The
Crock - from plastic looking to spaceship
in no time.
This
tutorial explains how to create a convincing
spaceship using Texture-CDs without
too much trouble and too much painting/customizing.
Understanding
spaceships
Before
we start with the material themselves,
it's important that you understand what
a spaceship is and have an idea of the
different approaches to spaceship building.
There are basicly two different ways
of thought concerning spaceship materials:
The "all white-the less color the
better" and the "bring'em
on, let's make some colorful stuff"
approach.
Single
colour spaceships
This
philosophy requires the spaceship to
be considered moslty like a military
machine, where paint is usually given
for camuflage and for protection against
the environment. The look of this family
of spaceships is usually severe and
realistic, colors are often grayish,
with few logos mostly using complementary
colours or white. The tipical example
is the 2001 Space odissey spaceship,
but you can find them in almost every
Sci-fi movie: from Alien's Nostromo
and Sulacos to the empire star destroyers
in starwars.
Multiple
colours spaceships
One
of the greatest authors that created
this style is Chriss Foss, maker of
the early sketches for Dunes and Alien
movies. This approach basicly takes
inspiration from the biological-insect
world, and produces some complex and
colorful patterns. Examples today can
be seen in almost every Japanese anime
as well as in computer videogames like
Homeworld2.
Let's
begin
The
ship used in this tutorial is the Crock:
a mixture between a crocrodile and a
dragon, with a flat vertical front part,
a more curved back and two rotating
side engines. The model is quite simple
as it's made mostly of extruded parts,
loft objects and splines. The approach
followed is the colorful one, mostly
because the other one relies on the
same operations, but it's simpler in
using just one colour. The first operation
is to analize the model and divide it
into groups or entities. Each entity
would require a different material and
definitely a different mapping method.
The crock is basicly divided in two
specular halves, each half also divided
into small gropus in order to distinguish
all the moving parts (carriage, engines)
from the main body. These entities can
be meshes themselves or groups of meshes,
depending on the software you're using.After
dividing the model itself into parts,
the next thing you would do is to save
the untextured model as a new scene
and keep it separate from the model
we're currently texturing.
Materials
& Layers
Now
that we have prepared the model and
we're ready to begin texturing, we have
to think of the overall look we want
to give to the spaceship. In order to
do that we can simply render the untextured
model and begin practicing a bit adding
colours till we have an interesting
result. I opted for a two colour scheme
(blu-grey for the upper armor and orange
for the bottom-engines) with white stripes.
How do we translate this in textures?
We have to options here. The first is
to draw from scratch a complete map
for the entire spaceship using a paint
program. This method provides definitely
the best results as the texture is "taylored"
precisely over the model, but it's obviously
time consuming and, unless you create
a huge bitmap, scales badly when the
spaceship is close to the camera.
The second method, the one we're using
here, is to use premadde highres textures
and combine them to create semi-taylored
materials that scale well and are very
fast to create and modify. Pre made
materials are a great base layer to
create your own texturing without the
hassle to begin everything from scratch.
While hand made details are still required
to create a convincing model, mostly
all of the base colouring can be done
in a few easy steps.
The idea is to use the same pre-made
material customized into different colours
(without the aid of a paint program,
just using the 3d software color map
controls) and then use masks to tell
where each colours has to go.
This
provides:
1)
seamless hullplates regardless as
the colour chosen. The result is that
the colour is painted over the hull
plates.
2)
different methods for mapping coordinates
for the hull plates and the color
zones. example: the hull plates can
be mapped with a box or shrink wrap
method while the colored zones can
be easly mapped in planar mode without
side effects
3)
easy customization of colours. Manipulating
the color map controls is easy to
create different variants of the same
spaceship without even opening a paint
program or having to redraw the diffuse
map.
4)
different scales. While the hull plates
can be a high resolution premade texture,
the mask used to define the colored
zones can be any size. The mask can
be even a combination of different
masks with different resolution and
mapping methods (more on that later).
Basic
materials.
To
texture the Crok I created 3 colour
materials out of the original one. I
used the texture hull007.jpg for diffuse
map and the corrisponding hull007_spec.jpg
for specular and hull007b.jpg for bump
mapping. To create the other colours
I enabled the color map option (3dsmax)
and edited the values of the diffuse
map so that I obtained the orange. To
get the white I used the bump map instead
the diffuse map. I also tweaked a bit
the shininess level and colour to differentiate
a bit the materials themselves.
This image was created using
a few of the hundreds of textures from the
Total Texture CDs - very comprehensive texture
collections priced with the hobbyist in mind.
To see more examples, download free
samples and read full details follow
this link
