Model Texturing

Now that we have made our three models, we need to texture them. Texturing is the necessary 'cheery of top' of the modelling that turns a lifeless, but accurate grey-scale model into a fully fledged model of a ship.

There are multiple different ways of texturing the ship, but we're going to be using a mix to get an accurate texture. For this Blog, I will be using my X-wing model to display the methods I'm going to use.

To get the first initial step done, we want to use 'block texturing' first to turn the entire ship into the most accurate 'general' colour. to do this, we need to select the entire ship and select 'Assign New Material'

This sets a new material on the entire ship, it then gives you a whole bunch of texturing options, which I can then edit as necessary. In this case, the most common colour of the ship is a cream/white colour, So we'll change the texture colour to fit that.

Now that the ship as a whole is close to the colour that we want, we just need to add some of the larger colour changes, like the silver nose/cockpit and the Black sections on the turbines. This is done by selecting the desired faces and doing the same 'Assign new material option we used for the whole ship earlier

Just like earlier, we can now change the colour of the texture to suit what we need it to be. in the case of the turbines, we want to change it fully to black. We do the same things with other parts of the ship, and we will end up with something like this

Now that we've got most of the basic colouring done, we can begin to go into detail. To do with, we need to select the faces that we wish to work on. First, I will be choosing the front of the ship, in order to add the red/yellow accents.

To do this, we first must select the faces we want to work on (These being the 3 long, thing faces that make up the front of the ship, the top half only) and selecting 'UV texture editor' and re-arranging the layout so only the 3 necessary faces are on the beige square.

Once we do this, we need to take a 'UV Snapshot' and save the image as a .jpeg file, so we can freely edit it. It was suggested to save it as a .tif file, and then edit it in Photoshop. However, I have absolutely no idea how to utilise photoshop effectively, and therefore decided to edit in paint, sacrificing detail in exchange of easy use.

Once you upload the picture to paint, you should see something similar to what we have in the above screenshot. all you need to do then is edit the picture (without deleted the pre-made border) in order to look similar to the ships original design. for my design it ended up looking like this

Once again, save the image. and we need to import back onto the faces of the model. If Everything has been done properly, the crudely done paint image should map itself perfectly to the model, and it did.

This is everything to the UV mapping. from here all I need to do is repeat this process a few times and then we're all finished!

Using the UV mapping seems convuluted for someone who are largely unused to it, and trying to use photoshop was almost impossible. However, theres always a workaround and workaround I did.

Final designs: