Apparentlly, textures and plain material colors work well with BZII

[BNG Da BZ Fool]

I found that not every object in an XSI model need to be textured to in the game. I made a jeep looking unit with twin guns on a turret and used both textures and plain material colors from the mat editor in TS 7.6. Most of the model is textured, but the guns and cockpit object use only plain mat colors and look just fine ingame.

[OvermindDL1]

Technically no part of an XSI model needs a texture, but they do need material entries.  Materials define the look, which may or may not include a texture.  A texture is just one possibility as there are other options there as well, just not any other supported by BZ2 (shaders and such).
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[BNG Da BZ Fool]

What are the other possibilities? Textures, being one common one in BZII. I also notice that transparent non textured materials are also supported. Could anyone please elaborate a bit on other types that are supported by the game. I have tons of ideas floating around in my tiny little brain. Stuff like transparent eyeball turrets and other exotic unit enhancements. I suppose that more organic looking units are possible like simulated head based turrets with another turret based eyeball type or maybe a tentacle based turret configuration. Mostly though I'd interested in other visually based presentations using a combination of textures and material based methods that BZII can render to make units...um look different. Do you guys know what I mean? Does BZII support vertex coloring as this is one of the save options when exporting X models out of TS 7.6, but I don't have a clue whether or not to export the vertex colors along with the textures and such. Tanks, BNG.

[OvermindDL1]

The texture supplies color and alpha information for the drawn pixels of the mesh.  The material is a global alteration of the drawn pixels of the mesh, applying the transforms it does to the texture.  The material holds information like alpha, color, specular, etc...
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