[Ryx]

I've made some progress, as you can see, but there must be some good way of getting a good pic with edges into PS. That would make it so much easier to make the textures.
I could also take a few pointers on how to texture angled bits good (Engine things).

Any tips (for MAX if possible) that might make life a little easier?

[Nico]

only way I know of is either to make a render of the ship with wireframe mapping, or take a screenshot of the user viewport or the UVW unwrapper if you use it.

[wEvil]

Looks fine to me - unfortunately Potatoshopping and UVW Unwrap are the only ways of effective mapping an object.

Its all handwork (you can tell I don't bother most of the time though!)

[Nico]

Originally posted by wEvil
Looks fine to me - unfortunately Potatoshopping and UVW Unwrap are the only ways of effective mapping an object.

Its all handwork (you can tell I don't bother most of the time though!)

lol, i wonder how I did so far w/o potatoshopping (photoshop?) and unwrapper till today

[wEvil]

Probably by being clever about how you modelled the object and the texture you were applying.

Still...box texture supports can only make something look so reasonable, after that its all by hand.  and bloody boring it is doing that too (specially because UVW unwrap in MAX is a little clunky....*dreams of sotimage XSI's texture editor*)

[Nico]

up till the, I used mostly planar mapping on a few selected poly, with just playing with the planar gizmos, and yes, it's a big work and a pain, sometimes.

[aldo_14]

Personally, I seperate up the model into regions (of faces) (obv. not literally break it up, just assign the faces).  then I apply a UV map (planar) to each face, and use the UVUnwrap tool to move it outside the material square - so it doesn;t overlap with the next reiogn...i keep on doing this until every face is mapped, and then I select the whole model, and use the UVUnwrap tool to manipulate it all so the faces are nicely grouped.

I then convert to obj (no texture exporter for max, y' see), and use UVWrapper to save the template of the ships UV.

normally I make symmetrical models - so I can half them and simply mirror the texture (cut in half, uvmap, mirror and rejoin).  Like for the :V: models in FS2.

If you look for an old post I made (quitea few months ago) on the main HLp forum ,someone posted a load of neat links... actually, i though it was you (?)

As for drawing the maps, it's hard to really give a good method... I tend to seperate it into coloured sections, overlay hull lines, then shade them 'in' to get the base hull.  then I just add all sorts of crap on top of it.

i.e; (in order, downsized from 1024x1024) - last pic is unfinished, but this shows the buildup of details

[Ryx]

Originally posted by aldo_14
...someone posted a load of neat links... actually, i though it was you (?)

Yeah, that was me.
Ok, I have some things to try out, Thanks!

[Ryx]

Originally posted by aldo_14
Personally, I seperate up the model into regions (of faces) (obv. not literally break it up, just assign the faces).  then I apply a UV map (planar) to each face, and use the UVUnwrap tool to move it outside the material square - so it doesn;t overlap with the next reiogn...i keep on doing this until every face is mapped, and then I select the whole model, and use the UVUnwrap tool to manipulate it all so the faces are nicely grouped.

I then convert to obj (no texture exporter for max, y' see), and use UVWrapper to save the template of the ships UV.

But you it's the MAX model you map right?

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by Ryx


But you it's the MAX model you map right?

Yep.  I only use UVWrapper to export the template... which, unfortunately, seems to have a lot of side effects (flips every poly, duplictaes vertices - luckily, PCS removes the degenerates, and I've not had any stability probs so far)

[Ryx]

On to the next question.

The map for the fighter/Bomber got smeared pretty badly, when I changed the tex res from 1400x1400 to 256x256.

What is the ideal map size, when your making the tex?

[wEvil]

I'd use 512x512, for most games.

anything larger will start to stretch the fillrate and memory bandwidth of most graphics cards  (512x512x32bpp= number of bits n the image / 8 = image size in bytes.  Then you have to essentally copy the texture for each face, without a clever algorythm or two which to my knowledge, only powerVR and 3dlabs use)

[Ryx]

Originally posted by wEvil
I'd use 512x512, for most games.

When you create the map, do you keep it at 512x512, or do you, like I did, draw on a higher res map and then reduce the size to 512 (or whatever)?

[Bobboau]

I generly make my textures at twice the resolution I am going to keep them at.

[Ryx]

Ok, next Q.

Where to find a good tut on how to do maps in ps or psp?

My own attempts suck real bad. My google searches have not provided any links, that were any good.