All Artist please read

ok I've been using 3d studio max for a long time but I've always been kinda crappy at making anything other then building textures. Below is a texture for a weapon im working on.


can I make this texture look better? it's only a part cut from a 512 X 512 texture but this is really the only importent bit basiclly what i want to do is give it a old kinda arcaic look but no matter how hard I try I still cant seem to make the edge where the wood meets metal and some rivets would look lovely. I use paint shop pro anyone know a good way to do this? any help would be great

what seems to pop out is the tiling on the grey area, which is a very bad thing when it comes to texturing. have u looked at a reference which resembles to the gun? this is very important to do when you want to create good textures.

the other thing is to try and draw out the shading and shadows, or just copy and paste a gun image on it -_-'

what would be helpul would be to see the wireframe version and how you unwrapped it. also i would suggest instead of just 'thinking' do wood and metal, think of the shapes/get some reference for what you are modelling
block out the shapes in gray scale then colorize it on seperate layer in your paint program.

If you're mapping your gun from the side, as that image would suggest, have you tried downloading some photos of guns, piece a few together to make them fit the weapon shape you've made, then mapping it to your model.

Sometimes a photo can be mapped straight on and work really well, especially on an object that's thin in one plane, as a gun is vertically, so you don't have to worry about the texture stretching across the top and bottom polys.

Using photo's and adding dirt and scratches adds a whole lot. Try to imagine which parts of the gun have suffered. The place where the soldier holds it could be dirty, maybe there's some rust on it or some oil dripping from the moving parts. Find out where the folds and idented areas are, and fill them with dust and dirt. Add some subtle shadows too.

I don't know if it is any help, but I'll give you a brief description of how I usually structure a texture document when creating a texture map. (I use photoshop and rely heavily on layers, but you essentially have the same structure in psp)

As a base i have an uv-map (ie a line map of unwrapped faces)

The next layers is just solid color shapes derived from the uv-map
(In your case iguess i would have a brown layer for the stock and grip and a grey layer for the metal parts)
Note that there is no detailing on these layers, just flat colors

Next up is any number of detail layers. in this case i could see for instance a seam-layer containing all seams (ie.) where two parts of the object mets each other, a nuts and rivets layer, a decal layer (usually on objects there are small printed texts or markings that really makes all the difference to include if you want to achive realism), a layer containing details swiped from photos.

The advantage of seperating the details in to different layers is that (in photoshop at least) is that you can use different effects for each detail layer. The seams probably will look good with a subtle bevel effect, the rivets might have a discreet drop-shadow and so on.

The next set of layers is highlight and shadow layers. I use Photoshops blending options (Multiply/Darken and Lighten/Screen). These layers just contain white and black shapes descibing highlight/shadows. By setting the transperency on these layers I can easily adjust how prominent the lighting effects are. This is is important since this has to correlate to the lighting conditions in your entire scene.

At the top I applie one or more dirt layers. Usually i freehand paint these and mess around with noise filters/transperency settings to get the right feel

The advantage of this approach is that you easily can create versions of your texture map. Will it look better with or withour dirt. Just hide the layer and save a copy and check it out mapped to your model. Also since you put the color information in as flat,solid colors that you just apply detail/light/dirt to you can easily change the colorscheme by simply adjusting hue on the color layers (Ok, a green gun might not be what you want, but say that you were mapping a car instead)

Ohh...I feel that I'm starting to ramble. Hope that at least something of what I said is useful to you. It would be interesting to hear what techniques other people use when doing the nitti-gritty work with their texturemaps. I'm always interested in new approaches.

And If it isn't clear from this message. Creating good texturemaps is HARD work. I would say (for me) the ratio is 30/70 if you look at modelling/texturing. So I would say that it really is in texturing that 'the magic happens'


//PetBom

Texuturing and uv mapping is a skill that will forever make your models actually useful.

I pretty much use the same approach as PetBom, although I usually render my highlight/shadows using gile[s] instead of painting them by hand.

um my question was really how I would go about making the parts where the metal and wood would meet

cut the edges between them in your UV map and put them on seperate bits of the colormap. That way you'll have a nice, hard seam.

I'd say get a picutre of a side view of a gun and cut and paste that. You may need to stretch bits and patch up others but it will look pretty neat.

This sure looks like a question to me ckob... :)

Seriously, I think what we are saying is that it is hard to do quick fixes to a texturemap if you haven't got a good structure of the document.

As for the specific question, how you would solve the meeting points of two materials, just take a look around. There are two ways we percieve that an object is composited of several materials:

1: The difference in color,texture,shininess between the materials.

2: But more importantly we see the joints, which is really what tells us what components an object is made of. A joint is identified by the two materials either getting darker or lighter in the seam. (Usually darker).

So I guess that means you have to accentuate the transitions between the materials by applying either a darker or lighter line in the joint between the two materials, since that is what tells us where a joint is in real life. As I mentioned earlier a subtle bevel/emboss effect on the seam usually gives a good result (since in real life the two edges making up a seam are seldom razor sharp)

Ok?

there's a boat load of tuts on skinning on polycount

http://dynamic.gamespy.com/~polycount/ubb/Forum8/HTML/000644.html?00063

didn't have time to go through them all, so some of the links might be dead

Thanks PetBom, nice overview for us amateur texturing wannabees. :-)


Paul