Question about texturing

[Animal Mother]

I would not call myself a modelling genius at this stage, it was difficult enough just to get a cylinder and its node_collider to work as it should, but as I slowly progress I also want to practice my artistic flair, so I can get a fully working and textured asset as soon as possible

I have been interested in the texturing side and, with Tiberion I have managed to export my UV map (though I need time to unwrap a perfect UV). I started with paint (God help us all) and now I have moved on to Artweaver3.0 Free and liking the artistic styles I can apply with that, though as you would expect I still need practice.

The question I wanted to ask is are there any art packages out there that have an array of geometry and measurement tools? The reason I ask it becuase I want to place rivets equally across a part and have seams placed across the craft. Whilst I mentioning this, can KSP take Normal Maps yet, or is the feature still deactivated?

[dt890]

when building your uv map try to unwrap so that its only straight lines.

so that every surface is rectangular straight 90° angles or as close as possible.(this excludes circles)

it is a hard process that needs you to cut the shapes using mark seam. <--- this need you to have blender as 3d modeling program. Any other program will you have to look up on the internets my friend.

And for photo editing programs i would recommend gimp.

gimp is in style with photoshop but is free and will allays be free.

uv mapping tutorial(blender):

part2:

[Misterspork]

Wait, you have the modelling down already, right? You just want to make better textures?

Well, here are a couple suggestions:

GIMP: Basically free photoshop, big learning curve. Best for improving images rather than creating them, like Photoshop, but you can still make some pretty cool stuff from scratch. My avatar was made entirely in GIMP.

paint.NET: Sort of a mix between Microsoft paint and GIMP, but you aren\'t going to make anything spectacular with this. Slight learning curve, but pretty simple. Good for making simple textures and then improving them with an image manipulation tool.