Thanks.

I haven't done that many handpainted textures before (and none before this without a normalmap for details) so my process isn't anywhere near refined yet, but I generally just treat it like the typical digital painting process and it's then just a matter of experimenting with different textures/detail styles to see which goes better with the model.

Dunno if this helps, but here are 5 different copies I had from the texture file in different stages:


I usually start with throwin a low contrast/low saturation texture on the entire mesh just so I won't have to worry about blank spots (1), and for this model, I then started overlaying textures in smaller areas either with textured brushes or stencils pulled from vanilla textures (2) and then added the linework on top (3) and gave it some shading so it'd pop a bit (4), and then went back and redid the armor parts with a different base texture and added/tweaked some more details (5). In the last part that I haven't done yet, I'm gonna go back and tweak the values a bit so the shading of the details end up looking sharper, rather than the smooth/round look it has right now and also the same tweaks will make it so the details don't look "burnt" like it currently does, esp around the neck, but this last step is only there because I was still trying to figure out FL style and made a bit of a mess, and probably won't be a needed for the future ships.

It's all mainly done in Blender, but there's also a little bit of juggling the file between Blender and Photoshop for stuff like color correction, value adjustments, easier sharpness/smoothing tweaks, etc, but thats most likely because I'm a lot more used to Photoshop than I am to Blender.

Also, this is a really helpful video on texture painting. It shows the general process and also offers a lot of good insight, and helped a lot when I was trying to figure out what's even going on in that corner of blender.

Unfortunately, FL engine doesn't allow that.

The glowing surface around the powercore is a glowmap, which is a part of the texture file itself, so it can't be tweaked without changing the .mat file; i.e. It can't be recolored for the same reason that ships can't be recolored.

I don't use it to that extent. That video shows the core process (since its more of a "lets do it just with the default brush to show all the fancy brushes aren't essential" sort of video), and like the fella mentions somewhere around the same part of the video, using textured brushes and stencils and whatnot can help speed up the whole thing, and FL already has a pretty decent library of textures for that. But yea, that's still a main part of the process for laying down the color and tonal variations (although I use a much lower opacity textured brush so I wont have to add an extra step to blend/fade the colors together).

So the general process is pretty much just going between what's shown in that video and using some stencils like these to get the intended look (all of em are from vanilla textures. the darker one used for the armor bits is from the rhein capship textures, the other two from wraith).