Wow…it’s been a long time since I’ve made a post on Blender Artists. Apparently, studying to become a Mechanical Engineer takes time lol. I just graduated from OSU. So, I have some free time before I start my exterior design engineer position at Honda. Anyways, I still love Blender and think it’s the best open-source project ever done!
With all that said, I was watching Star Trek Picard S3 recently and it sparked a memory of an older Star Trek project I never finished (College…SolidWorks err lol). That project was recreating the USS Voyager in Blender to the best of my abilities. The one problem I still face is figuring out how to correctly texture this in Blender. Particularly, UV mapping and Texturing for starships. Do you guys know of any resources that could help me finish this project? Thanks for any help!
Think of the textures as a puzzle game. You probably have a reference of the model they did in the show. So you know what the end result should look like. But how did they though about doing what they did? What was their process of thinking?
As far as I can tell this ship was originally made with miniatures and not by computers. So to add a texture to it they probably used some kind of weathering technique. Where they would put a bunch of various mud-looking paints and spread them around using a piece of cloth. This would concentrate more paint in creases and areas that are hard to get to. This is possible to simulate using Ambient Occlusion.
You can start by either baking an Ambient Occlusion map or using an ambient occlusion node in the material editor. And adding a bit of noise to it to make it look a bit more like mud stains. Then you can apply similar kind of thinking that I just demonstrated to other layers of textures on the model.
