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After a long hiatus...I am back fiddling with 3d stuff again.

Aeons ago, Trepan suggested to me that I should to learn how to do texture mapping. After looking at some tutorials, I had to admit the whole process looked a bit intimidating, so I put the idea on a back burner.

This past Christmas, I treated myself to a piece of software I have long lusted after, or actually the previous version thereof, Poser 5 (newest is 6). People were doin' lotsa cool stuff with it..but a lot of the really kewl stuff involved...you guessed it...texture maps...bump maps, displacement maps...transparency maps...all sortsa maps. It got me to thinkin'.

Anyway, for whatever reason, I started fiddling with Wings3D instead of my usual Blender and found a tutorial for texture mapping that didn't look half as bad as the Blender one. So I decided to have a go. I redid the Dzurg model in Wings and then did a tex-map. Below is the result. It is my plan, as I have time, to have a go at redoing Darkworld totally from the ground up, with custom textures and some re-done model work. Also included is a shrunk down version of the tex-map itself (orig. is 1024 by 1024 Thumbnails below are clickable for a bigger version...





I probably didn't make my "cuts" for the UV map in the right places, as I would have preferred a smoother transition from the horns to the skull, but I am quite pleased with the results.

I also have the whole thing in a single material reference, which was a mistake. I am assuming it is possible to have multiple texture maps for the same object??? With different material references??? Or do you just use one texture file and then reference it multiple times with multiple material statements. But howinheck do you do it so Wings exports it that way?

The texture itself was done in The Gimp.

Here is the data for the mesh itself:

# vertices: 191
# normals: 191
# texcoords: 279
# faces: 378

Dunno how bad four of them will be in a map. I think this count is less than the original. The horns on the first version were octagonal in cross section and these are hexagonal.

Looks great!
You don't have to worry about polys performance wise anymore, trepan was able to get millions of polygons to run at high framerates on his Geforce 3 with some new code.
You do need to worry about polygons if you have a lot of unique stuff, as it will increase map download size a lot. Using groups is a great space-saver to reduce map download size.
Make sure your UVmap texture size is in powers of 2, that makes them more efficient.
The less polygons, the quicker the FPS is for people that use software rendering, as it is especially slow.

ClayOgre is the king of low-polygon modeling!

That is the most kick-ass peice of moddeling I have ever seen...

Thank you. I do try...

I installed Yafray on my Linux box last night and tried it out from wings. Took and hour and a half for the render (I didn't notice, I was sleepin'), mostly because I rendered it in a large size.

It didn't turn out too bad, but again all the materials are set to shiny, I really need to learn more about materials. The model was smoothed in the process of the render.

You can use multiple materials/object. Use face select, and assign those faces the material you want. Then deselect those faces, and select the faces that you want a different material. If it takes to long to select the faces you can divide the object in to as many parts as materials and select those and assign them materials.

That isn't the problem exactly, it is more learning how to mix the diffuse/ambient/specular/etc. stuff and how those characteristics relate to whatever texture is on the surface and so on. And then you start throwing the wild stuff like bump maps, displacement maps, and transparency maps (I don't think BZFlag supports any of those right now, but who knows, maybe it might in the future). The whole materials issue is fiendishly complicated.

Whoa. That's incredible. (No, I'm not talking about your above post )

ClayOgre wrote:That isn't the problem exactly, it is more learning how to mix the diffuse/ambient/specular/etc. stuff and how those characteristics relate to whatever texture is on the surface and so on. And then you start throwing the wild stuff like bump maps, displacement maps, and transparency maps (I don't think BZFlag supports any of those right now, but who knows, maybe it might in the future). The whole materials issue is fiendishly complicated.

I've never come across anything that satisfactually explains what to do to make a certain material (I mean in the 'I need chrome for the exhaust pipe' or 'I need asphalt for the road' sense). My advise, play with spheres and one parameter at a time, with simple maps like b+w noise once you fully understand the basics.
FYI bz can use transparency maps indirectly as the alpha channel of the texture assigned to a mesh.