Anywho, I've been with First Strike for just under a year, and I started texturing about a month before I came aboard.

Lately I've been tasked with texturing static buildings. We're not talking about dinky houses here, we're talking about 32 story tall technological terrors topped with massive satellite dishes! A daunting task, needless to say. On top of that I've had to learn the ins and outs of Battlefield's layered texturing for statics. At the end of the day though, it's a good feeling when you complete a... umm... for lack of a better word, thing.

Now I would like to show you some of what I do and how I do it.

You may remember the Endor Bunker from a few weeks ago (if you haven't seen the video go see it now!). I was responsible for texturing it. I started off with modeling high and low poly models, as seen in the picture below. For anyone who doesn't know what that means, a high poly model is one with a very high level of detail (lots of polygons) that is used to create normal maps, which are applied to the low poly model (few polygons) to give an illusion of detail. I guess that was step 0, since it's not actual texturing, but more just a starting point.



After that, I rendered out normal maps and shadows, which was step 1 (yes, the models in step 1 are the same low poly, basically flat models as seen in the above picture). Then I added some colour, step 2. To finish it off, I just "grunged it up," step 3. Simple enough, all that was left at that point was to copy and paste the walls into the already existing model of the bunker - aka the grunt work.



And finally, a peek at a currently unreleased asset. This is the turbo laser tower, lovingly modeled by our own senior Aussie, General Un-Co, and textured by myself. I've tried to show how battlefield's layered texturing works. The 3 images being "added" are 3 separate textures that get blended to form what you see in game... although it's multiply blending so they should be getting multiplied instead... meh.



The First Strike shall soon be struck. Will you answer the emperor's beckoned call? Man I'm cheesy. Until next time, this has been another First Strike Dev Diary (hopefully next time will be less than six months away).