Texturing my sith fighter

I began to texture my Sithfighter model. I used Adobe Photoshop CS2 to design my textures as it seemed to be the most suitable software due to important features such as layers, patterns and selection tools such as the magnetic lasso tool which made it easier to select the UV Maps I created.

Before creating a new UV, I created a new material on the object. Typically I used the "Lambert" material but on my other ships such as the X-Wing I used the "Blinn" material for a better metal effect. I found that the default UV maps from the different objects used in my ship were most of the time; messy, unorganised and confusing. To get around this issue I used the "Planar Mapping" tool under the "Create UV's" menu in order to make the designing of the textures a lot easier. Below are the following steps I took to do this:

1. Select the faces on the object which I wanted to map.

2. Under the "Create UV's" menu, click "Planar Mapping."

3. Move, rotate and scale the Planar Projection into the correct positioning to get the best UV projection possible. Repeat for all the faces needed for texturing.

4. Once all faces are mapped, in the UV texture editor, take a UV snapshot. Below are the settings I mostly used. The size I used typically depended on how many different faces were in a certain object. Objects which had a high amount of faces would typically be a higher size due to more space needed for texturing.

I often used the image format: TIFF or PNG. This is because these two formats have minimal quality loss compared to other image formats.

5. Once the snapshot was saved I would import it into Photoshop and begin editing. I would often seperate each group of faces into seperate layers by using the magnetic lasso tool inside Photoshop to easily select the faded lines generated by the snapshot.

I would then begin each texture by using the fill bucket to give each group of faces a basic colour. Afterwards I would use the pattern overlay tool to give each group of faces the appropriate texture. This would often be a metal texture provided in Photoshop.

When each design is finished in Photoshop, each file would be saved as a TIFF as this format is very raw and gives the best quality possible when imported back into Maya.

The finished project: