2 questions

[berserker116]

1.Ok when i open a tga.dds. texture file to skin i finish the skin but when i wanna put a shield logo on there it comes out insead of a single texture but like a double one instead how can i pick this..(for expample a elite hoplite i gave it the scary face design for the shield but instead of that one texute i got two of the same..

2.where can i get the dds plug-in for paint shop pro..i tried the nvida site but the read me is not working..

[Bwian]

The first problem is easy enough. The way the textures are mapped onto the mesh is designed to save space. What they have done is use the same bit of texture more than once on the shield. It allows you to make that part of hte texture more detailed without using up too much of the limited space available. To cure this, you would need to re-map the shield in Max, so that it lined up with what you had put on the texture tile.

Don't know about finding the Nvidia plugin for Paintshop Pro...I do remember I had to do a bit of trawling on Google to find the one for Photoshop. Best place to look, as I recall, is the Unreal Tournament 2004 websites. They need it for skin painting too. Thats where I found a working link.

[berserker116]

can you give me a tutorial on the shield thing because i dunno crap about 3dmax..

[Bwian]

Thats a bit beyond me, I am afraid. Texturing in Max...I can do it....if I have to, but I hate it! I actually UV map out of Max, since it is such an annoying tool for the job.

Look up a Max 'UV Mapping' tutorial on Google, and you should find what you need. First you need to understand th econcept...then how to make it happen.

In short.... UV as a concept...

Imaginr your model is a real 3D sculpture. Easy.
Imagine your texture tile is a sheet of rubber ....

Now...if you cut out the rubber sheet and stuck it on the model, it covers it with the texture. Some bits may get 'stretched' to fit a flat shape onto a 3D one, and this is an effect you actually can see on the 3D model.

There is an extra twist to this analogy, in that you can use the same bit more than once. If you look at your texture, you will see the shield is either a half or a quarter. They re-use this more than once, flipping or rotating the piece of 'virtual rubber' and sticking it on the shield.

UV mapping is simply telling the computer game where to cut each bit from, and where to stick it afterwards. It does this through the vertices (corners) of the model, and uses that as a point of reference.