Blender Underground

I know that there are loads of ways to generate textures, ie, mapzone, painting them in gimp, photos. But it all seems very difficult to get a fulll set together. What advice could you give me
on the actual making of the textures. Example - Say I had a spaceship. Whts the best way to go about making the texures for it.

The easiest way is to append a material that is close to what you want and tweak away at it until it works.

http://matrep.parastudios.de/

The above link is the location of a huge group of materials already defined. Alternatively, you could get one that is close, see how it was done and try to replicate it using your own parameters.

thanks, but i mean all of the maps, like normal, spec etc.

Aha. So you are talking solely UV textures then and not just any UV texture procedure but multi-UV layers. Then you will want to look here:

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:M ... g_an_Image

That will get you started.

I would go with what Penix1 said above. It's a good start to be sure.

I'd also like to add my 2 cents.

When dealing with UV's it best to keep them fairly organized, and following a general pattern that is easy to read by others as what they are. Stack a UV only if you know that they will either line up well (A mirrored side or something that just need roughly the same texture appearance as the item you are stacking it with.)

building UVs gets a lot harder to do the more details and faces you put into a model project. I have found that as I finalize the seprate parts of the model I make an effort to take a moment away from modeling and go into UV plotting mode. Once I have that parts UV in a way I like it, I then throw on a proxy Material and some Basic Texture to hold it in place and see how it looks. After that, I drag the Arranged UVs out of the Grid to hand out for a little while while i finish up the model.

This way when I am finished, it then only a matter of Fitting all the areas of difference into the Texture space and scaling, Turning and Placing it where it will fight tightly into the Same texture space.

Once you have the UV's in their finalized Positions and are happy with it.

use the plug in that allows you to take a Template Shot of the UV map.

Then with you Favorite Image software (Gimp or Photoshop) Use that to make your texture.

there are places on the web where you can get Base materials Like Stone and metals images for free that can be used to make textures maps out of. There are also Commercial Packages for things like that that come with their Normal Maps and spec maps already. They can cost a pretty penny but if you build up a little, ever expanding, collection of these. you will start being able to blend some of these together and manipulate them to make even more.

There are also many tools that let you take out Sample of Normal maps and Spec maps from the texture itself that you can get as plug in for free in most cases. Play around with these. they can be great with a little practice.

Lastly there just come a time when you have to start making Textures from scratch. there are a mixture of making noise, Blurring, adding bump mapping and shadows along with layering and the like until the Texture becomes a some what the appearance of the Type of material you are looking for. Start by learning how to make Brushed Metal like materials using just noise blurs. then adding in some engraving bump mapping in 2D. then how to make a Normal map out of this using the Normal extraction Plugin for either Gimp or Adobe Photoshop.

this will teach you a bit, and give you a basic idea on the workflow of making a texture for a 3D model in a third party 2D art program.

thats all i have for now...