Hi everyone,
There are a few older tutorials about the subject - an excellent one by Tobias Richter on this site but none of the pictures show up anymore - and one on an old site called Meshweaver, but I was wondering if anyone would mind talking me through their hull panel techniques please?
I really suck at texturing and would appreciate any help at all.
Thank you
check LewisNevin's galaxy thread, he has a current tutorial on one of the last pages about exactly how he aztecs the surface of his ship's saucer. The principle is the same everywhere.
For the shield lines, there's a few methods out there. The usual method is to draw the shield lines as a seperate object around your hull and use a project tool like blender's knife project to cut the geometry into your hull shape. After that bevel the new cut to the width you want and extrude along normals to give it depth.
I happened to have stumbled on this tutorial today and realized that it can be adapted to work for an aztec pattern. It takes some creativity and finesse, but I'm so far happy with the results.
I had done models using the old Aztec tutorials and techniques I found online...probably some of the same ones you found. (Haven't seen the above-mentioned Galaxy thread yet.) On my current Ambassador project, I wound up doing one thing very differently: The tutorials had all suggested creating the square version of the Aztec pattern in your photo editor, then converting to polar coordinates. I'm using GIMP, and I found that the polar coordinate conversion made things very fuzzy all over the pattern. The pixelation was noticeable on the model. Instead, I kept the texture rectangular and did the conversion to polar with the UV mapping in Blender. I used cylindrical projection on the saucer, lined up the vertices manually. It was more labour-intensive, but the resulting pattern is nice and sharp.
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For the shield lines, there's a few methods out there. The usual method is to draw the shield lines as a seperate object around your hull and use a project tool like blender's knife project to cut the geometry into your hull shape. After that bevel the new cut to the width you want and extrude along normals to give it depth.
Current Projects:
Ambassador Class