Slowly but surely I’m learning Blender (I think!). I’m quite confident with the majority of modelling techniques so have now turned my attention to texturing! At the moment I’m having fun with image maps (colour and bump) and have produced the following space probe/droid bubble ship thing!
To do this I modelled each part of the ship individually (for simplicity) and just stuck it together (not as one mesh though). I’ve read a few of the tutorials on uv mapping and unwrapping but it doesn’t sit well with me. If you texture using the face select mode how can you add more than one image to make it ‘bump’?
I’d also be very grateful if anyone could give me a few tips on lighting a space scene as I intend to animate this and maybe blow it up! 8) The problem being what lights to use, where to use them and how lights cope when the ship is in flight!?!? At present when I animate the ship flying I make the lights fly with it, which looks lame!
Textures look very nice. A little over saturated in the orange and yellow parts for my taste though.
I’m not sure what you mean when you ask this:
If you texture using the face select mode how can you add more than one image to make it ‘bump’?
Do you mean, how do you apply a bump map along with the colour map? If so, jsu add a new texture channel and add the image in greyscale and then turn COL off and then turn the NOR button on. That should do what I think you are looking for.
For the uv mapping for more than 1map
Just “unwrap” your mesh. When it’s setupped right in the uv window then just go in material menu, add a new material blabla, add a texture, then in the material menu. Click UV instead of ORCO…and set this texture as your color map. Then add a new texture, and click UV instead of Orco again, then set this texture as a bump map (nor) and voila! you got 2uv mapped texture on the baby Hope it was clear…
As for the lighting in space,
Well, this depend if you’re going to be near a planet or moon or sun, but habitually you got 1strong light in space which is the nearest star. So I would suggest maybe using a sun type ligh and using raytraced shadow for it. Then maybe add some very very low energy blueish lamp on the other side so the shadow created by the sun lamp are a bit less dark (that is if a planet is on the other side, so the light bounce off the planet and hit back the spaceship from behind…). If it’s only flying in deep space with nothing around. The shadow SHOULD be very very very very very dark.
Don’t know if you are going for realistic textures here. If you are, try adding some hardness to your specularity. It makes the light reflected from the material more concentrated at one spot.
If you are going for a more cartoonish feeling, IMO this succeeds trmendously. I could see this thing flying around in Futurama. That was the first thing I thought. I guess you can take that however you want. That’s a cool design, and I like the textures. If you want it look more realistic, a lot more little details on the texture would help. Try going to http://www.blenderwars.com and downloading their bwing, the one that looks dirty. Those are some excelent and realistic textures IMO.
Well, when I did art at school I could always draw a good cartoon but never a real-life still of a coke can. I’m happy to stick with the cartoon style as that’s what I’m good at and you may as well play to your strengths IMO!
I just wanna make a few good models of ships and have them fight and blow up! I’ve done some test animations of other space stuff but the models are naff!
If you fancy a laugh have a look at the following video clips… They’re all WMVs no bigger than 600KB.
Each face only has one texture mapping (a (U,V) pair for each vertex), but that mapping could be used for more than one texture on that face’s material.
I really like the design. Like resident spaceship master X-Warrior says, use a sun lamp and very dark shadows (or use a small area lamp for slightly soft shadows). At the moment it does look a bit odd there is no difference at all in shading, but that’s my only real crit.
i would say that this pretty nice work for being some of your first uv work. love the style and shape, you could do some nice models and characters and really have somthing with this, keep up the good work
Hey, I__ like your ship, Elye_Ball. I think your color texture is well-painted and applied. Getting it to map properly in areas like this shows cleverness, I think.
About making a bump texture: it looks like you might be using the TexFace button to color your model. You can do this instead by making an image texture set to UV mapping an applied to any material attribute, like color, bump, specularity, etc.
Hope it was clear…