I may have over looked it somewhere here but im working on a model of the Enterprise-C and while the flat textures look good anything at a angle like the registry or anything else thats at an angle looks like crap up close when rendered im using a 4k x 4k BMP as the texture any help or advise would be appreciated oh im using 3ds max 2009 and Photoshop CS5 if that helps any
YOu can stencil/cut them into the hull. If not set the blur setting on the texture map to something really low instead of the default 1.0 Say .1 or so. I would also use something other than BMP, say PNG etc Least then you can ustilize 256 alpha.
Not sure if that was part of MKF's tutorial or not, but if you cut them in on a separate object hovering just slightly above the hull, you can easily switch it for a different registry
Posts
cutting hull reg tut here:
http://madkoifish.wordpress.com/2009/06/04/modeled-registriestestdecals/