After all that it's finally time to
dive into some texturing. Dave
Wilson (author of Texturing 101)
helped me considerably in this section.
Firstly in the surface properties of
the edititable mesh (3D Studio MAX)
I'll divide up the missile into multiple
material IDs depending on the surface
texture I want it to have and the angle
the polygons are faceing, for different
mapping types. For the main texture
of the missile I used a cylindrical
mapping. I use a plug-in called Unwrap
Texture Object which exports the
mesh to an image that can be imported
into Photoshop. Once in photoshop I
imported the mesh image for reference.
Dave helped me with the initial texturing,
he took an image of metal plating for
a base texturing, then added all sorts
of dirt, sunspots and decals. I then
took over and added straches and weathering
to the missile using the mesh as a reference
to where they would be.
The
most important part of the texturing
procedure is to keep the texture map
in layers. This means after you've finalised
the RBG texture map, you can desaturate,
then change the brightness and contrast
of the layers to create your bump and
specular maps.
I'm
not going to explain all the texturing
because that will that quite some typing
:). Basically the rest of the objects
varied between texture maps and procedural
textures.
RENDERING
To show off the model in all it's glory
I wanted to render an image of it in
"Radiosity Land". Unfortunatley
3D Studio MAX doesn't come with out-the-box
global illumination rendering software.
So what I had to do was improvise, instead
of lighting an entire scene with one
light I'll do it with 33 :). Below is
an image of my scene
To
start off the explaination, I have two
scene objects. The round globe is an
inverted sphere with a very white blue
self illuminant texture. The ground
plane is a simple plane with a matte
orangey brown texture. Now on to the
lights. Above I have 9 angled whitey
blue lights only giving off diffuse
light (no speculars). Each one has a
very low intensity, so they don't flood
the scene with light. The same goes
for the bottom 5 lights, except they
are of a light orange colour. The whitey
blue lights give the GI (global illumination)
effect of the self-illumanant sphere
and the orange lights give the GI effect
of the ground bounce. The main light
source comes from an array of 20 lights.
What this accomplishes is the soft shadows
you get with real lights i.e. the further
an object is away from it's shadow,
the more blurry the shadow. Below is
a close up on the array.
The
lights have a path contraint to a circle.
This way as I'm tweaking the shadow's
appearance I can easily change the radius
of the shadow blur by changing the radius
of the circles. Since there are 20 lights
the intensity has to be incredible low
so that they don't flood light. Also
to increase the illusion of global illumination,
I took the specular maps for all my
objects, and used them for the intensity
level of raytraced reflections.
Well
after all that, have a look at how it
all came out below
Cool
huh :). Below is a wallpaper I made
from the above image with added photoshop
effects. You can download the fullsize
image (1152x864) right
here.
And
here is a moody lighting render of the
Coyote missile. I used two lights, a
shadow casting main blue white light
at 1.25 intensity and a orange backlight
at 0.6 intensity.
