2 questions

[skwerlalhazred]

1. when I went to texture my gun i did it this way: i copied gun a and put gun b right above it, then i seperated gun a, and took the resulting meshes apart, then i put them in a downward row, and recombined the meshes, then i put them through a cylindrical mapping and moved the vertices on the map. Then after I textured them, i re-seperated them, and put the pieces of gun back together using gun b as a reference.
what is the way i SHOULD have done this?

2. I created a normal map for the ground in my railroad scene, and the result was the ground looked like mud. So i went back into photoshop, sampled some of the purple from the normal map, and filled another layer with the purple on top of it and adjusted that layer's opacity until it started to look like dirt again.
What is the non-cheating way of doing this?

Thanks!
-Ben

[DrEvizan]

Wait...

So gun A and gun B are the same gun? I would have just unwrapped them and then duplicated them, or make one and instanced copy of the other. If you want to vary the textures afterwards you can always change that later. OR are you talking about making a copy of the gun just to map it? If that's the case, then your doing it the OLD SCHOOL way. not in a good way either. It's usually best if you model has lots of pieces to just unwrap each one after the other instead of combining them - don't bite off more than you can chew.

The normal map question. There's no such thing as not cheating in 3D. But here's my method for when my normal maps look like their barely doing anything. Open the map up in Photoshop, go to your channels, and turn up the contrast on just the red and green channels. If it gets chunky, you may have to Gaussian blur these channels ever so slightly. That should make the map look more defined.

-Doug :mrgreen:

[Xeon18]

Hey Ben I am assuming your talking about the mini gujn for Advanced texturing? In that sense what I did since it has so many damn pieces :) is that i just selected the whole thing then used edit mesh - separate. I then selected each piece individually and it (Hide unselected objects) that way I could focus on each piece by itself. For pieces that are duplicated, there are quite a few, I UV's one then copied it into place of the other lining it up then deleting the non UV's version. So yea dude it takes a while just put on some good tunes and have at it.

As to your other question cheating in 3D is what it's all about if you can do something in a really simple way and get away with it (it looks correct) then by all means go for it!

[alsoknownasOTiS]

I think the best starting place it to select the object and use auto mapping...then piece them all together....least thats how i did it....maybe its more time consuming i don't really know, but i would think having to select each object individually and then map it would take way longer....