Texturing in 3DS Max (any version)

[frozen]

Applying the textures to the mesh and mapping the textures:

Assuming you’ve done all the steps labelled above correctly, you’re now well on your way to actually beginning the actual texturing of the model you’ve created.

Once you’ve opened all the textures in all of the spheres, renamed them, selected the chequered cube to display the textures on the mesh, made sure you mesh is optimized/centered etc, you can begin texturing. You should have a general idea as to which texture you’d like to apply where. For example, i know that the k_panel01_256 is a generic texture i can use for the majority of the mesh, since the ship is made of ‘Panels’, i can basically apply the texture to the entire mesh.

Making sure that the mesh is still selected, you simply drag the first sphere over the mesh and drop. If you have the chequered cube selected, you’ll notice the color of the mesh change from the generic color to the color of the texture- in my case as the screenshot shows, the mesh goes from grey to brown.

http://i84.photobucket.com/albums/k13/gu...min/16.png

This is the easy part. Now comes a bit of imagination and a bit of common sense into play- you cant apply the windows texture to the engine section and vice versa (the common sence bit) and you cant have just the same panel texture all over, you need trimmings for the textures (the imagination bit).

Texturing is mostly done in the perspective viewport, so you can just maximize this viewport by pressing the button in the bottom right corner of the screen that looks like a small box expanding into a big box with an arrow to signify size change.

After you applied the generic texture, you want to apply the details/other textures to the mesh, but you find a simple drag and drop just replaces the original texture. To prevent this, you will now need to pay a bit of attention to detail and concentrate.

In order to apply more than one textures, you need to do this:

You need to click the “polygon mode” icon (red square) on the right hand menu, click the “select object icon (mouse cursor) and then select the faces in the viewport to which you’d like to apply the new texture to. Once you select all your faces you wish to apply the new texture to, you simply select the new sphere from the material editor window, and then drag and drop it onto the selected faces:

http://i84.photobucket.com/albums/k13/gu...min/17.png

You will find that you will need to repeat this step in order to apply the different textures to the different faces around the mesh. Repeat the step as necessary to assign different textures to the different faces. If you wish to stop selecting any faces, just deselect the red square for polygon mode.

For the sake of a blatant different and to show how to texture, i will be applying the engine (green) texture to the faces surrounding the faces i applied the windows textures to. You will normally apply a trimming style texture to such areas to ‘beautify it further’ and make sure it fits.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

---