Art for Total War - Terminology

Introduction

This is meant as somewhat of an overview about many aspects of art for the Total War games. Its intended towards new modders but I hope experienced modders can take things from this as well. It is not intended as a tutorial or "how-to" for anything specifically, it is meant to provide overview and grounding for different areas of 3D art and modding.

Fortunately for the entire community, modding TW art-wise is easy. The specs are low, the meshes are similar, the texture layouts are nice and straight, and the content of the mods is somewhat limited. For the beginning artist, especially those without proper training, this means you can still achieve quite a lot without much art skill or experience.

Terminology

If you're not familiar with computer/game art, some terms may seem alien. Here follows a basic overview of common terms in alphabetical order. If you are new to 3D, then it would be useful to familiarise yourself with these terms.

Modelling

Binding

The process of assigning vertices to bones. The vertices take on a child relationship according to their weight (between 0 and 1) to the bone, which acts as the parent. Also called weighting, painting weights, or incorrectly called rigging.

Bone

Object that vertices of the model are attached to.

Child

An object that inherits its transformations from its parent object, and can move independently as well. (3ds Max)

Hierarchy

Series of parent-child relationships. (3ds Max)

Parent

Controls the transformation of its children. When you move, rotate, or scale a parent, the child objects behave accordingly, using the parent's pivot point as their own. (3ds Max)

Polycount

Correctly refers to the number of triangles in a model.

Polygon

A polygon is a 3D surface connecting 3 or more vertices.

Quad, Quadrilateral

A 3D surface connecting 4 vertices. A quad is composed of two triangles.

Rig

The system by which animators manipulate bones that animate the character. It also incorrectly refers to the binding or weighting of a character.

Skeleton

A hierarchy of bones that create the armature for animation of a character.

Tri, Triangle

3D surface connecting 3 vertices. All 3D surfaces are broken down into triangles.

Vertex

Node point in 3d space.

Weighting

See binding. Also called painting weights.

Textures

.dds, Direct Draw Surface

A compressed texture file, the format Total War games use for unit textures and more.

Gloss map

see Specular map.

Normal map

Displays the "bumps" on a surface. They have an overall blue color (128, 128, 256 RGB to be exact).

Resolution

Concerning art, usually refers to the size of a texture, in pixels. All texture sizes must be in a power of 2 (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096).

Specular map

This controls the highlights, or shine, on a surface.

.texture

CA's proprietary texture format (.dds file with header added)

.tga, Targa

An uncompressed texture file, which means the image does not lose any detail when it is saved (in comparison to something like a jpeg) which can have all sorts of artifacts. Its file size is also very large, and thus not often used for display of real-time content.