I’ve been working on various mechanical things in blender and want to give them good uv mapped textures instead of random generic mechanical textures like I usually use. My guess is I’d need to work with gimp or something, but I don’t know how. If anyone could offer a suggestion or point me to some gimp tutorials, I’d be much abliged.
The homepage is a good place to start, it has tutorials and the user manual. I wish the user manual could be downloaded separate though:
Definitely start out at the gimp home page, but definitely get to the GuG for their tutorials. Some nice metal stuff there, especially the “Scott Effect” if you need rust or corrosion. I believe the GuG tutorials are on the page osxrules gave, but felt they were worth mentioning specifically.
You can download “Grokking the Gimp”
http://gimp-savvy.com/BOOK/index.html
You used to be able to download the manual from:
ftp://manual.gimp.org/pub/manual/
but that looks to be offline now.
Yeah, I haven’t been able to connect to GUM, manual.gimp.org, for at least several weeks now.
Also, both manual.gimp.org and book at gimp-savvy.com are written for pre-2.0 gimp. There is still useful information in them, but there are lots of changes and additions in gimp 2.0.
If you install gimp2.0’s help system, you get much more online help than has been available in the past. The coverage is far from complete and not as complete as the Grokking or GUM books though.
You might be able to get to the GUM book via http://www.archive.org/
Another good site for tutorials is http://www.gimpguru.org/ The tutorials on this site are geared towards photo processing, not texture manufacture, but many good gimp techniques are covered.