Hey, my name is Daniel and this is the second article about my Battle Toaster. This time I will focus on the texturing process.

When I got my hands on Total Textures I was amazed and full of ideas. I wanted to make a sci-fi toaster in deep space, a dirty toaster on the battle field, remains of a rusty toaster, a killer-toaster covered in blood... It makes a big difference when you don't have to worry about finding or painting the textures from the beginning. I also realized that I can't complete all those projects, so here you will see a Racing Toaster.

This article is divided into 3 main parts: making of, tutorial about texture baking using ambient occlusion and finally some remaking examples.

1. Less is more

I wanted to give the toaster a totally different look, and as I have mentioned before, I had tons of ideas. Finally I decided to make a Racing Toaster. Why? Hmm, maybe because I've never made a 3d car.

Unwrapping

This part I hate, really, really much. Especially in bigger projects with lots of technical parts (just like toasters :D ). I unwrapped manually almost all of the bigger parts and automatically generated some uv's for the smaller ones.


Sadly, I can't give any brilliant unwrapping tips. 3D Max is a bit behind other 3d programs in UV mapping. Blender, for example, has a really nice algorithm: LSCM Unwrap, which has performed really nice when I was testing it. I haven't used it here though. The process of exporting and importing everything would take some time, and more importantly - it would break the instaces of meshes.

One tip I can give is to use pelt seams. It helps divide mesh into pieces and organize things on uv even if you don't plan on using pelt mapping.

Useful links

http://www.luxinia.de/index.php/ArtTools/3dsmax - the LSCM plugin for 3d max, in beta stage, sadly didn't work for me.
http://www.pullin-shapes.co.uk/page2.htm - a really nice UV tool, its cooperates with Maya, but it can also be used as a stand alone tool into which you can import models.