Monday, May 5, 2008

First, pants.... then shoes.



Sorry for the title, it's late, couldn't think of anything better.

So I'm now on to the part that just about every 3D artist hates with a passion: the texture mapping. Not the textures themselves, they're fun to paint, but actually generating the first version of them and mapping them onto the model... shoot me now.

If you've never done this before then here's an idea of what it's like. Imagine you emptied a bowl of sugar onto a piece of paper and had to line up all of the individual grains into perfect rows on an outline of a picture... one at a time... with tweezers.

It's kinda like that. In my case there are 12454 grains to place, ugh. It's mind numbing beyond belief haha.

On the plus side I'm thinking of future repainters from the get go. All of the textures I'll include in the paint kit for the plane will be clearly marked and laid out, and will include guides for where objects overlap or are recessed inside each other, right down to the vertex. Lining up a custom camouflage scheme on this, should someone be so inclined, will be cake.



And finally, last night I got the front seat pilot converted into a skinned mesh with a bone structure and now have him animated doing all the usual things, moving the stick, throttle, rudder pedals, and a couple other fun things. :) When I get them both animated I'll toss up a little movie of 'Ace & Gary' as I've taken to calling them, hehe. This is a breakpoint in the model though. Up until the skinned mesh pilot the L-39 *could* have been made into an FS9 plane as well as an FSX one. No longer. FS9 can't handle that. Good riddance flat earth sim!

-lotus out.

7 comments:

d0ugi3 said...

I barely know how to use a repaint kit....

Vlad said...

We're going to have to find that out the hard way. And I though making the model was difficult! ;)

By the way lotus, what happened to your Iceland scenery you were making before? I've never seen anything past that post about it.

Anonymous said...

Don't worry Lotus, this will motivate you to spend decades of texturing those mappings:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=0TlQ_21bICo

Lotus / Ramasurinen said...

Great video Mugar, hadn't seen that one. Wild Child was one of the paints I was planning on doing, one of the best known L-39s around. Cheers.

And not sure about decades, perhaps another 4 days, but it bloody well feels like it so far haha.

Lotus / Ramasurinen said...

Vlad, I'm visiting Iceland in six weeks actually, for a month, it's on hold until well after then. When the L-39's done I'll prob get back to it. Planes I discovered are far more interesting to make than scenery... who knew? ;)

Vlad said...

Ahh, and then there's that thing called Rafale Video. ;)

Lotus / Ramasurinen said...

Never heard of it.