Greetings Wastelanders, it's me! Not Loonybinjin, coming at you again with some news on Fallout, Old World Blues. This dev diary is going to focus on our new and recently house broken modeler and some of the first models added by our mod. Only a few have been finished, but many more are on the way!

Currently there are four completed models. These are the T51 Power Armor, the Protectron, the Vertibird, and the laser rifle. Nothing has texture maps yet due to our texturer being busy, but that happens.

Veribird[imgur.com]

There normally isn’t much explaining how a developer goes from a reference or idea, into a little man shooting in the game. Hopefully this section will remedy that divide and might even be interesting to a few of you!
First, for any budding HOI4 modelers, the tools used are almost all free. The main modeling program that has stolen my heart is Blender[www.blender.org]. Then to get the models into HOI, I use two different methods depending on what is needed. Maya is expensive, but a student or teaching license is free. The other method is to use Jorodox Tools[chrome.google.com]. For textures and touch ups, GIMP is basically open source photoshop.

The first stage to any model is the “highpoly” or a model with many triangles that can hold as much detail as needed. These are the time consuming monsters of modeling. For example: this is the full high poly model of the T51 sped up to 14 minutes. Realistically it took five to six hours to finish with a lot of feedback fixing edited out.
Speed Model
After this, the finished highpoly is ready, and the next stage is to make it game viable!

T51 Flyaround[i.imgur.com]

Old-War Tank[i.imgur.com]

Protectron[i.imgur.com]

To save your computer from becoming a prime marshmallow roaster, The in-game models are greatly reduced in poly-count. They contain many less triangles and therefore less detail. All of the highpoly models are reduced at least 60 times.

Protectron Lowpoly[i.imgur.com]

To make the lowpoly look pretty like the highpoly, we use a texture called a normal map. Normals take the three color channels (RGB) and convert the intensity of each from 0-1.0 into a direction. Red pushes the model on the X, Green the Y, and Z the blue. Paradox games only use two of these channels, but it still looks stunning. To apply the normal to a model, it first has to be projected into two dimensions, which is where the funky looking face explodes come from.

Protectron UV[i.imgur.com]

After that is done, the details of the highpoly get baked into a texture for the lowpoly, effectively creating a lowpoly look-alike.


Protectron Normal[i.imgur.com]

Applied Normal (Right)[i.imgur.com]

T51[i.imgur.com]

The final step in finishing a model is to give it a physics based rendering texture or PBR. HOI decomposes PBR into albedo, glossy, metalness, and emission. Currently, due to lack of a texturer, we only have baked PBR maps to show for now, but they are pretty none the less.

Protectron Baked Texture[i.imgur.com]

Protectron with all the bits[i.imgur.com]

Protectron in game[i.imgur.com]

Currently there is only one work in progress animation project for the T51, but hopefully everything will be fully animated in the next two months. I could go into detail for the animation steps thoroughly if there is interest, but for now take this cookie:
It works![i.imgur.com]

And an album:
Album[imgur.com]