Profile of Cyanara

Thanks for the video, looking awesome. So far I've only used Photoshop for editing while comparing result in 3ds max. Using Substance would be nice.

Ah, I was wondering how people modded skins without 3D painting. Loading COH2 to check every paintstroke that crossed detached polygons would be soul destroying.

Nice video. Thanks for posting that. I may have to look into trying Substance out. Like shpongle, I also use PSD with 3dsmax.
Btw, another tip is to use layer masks...a lot.

I do indeed use layer masks a lot now I've come a *long* way in the past week or so, and that video probably now looks like child's play with what I know now I've been keeping notes for an improved video, so with this bit of encouragement, I'll probably go ahead and make that now.

It's possible at the lower ranks, but over 2000 hours of generally top 500 and I've never seen anything to suggest it. Remember you can hear vehicles in the fog of war easily.

FYI though, the USF mortar has an inbuilt 'maphack' for each squad it hits (makes them keep appearing in the fog of war).

I did once encounter a maphack in COH1, I think. It was a 2v2 custom on Achelous River. They had no units on our side of the map (I checked the replay), but any time I started building an artillery piece, they would hit it dead on immediately with their own artillery. It's possible they were listening for building sounds in the FOW, but it was a bit too instant and accurate I think.

So the Tiger is officially my new favourite model to skin.



That said, I haven't tried it in-game yet. If it's anywhere near as broken as the Elefant was, I'm going to be quite the sad panda

Ostwind, 222, and Elefant are at the polishing stage.

Edit: Oh cool. Most things have come through almost perfectly. Tigers never let you down



Good chance I'm going to tweak (if not outright change) that base brown colour though. That was only a random choice at the beginning. Something lighter would probably be more appropriate.

Edit: Both the summer and winter versions of the Tribal Sands skin for Ostheer are now live for using and testing at my Steam Workshop

If you think you'd be interested in seeing this skin added to the curated pathway, I'd be extremely grateful for any feedback. Please let me know if there are any mistakes, or you just think a particular unit needs more work/better colouring.

Just subscribe and fire up a custom match (CheatMod is fastest and easiest) to have a look. Hit F12 to screenshot any problems you find.

Thanks!








Original post (Most of the screenshots are very outdated):

Hey all,

Just wanted to post some screenshots of some skin painting I've been having fun with.







"The German forces may have been eventually forced out of Africa, but not all of them left Africa completely. Visions of sandy dunes and tribal natives clung to many of their minds.

Although, some just really liked chocolate and licorice swirls."

A bold and relatively high contrast skin, aimed at people with 1080p and lower monitors. No reference materials were used in this. It was just me experimenting randomly and seeing what stuck (so any possible similarity to other skins is coincidental).

So after a very short amount of time messing around with it, I'm a firm believer that Substance Painter 2 provides a highly intuitive, cost-effective, and outright fun method of opening up COH2 unit skin modding. It lets people just paint their favourite tanks directly in 3D, and can be easily demonstrated by short flashy videos. By comparison, the Photoshop 2D textures can be completely bewildering to newcomers wanting to edit them.

Given the whole revenue sharing system for curated skins for Relic, tournaments, and the community, I feel like it's a win-win to promote this vastly more accessible way for people to produce content, and I'm in a good position to provide straightforward guides to help people get started.

There's pretty much just one thing I would like to resolve before doing so, if possible:

The only 3D models available were extracted by a Polycount member (Vailias), using a slightly modified version of an extractor for the original COH.

As a result, these models were not always clean and the official textures provided by Relic are almost always misaligned on them. It's not a massive discrepancy, but it does impede a lot of finer artwork, forcing you to use Photoshop more than one should have to.

While it would be amazing if Relic were to release these models officially, they no doubt have reasons not to. So, I'm essentially putting a call out there to see if anyone with the appropriate technical expertise thinks they might have a means of improving the mesh extractions.

Cheers!