I am making a RTS game, and I have made me a low poly spaceship, and my designer has also made me a spaceship...but I am afraid to say he can't texture very well, and neither can I!
Nothing I do seems to look good. It could be my model I suppose, its nothing flash, but I am wondering just how you guys make good looking textures for your models? Is there some special tricks or methods?
Any tutorials on the subject would be great too, I can't seem to find any that are useful.
I made the ship with anim8or, and I was trying to make my texture in photoshop.
an image of the ship can be found here if that will help you help me.
http://i134.photobucket.com/albums/q90/esaptonor/spaceship.jpg
thanks for your help,
esaptonor
Posts
I don't know anything about the app you're using, but hopefully you can break the surface down for UVs? Or planar project a map on to the work and then work with verts and faces to get your scaling right?
As for HOW to do all of this... decide which sounds less painful...: create the art, project it on, adjust verts and faces, or flatten/rip/base/etc UV page, render base page with UV outlines, open in Photoshop, paint away.
Think long and hard about resolution. A co-worker just rendered a full size airship with a single 256... so you don't have to go insane on res. I would go 1024 largest if this is going to get really damn close to camera. You said RTS, so maybe 512 max.
You may get some advice about using photos... I'd avoid that at all cost. Use the information in the photos, not photos themselves. That's a whole other ballgame though.
Assuming that you're with me this far, can post more specific stuff later on...
Anim8or does not appear to be able to do what you said in terms of putting the map onto the model...i just select a face, then click uv, then proceed to line up the texture to where i want it on the face.
I think i have that stuff pretty sorted, unless there is an easier way or something....its the actual creating of the texture and making it look good that is the problem. I want it to look as good as possible, so 1024 seems like the logical choice....games these days are using 2048 for actors, and a ship is as important in this game...but 1024 seems good.
What are the secrets to getting a texture to look good? to actually look realistic like every single ship in the gallery seems to have! I was getting frustrated as no matter what i did, the texture didn't look that good when it was on the model. It looked papery sometimes and it just didn't look realistic. So any help in the creating of the texture department would be very much appreciated.