Heavy Rheinland Military VHF v1.0 - 31 July

[aerelm]

Really interested in knowing what your texturing process is like because this is almost assuredly the best looking ship submission we've ever received.

I second this.

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.

My question is will the light around the engines be changeable? Are those light hardpoints? Or are they based on the engine effects? If not I can imagine a police one with one side Blue the other red and a strobe on the nose for good measure.

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.