Doing the actual texturing of the models in 3ds max:
Again, as i said before, easy as pie, just time consuming. To begin, press the M key to open the material editor. This is where you will be opening textures in first, before you actually apply the textures to your model. Alternatively, you can press the icon with the 4 spheres as shown in the screenshot below:
To open a texture, you need to do the following steps-
Click one of the spheres to select it. Having done that, click on the expandable option called maps below. When you do that, youll see loads of options, the first one being something like diffuse color and next to it a button called none. Click the button. This opens a new window, out of the list you need to double click on the option called bitmap which opens yet another window. This new window is where you navigate to the folder where you have saved the texture you wish to use for texturing purposes.
Once you navigate to the folder where the texture is saved, select the .dds file, and click open. This will open the texture in the sphere, and that is your first texture open, -nearly- ready to be used for texturing. Repeat this and the last few steps till you have all the textures you wish to use open in all the different spheres. Since the model is a kusari cruiser, ill use kusari textures. The first one is found in Ku_capships, and is called k_panel01_256.
I have not opened all the textures i need, since i will not be texturing the entire mesh, just a small section to show how texturing works. You will need to open all the textures you will need in order to texture the model properly- remember, dont just select panel textures, freelancer ships tend to include alot- of trimmings and beautification texture mappings, so you need to strive to work to that quality.
Once youve opened all your textures, you will need to give each texture a unique name. Not only will this help with texturing, its a necessary step before you export the cmp, or youll get errors in your model.
In order to rename the textures to unique names, you need to do the following:
Making sure you have the first sphere selected, click the dropdown where you can see some text that looks like Map #1. You should see two options, click the other option that ISNT map #1. This will take you back to the maps screen, where you first selected your texture. Instead of seeing the none button, youll see some text there- you will see the name of the texture youve currently got opened. In my case, since i have the texture k_panel01_256 open on my first sphere, ill see that texture. The dropdown next to the button called standard is where youll rename your texture to a unique name- i normally just give the unique name as the texture itself, as youll see in the screenshots below:
Once you rename the texture, there is one final step you need to do- this is so that you can view the textures on the mesh in the viewport. There is an icon that looks like a chequered cube- click that
![[Image: 5d1144bd1.png]](http://i84.photobucket.com/albums/k13/gurjiv/5d1144bd1.png)