There seem to be a lot of spaceships out there. Anyway, while waiting for my latest movie to render, I’m going to make a short animation with two jets/spaecships that fly through a canyonish landscape and one blows the other up. It’s going to be short because I want to try and get as close to “photorealism” as I can. So for the most part, this animation will be modelling and texturing practice. I’ve made one of the spaceships and have unwrapped it and textured it as best I can by drawing a texture in Paint Shop Pro 7. I know it doesn’t look anything like a “real” spaceship, and that is where I’d like some help. I always seem to get jagged edges on my textures, no matter how big of an image I start with.
Here’s two pics of it so far.
(Are there any general pointers for texturing that I need to know? Any great tutorials?)
btw im using psp7 too
the biggest problem is so far that its hard to work on those hellish big textures wich i use (espacialy with my crappy ol pc and low ram)… wich res do ur textures have?
maybe u could describe wich part u want to look like what? (maybe reference pics)
Ah. I was in a hurry when I posted that. I probably should’ve just waited. I was kind of afraid I wasn’t posting enough information.
The “dirt” is actually supposed to be blast marks, or scuff marks, or marks from heavy smoke that he’s flown through. But maybe you knew that and still thought they’re misplaced.
I used the UV exporter script and exported a 1000X1000 image. Is that too small to get the kind of detail I need? I’m guessing it is. Okay, I’ll ask a pretty straightforward question. This is how I unwrapped my model.
After working on the texture for over an hour, I started wondering if I unwrapped it properly. As in, should I have it more open in certain places?
I don’t really have reference pictures, I just want a somewhat simple looking spaceship that has some of that type of panelling that a real jet has. Simple, but one that looks real. (Can that make sense?)
Am I aiming too high, too soon? I’ve been using Blender since October of last year.
well if it should be blast marks maybe more circle/starformed instead of just a black airbrush cloud?
also bumpmapping could give good results
if u want to look in my wip thread… im using 4kx4k textures… espacialy on the bumps u can see the pixels :((
but this is real pain… iv only 500mb ram and one of these big thingys kills 100mb if its completely decompressed… also working with huge amounts of data makes working with a paint program realy ugly
im using blender since more or less 10 or 12 days so i think im not the best person to answer most of ur questions sorry
btw im working since last weekend on those texturestuff u can see in my wip… but i think the most time goes by for finding out what to do so that the result is ok…
however the point is that texturing took yet twice as long as moddeling (ok the model is screwed up on some places wich makes texturing all but not easier)
and everything is uggly espacialy the bumps in the hull however…
with ref pics i meant pics on wich u can see the effects u want to have… not a blueprint or a ship after wich ur moddeling urs
u thanks for your help/tips. I noticed you had your “first WIP” in your sig, checked it out, and saw that you are making a spaceship too! Heh, that was a bit of a shock. I knew spaceships were common, but that was really funny.
Anyway, I finally found the settings I missed. (Oh yeah, duh, what about ratraced reflections?) So I put a half-sphere around my ship, mapped a cloud texture to it, and made one of the textures affect raymir, put some ambient occlusion in, a sun lamp with a slightly yellow tint, and I got this.
It’s still not “photo-realistic” but it’s a lot nearer than it was before in my opinion.
4kX4k? Ah, I was using too small of an image. Well, I think I’ve found all the settings, and texture types. I guess it’s time to go back and re-draw that sucker. I’ve seen your WIP and the textures aren’t pixelated like mine.
As for reference, I did a quick google image search.
Thanks, that’s (some at least) of what I needed to know.
Hey, I’m re-drawing my textures at 4000X4000. And the bitmaps I use are 50 megs! Is there a way to use multiple layers in an image and have them affect the texture as seperate images? As in, have the first layer affect the bumpmap, the second layer affect the color, the third the ref., and so on.
decompressed they should be around 100 megs… if u use 24bit color
and nope afaik blender dosnt support layered imageformats like photoshop or psp format
Multiple layers are done int he texture button under the “map input” tab, IIRC.
(not at a computer ATM.) your UV mapping is using “col”… other ones are “emit” (black shaded normally) --> white (will have no shadows), spec, (white will show up as shinier) and normal, (black lines will bump up, 128,128,128 gray is neutralm white lines will show up as grooves)… so if you make grey scale UV maps for these, you will start to get a nice effect.
Blanders default blend mode for these textures work for me at the moment, so don’t worry how blender would mix these four texture types, just play and see!
NeOmega: I meant, can I have multiple layers in the same image affect the spec, bump, etc, as if they were seperate images. Thanks, though. I’ve completely redone the textures. I’m trying to use only procedurals, just for a fun challenge. (And because I don’t quite have the space right now for multiple 100+ meg texture images.) I haven’t worked on it the past few days, since I was finishing up my most recent animation project, but so far I’ve gotten this.
The environment isn’t finished yet, and I just included it so you can see the raymir. The girdwork was fun. I just duplicated the ship’s body, made the material render as wire, deleted the vertecies I didn’t want, and sized along normals a little. (It needs a tad more work.) I had to delete all the faces and put new faces in places where they wouldn’t obscure the original ship’s material. It’s hard to explain without any supplementary images.
Anyway, I can see I’m not going to attain photo-realism, but perhaps I can get a really nice image here. (Which will be in a short animation, however, so perhaps photo-realism is a little far-fetched anyway.)
Thanks,
LGM
(Darn, I forgot to subsurf the canopy in that render. That’s the only reason there’s some jaggedness to it.)
