Fri May 13, 2005 1:10 pm
Ok, now that Panther's links work... I can see what he's talking about. Yes, that's a good approach for a starting place. I also build a lot've little details by hand. Here's the skin for the Purity (56Kers... sorry in advance...)
Basically, you want to add small greebles that add new areas of visual interest without overwhelming your basic color scheme or looking completely ridiculous. With the Purity, my goal was to make the ship look very car-like, so I made the number of obvious seam-lines low, and concentrated my details on small parts of the model, or areas (like the underside) where players would rarely even see the details, but (hopefully) would appreciate them, just like real cars, where the manufacturers often cover body seam joins or dovetail them so that they're hard to see.
I don't rip my hair out trying to make the details all make perfect sense, and I gladly steal textures from all over the place (for example, I found a program that would let me un-pack all of Half-Life 2's textures to TIFF, and then I used a Photoshop Droplet to convert them all to DDS to save room on my HD, and I raid these texures very frequently while building models). After all, we're talking about the far future, right? So I basically make things look kewl and vaguely functional, and let players' imaginations fill in the dots. But you want a few odd little things that jump out at people, and (hopefully) convince them that they're looking at a working machine, not just a painted 3D model
It's important to add the little things, such as the fake "shadows" on the Purity's engine intake grills- it makes the ship look a lot more real when players look at in the Ship Dealer, which where most people make their initial impressions. Such things are very easy to add.
When adding greebles such as hatches, access panels and other areas, I take a lot've care to shade and light them as convincingly as I can. This is all trickery, of course- making people see depth on flat surfaces. But, if done carefully, it can really get you the results you want
Edited by - Argh on 5/13/2005 3:40:10 PM
Basically, you want to add small greebles that add new areas of visual interest without overwhelming your basic color scheme or looking completely ridiculous. With the Purity, my goal was to make the ship look very car-like, so I made the number of obvious seam-lines low, and concentrated my details on small parts of the model, or areas (like the underside) where players would rarely even see the details, but (hopefully) would appreciate them, just like real cars, where the manufacturers often cover body seam joins or dovetail them so that they're hard to see.
I don't rip my hair out trying to make the details all make perfect sense, and I gladly steal textures from all over the place (for example, I found a program that would let me un-pack all of Half-Life 2's textures to TIFF, and then I used a Photoshop Droplet to convert them all to DDS to save room on my HD, and I raid these texures very frequently while building models). After all, we're talking about the far future, right? So I basically make things look kewl and vaguely functional, and let players' imaginations fill in the dots. But you want a few odd little things that jump out at people, and (hopefully) convince them that they're looking at a working machine, not just a painted 3D model
It's important to add the little things, such as the fake "shadows" on the Purity's engine intake grills- it makes the ship look a lot more real when players look at in the Ship Dealer, which where most people make their initial impressions. Such things are very easy to add.
When adding greebles such as hatches, access panels and other areas, I take a lot've care to shade and light them as convincingly as I can. This is all trickery, of course- making people see depth on flat surfaces. But, if done carefully, it can really get you the results you want
Edited by - Argh on 5/13/2005 3:40:10 PM
. Ok, so I don't really agree on the yellow (or the white, for that matter...not sure if it'd fit nicely alongside FL ships) and the engine vents could be the same texture as FL ships' vents (although I have to admit the back vents look -very- nice 
).
