Been working on this, on and off, for quite awhile. It's the first monster ship I ever tried to build.
As you likely guessed, it's based on the Mercury class battlestar. In my Aurora 4x game, my empire
was finally able to build them, so this is a Terran Battlestar, hence the minor differences. The Imperium
is more advanced than the Colonies, so the weapons are slightly different.
Now, some advice from those who HAVE built monster ships like these, or the Star Destroyers of Star Wars fame.
How DO you color these massive ships? As you can see in the second pic, it took two UV maps just to map the
hammerhead armour plates. I really don't think textures will work with something so big. How do you color YOUR
own ships?
Eric
aka Starkiller
Posts
As for the textures, for starters, that UV is very loosely packed. You can definitely fit more pieces there. And then, how much detail you want out of those textures? If the texture is 2048x2048, you can't fit much more. But if you are working with 4096, you can make those pieces smaller and fit more in. At the same time, nothing wrong with multiple maps. Unless this is for a game engine. Then you need to do as few textures as possible.
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For the details, like Viper said, more and bigger textures with your UV islands closer together.
If the engine you're using isn't fussy about mirrored UV's you could also map the right and left side the same (assuming the would also look the same)
What I also do with large models for a game engine (I make cargo and navy ships for virtual training), is to add a 2nd or 3rd tiling texture on another UV set to give you that extra detail when going close in with the camera.
It's much neater than the unwrap tool, just need to make sure the camera is at 90 degrees from the piece
you're mapping.
It's not for a game engine, not at 980,000+ polys and counting. heh. My textures are usually 3000x3000 pixels.
I need it for close in work, so a tiling tex is likely the way to go. ^_-
Ah, good to know. I'll check Modo out since I see a trial version is available. I've been using a simple and free version of UVMapper. Tiny pocket sized unwrapper with simple functionality in a 576kb exe file. Seems to do okay-ish. I understood it a lot better than Blender's native unwrapper, unfold3D, 3D-Coat, or some others I've tried.
For high resolution work, 3k is kinda small actually. I'm going to output the textures for my Constitution at 8k and downsize as needed. And just use as many as you need to get the result you want. Of course, you need more memory to render all those textures. Especially if you are doing PBR.
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Your videocard will upscale it internally to 4096x4096 anyway so it won't really matter for you renders, just gives you a little bit more detail to play with.
textures next.
I use Lightwave 2019 and one nice UV mapping feature is that when you mirror image something that's identical on either side of midline it duplicates the UV map image in the exact same UV space as the item that was duplicated. It cuts the space taken up by mapping in half as well as the amount of painting you have to do. Of course the only time this won't work is if there is lettering in the image because it will be backwards (the item has to be flipped 180 degrees). In that case I have to UV map that item or panel separately