Normally I make the background of my bump map 50% gray. Panel lines and rivets I draw black > change the layer to multiply > dial down the opacity to 40% or so.
I might do some fasteners in white (to bump them out) and dial the layers opacity down to get the effect that looks good.
Bump maps can look a bit ordinary at extreme close up, its more about how they look with a in flight render.
Keep in mind with 16 bit bump maps, you have to create all the detail in them in 16 bit mode. Converting a 8 bit bump to 16 bit does not work, it won’t look any better than an 8 bit bump map.
Since aircraft are generally symmetrical along the Y-axis, I often make a separate UV map for the bump texture. I only unwrap one half of the plane, then mirror the polygons to the other side. This has the effect of doubling the resolution of your bump map since you are only mapping half of the aircraft. It also cuts your workload in half since you only need to paint rivets and other details once and not twice.
Yes, good point Mark06T. I went back and deleted one side and reapplied the mirror modifier last night. Do you use another UV map for the diffuse textures later, since letters and numbers don’t mirror?
A non-mirrored map of the entire model to be used for diffuse, specular & roughness
Sometimes I create specialized maps for alpha masking or special effects. For example, if the model has a couple sections where modeling holes would mean lots of extra geometry, I make UV maps of just those faces and then take all the other UV faces and shrink them into a point in the UV map. I then use that UV map to create a transparency mask for all the parts that need holes in them. Isolating the map to just the areas that need holes lets you have much higher resolution for the alpha map. It can also save a lot of polygons. For example, the deadlights on my USS Monitor were not modeled. They are created in the shader via an Alpha UV map. The water streaks across the deck were also made from a dedicated UV map. I created a planar projection of just the deck and used that to mask the flowing water.
If you’re not getting the resolution in your UV map that you want, don’t forget that you can use UDIMs to spread your texture across multiple UV spaces.
Hi, I love this F-86D model you created, do you still have it? would you be willing to sell it? I just need it in the OBJ file format so I can bring it to Fusion 360 as a Mesh and convert it to a solid, so I can cut it up and make molds that I can 3d Print and ultimately create a composite flying RC model, I did not want the regular F-86 is too common in RC jets, I love this one is a lot more obscure and has a beautiful shape, let me know if you can help me with this project thank you and awesome work! Regards, James