British Road Signs

[maxon]

Making new sign heads 
Although the head of the sign is controlled by alpha and that sounds really fancy, it’s not, it’s really simple because I did the alpha work first and it's embedded in the sign object.

Making a new recolour

• Make a recolour in the usual way and extract the existing (Give Way) texture
  
• Take the existing texture into your graphics programme of choice and make a new layer on top
  
• Stick your own design on the new layer (see below first though)
  
• There is a back and front to the sign – the Give Way texture shows you which is which
  
• You can delete the original Give Way layer once you are done, in fact, you should do this if it’s sticking out underneath your own texture at all
  
• Make sure you save the image as a png with a transparent background.  Seriously, that’s it for the file making technical stuff
  
• When you import to your recolour file make sure it’s DXT3 or above so the transparency part works as it should – you can do this on import or change it once it’s done (don’t forget to update all sizes in that case)
  

If you have any trouble with little defects/artefacts in the rendering (solid colours are prone to this, especially red), use the tutorial I linked to in the original post by pforest – it helps you manage and edit the alpha of a png to make it render better.  That tutorial really helped me here

Fitting the texture
What is a little more tricky is the way UVMapper mapped the mesh – I still struggle with mapping and tend to compensate with the texture instead and I did here (sorreeee!).  I really must get to grips with mapping better and might eventually correct this but here’s what you need to do with this mesh right now.

UVMapper stretched the mapping of the sign face to fit the texture size and I still can’t work out how to get it not to do this.  This means if you place a straight image onto the head of the sign (in other words as you want it to appear), it will get distorted in the rendering

The length of the image (top to bottom) needs to be extended by a ratio of 1:1.3434 – that you use the resize option in your graphics programme to distort the image you’re using top to bottom by 1:1.34 or thereabouts for it to render properly in game.  To do this:

• Work out what the size of your image is and resize it (I do this on its own before I bring it in as a new layer to the sign texture) 
  
• The maximum width of the sign texture is 227 pixels resize to that first, keeping the proper proportions of the image intact
  
• Then resize the top to bottom length only by 1:1.34 (take the existing number of pixels it has top to bottom and times it by 1.34343434 (it’s recurring, but 1.34 does it), that’s the size it needs to be.  This stretches your image, of course.  Use a calculator to work out what it needs to be (Windoze has an inbuilt calculator – it will even tell you Hex values if you want it to!*).  You would need to do this for the back too if you have an image there – I didn’t bother because I had a generic metal sheet texture on the back (remember also the back of the sign has brackets round the pole which will obscure an image on the back)
  
• You can then bring this 'corrected' image over to the sign texture and fit it into place on its own layer in the right point in the texture
  

I attach the original texture from UVMapper to show how the sign head is mapped

• basically the mesh of the sign head is a box-rectangle.  I recoloured the front and the back and they are so close together you don’t notice the top/bottom and sides are not coloured
  
• the top/bottom and sides are mapped at the side and bottom of the texture, if you put something over those, you will see it in game.  Remember the mesh is actually rectangular – you won’t get sides to a circle or anything like that
  
• the two large rectangles are the front (left hand side) and back (right) of the sign face.  Your image doesn't have to be a rectangle - you can have anything you like because the object will show only what's in the texture - any transparent bits will be invisible
  

*sorry this is an old beef