Taiidan Elites' black color scheme

[Arcane]

I'm trying to make models with the black-on-black used by the Taiidan Elite Guard (and Elson's gang) late in the game. But when I try to simply paint COL1 and COL2 black, it doesn't come through strongly, I'm guessing because those layers are overlays. The result is mostly uniform gray. But I don't want to change them to normal layers, because I'd lose the texture underneath. So how do I do it? I've even been looking at the single player missions scripts, to see if it does anything to change color schemes, with no success.

[Nerath]

Oh, you can't change ship mesh colors from the game. The files in Homeworld have a default color layout.

It's odd that you can't get black, though. My colors come out just fine. But you're going to lose texture underneath anyway if you do black, so if you're that dedicated, just create a new layer and merge it down. (I'm assuming you use Photoshop.) If you merge those layers, your black layer shouldn't cause the overlay to become a normal layer, and it should all work out. (Key word is 'should.' I've actually never tried it.)

Tell me how that works out.

[Arcane]

Apparently, the reason it isn't working is because the TEX layer is actually lighter in the spots underneath the base/stripe overlays. Furthermore, its lightened by just the right amount to cancel out black overlay, so black turns out the same shade of gray as the base color of TEX. Other colors than black come out lighter than they "should be". I say "should be" because it seems almost certain that Relic intended for the textures to work this way. The question is, why? Other ships, even other R2 ships, do not have textures that do this.

These show what I mean, using the "body_sides" texture used on all (AFAIK) R2 frigates:

home.comcast.net/~sorceror25/body_sides-test1-default.jpg
-texture with Taiidan default colors (255, 210, 0 Yellow and 255,0,0 Red)

home.comcast.net/~sorceror25/body_sides-test2-noteamcolo.jpg
-this is with the overlay layers turned off

home.comcast.net/~sorceror25/body_sides-test3-teamblack.jpg
-overlays black

If you change all the textures, and render the model, you get this:
home.comcast.net/~sorceror25/ion_cannon_notleet.jpg

which looks nothing like how its supposed to look (HW Shipyards for reference):
shipyards.relicnews.com/taiidan/images/display.htm?ion_frigate2.jpg

[gremdek]

maybe changing brightness/contrast will help you.
well, it's strange. I once came across on sth that it didn't change the color anyway where it was supposed to do so, so i colored it maunally loosing the texture.

[Nerath]

I believe my colors came out "light" as well, but I want to say they were correctly hued when I printed the models. Don't take my word for it, though; I need to test it out.

[Arcane]

I've been able get something close. I abandoned overlay, and instead went with normal blending on COL1 and COL2, but with 80% and 90% opacity, respectively. That gave me this:



compare:


But another thing has been bothering me. Look carefully at the rear of the ICF, upper side near the engine. See that X? That X is always there, but the black makes it stand out more for some reason.
The thing is, that X appears nowhere on the ship textures! I've noticed similar things on other ships as well. The only thing I can think of is that they're scaling artifacts produced when the game engine maps the textures to the polygons. But often they look like
highlights, and (to my eye at least) add appealing geometric complexity. My goal with my paper crafts has been to mimic the in-game appearance of ships as close as possible, and this has been frustrating, since this aspect seems unreproducible.

[TheGlove]

Try emailing Fructose, he got some pro photoshop skills.