Texturing I: The engine

For several reasons I decided to texture the engine before I move to the cockpit modeling. I never did texturing of 3D model before so I was expecting a lot of learning. Also wanted to check how my way of modeling affects texturing. For example I found that repetitive parts is better to duplicate by Alt+Enter in the blender so later only one instance is required to be textured. All duplicates are automatically textured at the same time. It took me lot of trial and errors to figure out how things are working. One has to switch his mind from technical, modeling thinking to more artistic way :). My goal was to use just 512x512 texture while level of details will be still good. To acheive this I could not simply unwrap all the parts and paint them. I had to think how to reuse particular areas of the texture. With combination of specular and normal map pretty satisfying results were acheived.

      

Some things may still change as I learn some new techniques in future. But for now I'm quite satisfied with the result. I prepared one "trailer" video displaying the textured engine using dramatic soundrack ]:-). Enjoy!

   -Joe