Updated Pavise crossbowmen that will use their shields in melee

[Medusa0]

Here are the edited models of the Pavise crossbowmen, Pavise crossbowmen militia, and Genoese crossbowmen that will allow the unit to use their shields in melee (Genoese crossbowmen militia, Mercenary Pavise crossbowmen use Genoese models in the stock game, while the Livonian Auxiliary unit from the Teutonic campaign uses the Pavise crossbowmen models). I am assuming everyone downloading the files will know how to install them.

Enjoy!

Contents of the original discussion in spoiler for those who are curious as to how it was done.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Greetings all, I have encountered an odd quirk with M2TW's model comments: I have duplicated the Pavise crossbowmen's shield and set the comments so that the duplicate will appear when the unit is in melee (shieldactive0 for the Pavise on the back, shieldpassive0 for the one on the arm).

All is well until you view the unit from a distance, or if the graphics levels are toggled down - the new shield will magically be replaced by the old one. All battle_models entries were replaced with the same models, so it was not a matter of LODs changing.

The bug does not occur with the Ottoman infantry unit in which the comments were copied from.

[AnthoniusII]

When you created your new texture of shields did you save it as dds with MIP maps creation before convert it to texture?????

[Medusa0]

Nope, all textures are vanilla. In fact, I was working in 3ds Max without linking the materials at all since I could not find a way to assign the soldier and weapon textures separately. I am going to try renaming the shields to something other than "pavise passive" to see if it will make a difference.

Edit: Changing the name of the shield fixed the problem, I am updating the name of the thread and the download above so the community can use these updated units. Thanks Anthoniusll for the help.

[the Leper King]

Well done Medusa Pavis Crossbowmen from Sicily have always been my favorite archers but I really wanted them to fight with those nice looking pavise shields. Can you tell me what files are included in the zip file? I'm currently on my phone's browser because my laptop has no connection. I'm fairly new at modding but I'm familiar with most of the data files.

[builder680]

This is very interesting, thanks for sharing it. I've already sent a couple PM's but I should probably ask here as well. Currently, you have meshes for 3 units:

Genoese Crossbowmen
Pavise Crossbow Militia
Pavise Crossbowmen

I'm curious if you plan to also do Mercenary Pavise Crossbowmen and Genoese Crossbow Militia?

Edit: Ignore my question, I just read your op a bit more closely. Tested all (except the Mercenary versions) units and they work great, though I had to copy the Genoese Crossbowmen over the old Genoese Crossbow Militia entries. Very nice work! Testing the Mercenary Pavise Crossbowmen will have to wait, as I can't find any to recruit at the moment.

[Firnafin]

Hello there,

Sorry for the necroposting but an issue as arise when I tried to implement this into my submod :

The shield the pavise crossbowmen uses when in melee are less colorful than when they're on the back, they look greyed out and do not reflect light properly like the rest of the model.

I played with the ambient/diffuse/specular/emissive color in Milkshape 3D but nothing seems to work.

It is not an issue with the colored texture of the attachement, so I'm am wondering if it's linked to the normal texture, but I have no idea how these works

[Louis Lux]

likely a normal map issue.
Upload the normal texture and I'll take a look

[Firnafin]

Well the models uses the vanilla norm texture i.e. final european cb gun_factionname_norm.texture, see attached the one for the genoese crossbowmen (not the genoese crossbowmen militia) :

final european cb gun_milan_norm.rar

[Louis Lux]

The normal map looks a bit weird. Can you upload the diffuse texture as well?

[Louis Lux]

I think it's a problem with the mesh. I think I fixed it let me know if it looks good now. I only applied the fix to one shield and lod0. You can duplicate and move the uvs to make use of the shield variants and merge the new shields with other lods (and other units as necessary).

pavise_crossbowmen_lod0.zip

[Firnafin]

Indeed you fixed it, many thanks.

How have you done it ? It wasn't a normal texture coordinates reassignement.

I'll upload an updated version once I will finish the correction of all model and their lods.

[Louis Lux]

It's a problem with the vertex normals (different from normal maps). I recalculated the normals in milkshape but it still didn't look very good so edited the uv to place a few more seams along hard edges, the result is better looking vertex normals.

It's all a bit technical. I'm one of the few modders that pays attention to vertex normals in milkshape.