Textures. . . . .

[BlazingAngel665]

I have been working on a Delta IV project just for kicks and was looking at doing textures in a "stock" fashion. I have absolutely 0 experience with texturing or texturing programs (don't even know what would be good to use) all I know is that Blender is almost useless for effective texturing, or that I am doing it all wrong. Any suggestions that could be given on how to texture a part once you get it into a good UV map would be greatly appreciated.

~Subnote, if someone wants to work with me on texturing this thing shoot me a PM.

EDIT: In case you are interested

It isn't optimized yet, the colliders are still missing as are the payload fairings. I also hope to do a custom radial decoupler and launch clamp.

Edited May 29, 2013 by BlazingAngel665

[electronicfox]

Everyone has their favourite program for texturing. I use Photoshop myself. I'm not sure how it works in Blender but any 3D package should allow you to export your UV map as an image file, from there its just a case of opening that image in whatever program you choose and painting over it. One tip is to have one of the stock-piece textures open too for some colour-picking.

[BlazingAngel665]

Everyone has their favourite program for texturing. I use Photoshop myself. I'm not sure how it works in Blender but any 3D package should allow you to export your UV map as an image file, from there its just a case of opening that image in whatever program you choose and painting over it. One tip is to have one of the stock-piece textures open too for some colour-picking.

How do you open up the .mbm files? I wasn't aware that they were usable outside of KSP. I already have the UV unwrap as a file, I just am having difficulty making textures that don't look like complete and utter crap.

[Nuke]

i use shop. i only recently moved up to cs3 (before that i used photoshop 7). id hate to switch to something else because i know the interface and many of the keyboard shortcuts. if i didnt have any previous knowledge id use some open source utilities. for modeling i use max9.

regardless of the tools used, the process is pretty much the same:

create model

uv map model

export template

import template to a paint program

color it in

save to a texture file

use texture on model

im assuming you got passed uv mapping. if your paint program does layers (such as using psd for photoshop), they help. never ever flatten them. when your are ready to import stuff to unity, then you export to png or whatever and keep your image in its original format. if you need to make revisions, go back to the unflattened texture. some more artistic people are good at overdrawing, but i am not. what i like to do is go into photoshop with a blank canvas, draw a bunch of random crap and play with filters to make some fill patterns. photoshop also has styles which i also make extensive use of. not to mention brushes, shapes, swatches, etc. i have a massive collection of assets that ive built up over the years which makes my texturing a much easier job. of course ive seen some really good texture artists who can with just a brush make some really impressive textures, i even seen one guy print out the uvw template and then pencil in textures, scan them back in and use those, to great effect. some of them will go out into the world with a camera, photograph some materials, and use those for fill patterns. thing here to remember is build up art assets, even if they suck, you might find a use for them one day.

to start out section off some of the poly groups and fill them in with a color that is about what you want that to be. i keep my template on the background layer and create a new one on top of it and work in there. you can use fill patterns, layer styles, or if you dont have anything you can try adding noise and bluring, smudging, burning, whatever, play with airbrushes. noise and motion blur are useful for making metallic or stone textures.

once you got a basic fill then you start adding details, like rivets, burn marks, caution stripes, text, things like that. just keep throwing down layers until you like the results.