=== [TASK] === Male Head's

[Alexandermb]

11 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Nice! Can you make a female Kushite one like this with a leather eye patch over one eye? For Amanirenas. 

A plain basic eyepatch or it is too modern? 

Btw i can make this facemask but i belive it will be only applyable to your mod. IIRC there was a rome mask helmet but idk if it was for Millenium AD or Imperial romans?

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[Alexandermb]

@Stan`Rebaking head shape with 1024x512:

 @wowgetoffyourcellphone Added eartip shape:

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[Stan`]

What does the tex look like now ?  (My guess is the top corners can be used for props)

[Alexandermb]

Spoiler

Prob too little, but can be special cases baked with less width

[nifa]

2 hours ago, Alexandermb said:

Btw i can make this facemask but i belive it will be only applyable to your mod. IIRC there was a rome mask helmet but idk if it was for Millenium AD or Imperial romans?

Looks like the ones for the gladiators, in vanilla atlas-only unit and in DE trainable from the colosseum?

2 hours ago, Alexandermb said:

@Stan`Rebaking head shape with 1024x512:

 @wowgetoffyourcellphone Added eartip shape:

  Reveal hidden contents

 

Are you taking the pics from above in atlas with "ground" activated? Looks like they are cut off below the mouth

[Alexandermb]

56 minutes ago, nifa said:

Are you taking the pics from above in atlas with "ground" activated? Looks like they are cut off below the mouth

Thats correct.

[Alexandermb]

@wowgetoffyourcellphone

Spoiler

Just in case this was the first rendering test i did before head's for bodie whitout too much detail:

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Mod file for testing, still work to do: New_heads (3).7z

[Alexandermb]

Brennus with a new cape test:

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[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

Cape looks great, ngl. The game needs a better variety of capes, too. We essentially use 1 cape texture for 90% of units. 

[Alexandermb]

21 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Cape looks great, ngl. The game needs a better variety of capes, too. We essentially use 1 cape texture for 90% of units. 

Eventually.  Same for Cloth hood's and if its possible a new toga texture with normal map. because cloth can be done easily if its plain for a cape. At least now that my current CPU and Ram amount can handle cloth physics.

[vladislavbelov]

On 11/05/2026 at 10:41 PM, Alexandermb said:

Those are the same hair spikes currently in game, i did an import then paste to the new mesh. Since its used only whitout helmet count's like a helmet+head?

Ideally - yes. Practically we need to choose appropriate number of polygons accounting how close camera in a regular game can be.

Also I think baked AO shouldn't be so black as the human skin has significant subsurface scattering. So I'd make it warmer and leave darkening to normal maps.

About normal maps in terms of the engine: they shouldn't contain noise as it's not good for compression quality and might lead to light flickering on our general scale.

[Stan`]

@vladislavbelov btw per civ is it better to have 8 256x128 textures  or one 2048x1024 for all 8 heads but with 8 separate meshes, with identical geometry but different UV. (Sadly we can't specify atlas position in actor)

[Alexandermb]

3 hours ago, vladislavbelov said:

Ideally - yes. Practically we need to choose appropriate number of polygons accounting how close camera in a regular game can be.

Also I think baked AO shouldn't be so black as the human skin has significant subsurface scattering. So I'd make it warmer and leave darkening to normal maps.

About normal maps in terms of the engine: they shouldn't contain noise as it's not good for compression quality and might lead to light flickering on our general scale.

i would like to figure a better way to make Spiky hair a plain mesh like the hair of Guile from Tekken:

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But the hair has been the most complicated shape of baking in blender because from geometry nodes it looks beautifull but it only work's as hair cards.

i removed noise from hair normal map but left it on the beard or short hair or it will look plaing wich it isn't the objective.

[Alexandermb]

For skin tone issue i'm experimenting with a toga:

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[Alexandermb]

At least the baking test work's fine. Ignore the missing hand's is just a test of preliminary for skin shader's with norm maps for new head's:

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[Alexandermb]

@Stan` How much is the file size limit for source files or for posting on the forum ? the body blend file is almost 2Gb but i like any1 could have it here and experiment if they know how to sculpt and bake.

[Alexandermb]

Feet done!

Spoiler

 

[Gurken Khan]

2 hours ago, Alexandermb said:

How much is the file size limit for source files or for posting on the forum ? the body blend file is almost 2Gb

I once helped out with a RC version, ~1.5GB was no problem, don't think there's a quota either. (Don't know if you can compress that file.)

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

2 hours ago, Alexandermb said:

@Stan` How much is the file size limit for source files or for posting on the forum ? the body blend file is almost 2Gb but i like any1 could have it here and experiment if they know how to sculpt and bake.

2gb to the forum is too large, IMHO. Eventually we'll be porting the forum over to new software and having massive files like this may create issues (or maybe not). 

[Lopess]

2 hours ago, Alexandermb said:

@Stan` How much is the file size limit for source files or for posting on the forum ? the body blend file is almost 2Gb but i like any1 could have it here and experiment if they know how to sculpt and bake.

Perhaps GitHub could be an option?

[nifa]

Maybe MakeHuman could be useful for some of these tasks.

[Alexandermb]

57 minutes ago, nifa said:

Maybe MakeHuman could be useful for some of these tasks.

Blender provided a full human body (even skull) repository for free in their webpage and also Animal Fur Examples wich i used for the cape. 

[Alexandermb]

Btw to clarify: The issue with the high poly model isn't the model itself, is the distribution of the UV map's on the current body wich make's more difficult to bake high poly models into the body mesh, until now. The only issue left is the hand mesh/uv currently used wich has a non used space and a overlapping UV on the thumb wich could be either fixed and rebaked but i would need help replacing the hand's textures on current textures for a more detailed and normal mapped hand or just adjust all the meshes and use the unused space for the hand wich currently is just a blurry skin tone.

[Alexandermb]

To explain the Combat variant, the word "combat" is used in the Unit.Ai component as a special variant when the unit receives the order "approach enemy" or "attack and walk" the variant "combat" is forced into the entity. 

So as this is already implemented in the base game, the trick to use it is replace the name of the variant xml file with Combat.

Replacing every actor with the combat new variant but it induces a new requirement to make every cape separated for Attack type:

• Swordsman
• Axeman
• Spearman
• ............n

or either someone give the combat word another code like to give an additional prefix so we can generalize the cape's.

So for modders: Just add the combat name variant if you want your entity to walk aggresively to an enemy entity instead of walking like in a field of flowers to burn a city.

[Alexandermb]

As the mod is partially ready, i would like to finish the female head's also and leave another topic later for hero's as long as my skills allow me to do something at least a little bit different for the hero's.

Missing the celtic's head with pattern's.