zeno,

Yu dont say what program you're using but Iassume its milkshape. if it is then you have to break your model up into the surfaces that you want to apply the texture to, ie body upper and body lower for instance - select each surface then map the texture to each surface in turn using the texture coordinate editor. I'm afraid i don't explain it well but i hope this helps. milkshape has some excellent tutorials on this on the chumbalum home page.

Harrier.

Retreat[![! ---- I'm too badly messed up now[![!

Harrier,
Thanks fot the reply, i know see whats going on and why i was so confused. I had thought that there was some utility or technique which once you had given all your model some textures, produced a single tga file with all the textures on. Instead what you should do is first prepare a your TGA with all the various pictures each of your surfaces on it then use the milkshape texture coordinator to pick the region on the tga for each surface in to be mapped to. Of course you can use mare than one TGA/texture which makes it even more confusing

I think when i finally get this done i'll try to assemble a tutorial as i'm having some trouble finding all the relevant details and figuring it out, and i'm sure others have the same problem.

Ps yes i was using milkshape.

The reason the texture file for the cobra is like that is only because it is such a simple shape. Its easy enough to work out the layout 'cause there are so few surfaces to deal with. I liked the fact that this would allow an obvious blank texture file which people could easily customize.

While it would be possible to create such a 2D net for a more complicated ship it would be far more hassle than it was worth.

I usually use the method you mention. One or two background textures for the ship then any particular textures on top of them. You are right tho it is alot of hassle, especially when you have just spent ages building the ship and are desparate to try it but have to spend another load of time texturing it

Nah, the "2d net" is easy, just take a screenshot of the texture coordinate editor window and go from there

Lol, i actually tried to do a ship like that once. Gave in after about 10 minutes tho

Apart from the nightmare of trying to work out which triangles were which part of the ship i thought there were two main problems. Firstly you had to spend alot of time working out how to squash your textures so they would look right depending on whether you had picked top, bottom etc. view for the texture coordinate editor. Secondly i normally tile most of the ship with a relatively small piece of texture, leaving the majority of the space for the details. However with the 2D net version you had to allocate space in the texture dependant on how much of the hull it covered.

Basically texturing a ship is a huge hassle anyway so i suppose it just depends on which method you personally prefer.

Hmm, tiling the textures in milkshape worked for you? I couldn't get it to work with the Freelancer ships.

The other method is how I learned to skin models in the first place so it was just second nature for me, I adjust points on the UV map to get rid of the distortion you speak of without even thinking about it The trick is to just work on one piece at a time and not try to get the whole ship in there, then it's a snap. You know, *click* ok, wing top is done...*click* ok, wing bottom is done... etc. I can usually lay them out using the same polygon selections that I used for the smoothing groups so that makes it pretty easy to select the ones I want.