[WraithHost]

Well I've textured the Zenith. but I'm not to happy with the results. How do you get such great textures on your models?
Looking at you Aldo14/dark/sushi.

 

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Phil.
  Trust In Me &
  Fall As-well

[Sushi]

I'm glad you like my texturing.  

Well, I ripped all of my textures out of the FS2 Sparky.vp file. I used Irfanview to modify the colors and brightness levels a bit, but I didn't even try textures from scratch. Then, I just slapped the ones I thought I'd use together into one 256x256 bitmap and got to work with the 3DS-MAX UVUnwrap modifier while I had it, and later Lithunwrap- both worked great, although Lith is actually a bit more flexible.

From there, it was just selecting faces and moving the coords around the bitmap until I liked what I saw. I'm no expert.  

All I can suggest is to vary your textures a bit more, and try to take advantage of the fact that you're using tiling to increase the resolution a bit- fewer, higher res triangles that you tile. If you do that, though, you may need more than one bitmap.  

Good luck!

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Sushi- the OTHER white meat!

Accelerate your game-Velocity Mod
Sushi's Freespace Zone-Future home of loads of cool stuff.

[Stryke 9]

I like it the way it is! The new, QUILTED fighter- absorbs more damage then the standard fighter!

OK, I'm being mean, sorry. I can't figure out this texturinfg stuff anyway.

[DragonClaw]

Do venom's way... take a render of the ship from the side and "paint" it... and there's your texture.. just UV it onto the ship in X,Y,Z axis(diff. textures)

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   -Fleet Admiral of The Ancients Armada

         

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[CptWhite]

i can only refer you to skullars tutorial for truespace 4.2

 http://freespace.volitionwatch.com/babylon  - go to "guidelines"

took me about 1 week to feel fully comfortable with texturing.  add a couple more weeks to iron out things i might have been doing wrong and generally going "oooo so thats what was going wrong"  now i'm pretty comfortable with the whole process.

just e-mail me if you have any problems.  btw you really should only use truespace for texturing, call me arrogant but pof constructor suite is all based around truespace so i feel its the safetest bet......yeah you can use other programs...but everything is capable of being done in truespace (sharlin was on the other thread)

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[Stryke 9]

Nah. I use RDS and it works more or less fine. And I have the TS5 demo, not TS4, so I don't think that'll help (everything really is different...)

[aldo_14]

Personally, I use a program called Lithunwrap which takes the model and creates a BMP template from it, and applies UV mapping to it (need to save as 3ds Format to preseve this).

Then I can create a single map from this  tmeplate (which covers all the sides), and use Paintshop to draw onto it, so I end up with a single map covering all the fighters' surfaces.... normally I also cut and paste stuff from the original   textures as well.

Finally, the map I generate (512x512) will be auto-downsized by the FS2 engine... so I cut it into exact quarters, set both the U & V reps in TS to 2 and apply the texture quarters individually at a time - this is a bit tricky, but gives a better look to the model.  If you ever d/l one of my models you can see what I mean by playing about with it in ModelView.

[WraithHost]

Thanks for the advice,
I've tried UV unwrapping in 3dsMax but it doesn't create a template image like you say Lith does. I think I'll try using lith to create a template. Then I'll map onto it from 3dsMax. I'm not sure quite what you do with the map once you've split it 4 ways as uv unwrapp uses only 1 map I think. More details on this last stage would be nice  

I think part of the problem is that I just can't draw   maybe I need a ghost texturer.

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Phil.
  Trust In Me &
  Fall As-well

[aldo_14]

 

Originally posted by WraithHost:
Thanks for the advice,
I've tried UV unwrapping in 3dsMax but it doesn't create a template image like you say Lith does. I think I'll try using lith to create a template. Then I'll map onto it from 3dsMax. I'm not sure quite what you do with the map once you've split it 4 ways as uv unwrapp uses only 1 map I think. More details on this last stage would be nice  

I think part of the problem is that I just can't draw   maybe I need a ghost texturer.

Well, I start off with a 512x512 map, which I alter.  The FS2 engine will reduce this map, so I'd lose some of the clarity.  so I load the map into Paintsho, and use the 'crop' tool to make it into quarters.

Now, I load the model up in TS5... this is the saved 3ds model, so the UV is preserved.  First I map it with the large (uncut) map, and make some renders for refence.  Then, I load up one of the texture quarters in Ts, and set both the U and V reps to 2.  

Firstly, I fill the whole object with the map... this means that 3 quarters oif the model will look wierd, but one part won't, so this is fine.  Then i need to load up each remaining quarter in turn, and apply it to the appropriate parts of the model in turn.

This is quite time consuming, and the odd error occurs, but it allows me to use a larger, higher quality map.

Go to http://uk.goecities.com/gunnery_control  , and download either the Firehawk or Claynmore fighter.  Look at it in modelview and select on/off textures.  also look at the indiv. maps, compared to the whole maps (i.e. firehawk01b) and you'll be able to figure out what i mean.

Theer are better ways to do this, but this is the one i use.


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