Opinions on Texturing

[CluelessModeler]

Hiya Folks, I'm working on the rocket models for the ULA pack, and I just wanted to get an idea of the best way to make really realistic, or at the very least, believable textures for these models.

For as long as I've been piddling, I've found that simply using an external program (photoshop) only allows so much room for giving the illusion of shadows and fine detail. So, I did a little research, and found that most other types of models actually include baking the texture to the model, and using that "render" to determine the shadows and everything else using the geometry/lighting positions etc...

I just wanted to hear a few suggestions from everybody as to how they've accomplished realistic effects and such!

My goal is to provide the community with the best models I can, and any help would be greatly appreciated!!!

[blackheart612]

Yep, baking is a good way.

[700NitroXpress]

If you want an alternative to hand painting everything, you could check out dDo and NDo by Quixel. Using these programs you can have the program do the texturing work for you and generate the AO, diffuse, spec, color, and normal maps. Then all you have to do is plug them into the proper channels of the material in Unity. It helps make fantastic looking textures really quickly. The programs are basically plugins that run using Photoshop.

[frizzank]

X normal does an excellent job of baking ambient occlusion and is not dependent on any particular modeling program and supports many different modeling formats Obj, LWO, 3DS....

Also it is FREEE!!!!

http://www.xnormal.net/1.aspx