The thing with the UV skins and UEngine 1 (solution thread)

[Creavion]

I guess a lot of modders and mappers among you have asked yourself in the past why your UVs/Textures/Skins for 3D Models were sometimes partly offset.
It is pretty much an unrevealed "secret" for most I think. Rumours are saying, the 3D Model needs to fit into a 256³ cube or may only use textures up to 256 pix resolution. Both rumours are wrong I would say!
Today I also did spend some hours with a stupid banana palm to get it working for UT1 (ripped from UT2004, since I suck with authentic Palm tree modelling so far).

Object of desire:

A lot of obstacles crossed my way, until I finally succeeded at the end.
First problem: The static mesh uses a palm texture which is NOT wrapped, but clamped.

By switching the ClampMode the changes are clearly visible, aah and it is still ut2004 here, just saying to avoid confusing reactions.

Default Epic Games UEngine 1 (means oldunreals patches are not included) only has wrap texture mode (texture repetition). UT2003 introduced a second mode, called clamp, which was very useful in cases like the upper one and of course in case of SKYBOXES. Instead to display the pixels at the edges from the opposite side clamp repeats the border pixels in the corresponding direction and border (in photoshop you can fake this clamp effect with "Repeat Edge Pixels"). So, long story short, since we do not have this effect available for UEngine 1, we have to help ourself with other methods.

This certain static mesh can not be converted to a brush, it results in an instant editor crash (still ut2004):

BTW: The error text is BS, I have 8 GB RAM! And it does not know Win 7.... of course not.

umodel and Actor X importer plugin for the win:
http://www.gildor.org/en/projects/umodel
umodel is pretty much the most useful ripping tool, if you need something from an uengine game (supporting nearly 100 UEngine games, starting from Unreal until the recent uengine game addition "Mass Effect 3"). However, better do not rip of stuff from a non-epic-games-game, if you do not want to get in trouble, assumed you want to use the content and not only learn something via reserve engineering.
It is not that comfortable as like the Unreal Tournament package tool, but it just supports more stuff and the UTPT development has been stopped ages ago.
So, here imported the already mentioned palm tree object from the pskx file.

3D Modelling programs do not care for texture clamping AFAIK. This is an game engine thing anyway... AFAIK!!!!

[Creavion]

Second part:
I edited the leaves as like displayed in the following, however it should not be enough!

Via Unwrapping of the UV you can see how a such leaf looks from its polygon/edge/vertex adjustment.

UVwrong01.jpg (27.7 KiB) Viewed 450 times

After so much talking before here comes now the most important part. Some UV parts are standing out of the "displayed texture" box, each in the top right and the bottom left corners.

Such UVs resulted in a shitty palm as like displayed here:

No need for futher explanations, I think. Everybody sees, this is utterly wrong!

Since I already had some normally and correctly looking vegetation prepared, I figured the only reason for this bug could be these outstanding UV parts outside of the box.

UV05.jpg (30.95 KiB) Viewed 450 times

The UV limitation however sucks. In some cases you would have to do great changes for your UV map.

Well and with the upper displayed UV skin the palm tree finally looked right! Mission finished! Very sure, this is the only thing you have to take care of. Texture resolution does not matter, the leaf has 512² pix. An other model (a nalifruit remake) for my map even uses a 1024² skin and also looks right within UT. So that`s it!

[Dr.Flay]

Very useful guide, as we are trying to squeeze more out of the old engine.
Well presented, and easy to follow.

There are a bunch more palm trees I found in one of the other odd deco packs.
I keep meaning to do some "planting" to get some screenshots, and give you a list, so you can see if you've got/used them.
Will poke around my UT99 backups later.

[Creavion]

Image editing and 3D Modelling knowledge of course is required. But maybe it really is of some help for the one or other around here.