A minor update on the progress on creating the workflow pipeline that allows everyone to contribute to supporting PBR shaders.
We've been looking into doing a few units and noticed that there are various issues, not just related to textures but sometimes also related to the mesh itself. After tweaking away yesterday evening together with @Degulum and @thekodecs we managed to produce the following image. On the left is the old factory (tech 2 support) with all sorts of issues and on the right is the new factory (tech 3 support) with the majority of the issues fixed:
Now that is looking crisp!
The reason the factory on the left is so messed up is because the game 'smooths' properties between welded vertices, and a lot of vertices in the UEF land factories are welded together. This should only be the case if the surface is recently similar, e.g. a flat surface can have welded vertices but on a 90 degree edge the vertices should be split.
This is a trivial operation to do in Blender, but it also means that some units cannot be fixed with just adjusting the textures. And that pushes the skill requirements to help contribute for quite a few units.
On the other end, we also managed to simplify things. There is now an easy-to-use branch (we'll talk more about those later) that allow you to find all the necessary files and immediately preview changes in-game. It also allows you to inspect various properties by changing a few characters in the shader.
With thanks to @thekodecs we have a first example video on how to approach this. We've learned from this video, and this weekend we'll be making more videos to assist you through the process. The videos on their own should help you each step of the way, but as a lot of you are not programmers by nature we'll also be introducing help sessions. During these sessions we can help you through any issue you have on the process with the exception of doing the actual work - as I am a programmer and not a texture artist. I can't help you with the work itself, only with the workflow surrounding the work.
I hope the majority of you are still as eager as us to get started with this project - the results are promising - it is just a matter of time at this point!
@sodisodisodi I'll respond in more detail later this weekend on your message!