I’m trying to texture my firearm in this thread (I should have put it in the works in progress but I didn’t know this was going to be so difficult):
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=99903
The main problem that I have encountered concerns specularity which turns everything into plastic or black lacquer no matter what light types I use or the light and shader settings involved. I was able to come up with a so-so parkerized finish for it but I’m just not happy with that. What I would really like to have is a gun-blued finish that viewers will be able to see the machine marks in like this:
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The problem here is that this is not a texture at all. That’s ribbed geometry. That cylinder alone cost me 265,216 verts to create so I can’t really afford the billion or so verts which would be required to render the model, plus I would probably go insane trying to match the scale of the ribs to the different parts of the weapon which have either none or varying levels of subsurf. This model has a LOT of parts!
This is the problem that I’m having with a procedural wood texture because it only looks good at certain distances or image scales:
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This image looks about half as good as the ribbed geometry at 75% scale but here at 50% it just looks awful.
Does anyone have any idea of how I might be able to go about this in a manner that’s not going to fry my brain with tedium in the process? If anyone could tell me how I might scale the procedural texture in the nodes beyond the default limit of plus or minus 10 then I can probably figure out the rest from there. As it stands the default scaling parameters are grossly inadequate for this to work. Thanx, Rambo