Anyone have some good textures?

[Retroactive]

I'm working on some 3D ship models and was wondering if anyone knew where I could get some good space-style texture/bump maps.

Speaking of which, here are some engines that I'm working on right now:

[Aury]

nice engines, but unless those are for a really big ship, you unfortunatly don't get to see much detail....
You could probably use some basic tessellating textures
(I gave up making lots of details a while back...)

[Retroactive]

I'm mostly looking for hull armor-type patterns. George uses these on small and large ships and they look really nice (look at the CSCs, the new Centauri ships and the Outlaw ships, especially the Mikeno.) Even the small Wolfen has several textures on it.

[Bobby]

you could try this site. i don't know if there's any copyrights or not.

[Aury]

I'm mostly looking for hull armor-type patterns. George uses these on small and large ships and they look really nice (look at the CSCs, the new Centauri ships and the Outlaw ships, especially the Mikeno.) Even the small Wolfen has several textures on it.

oh the hull plating? ^^ those are for the ships, not the engines though I guess I must've misinterpreted you.
I downloaded a texture making program but I havn't checked it out yet..

[digdug]

If you downloaded Filter Forge, that's an amazing software for creating textures. (a bit expensive however for sporadic use, but for a professional is a must)

[Retroactive]

Thanks for the suggestion, digdug, but I'm really not looking to spend that kind of money right now. I'm not even using a professional 3D modeling package; I use a 15-year-old application that I run under emulation.

[Periculi]

I have made a bunch of textures for things using nothing more than an old digital camera, things in my yard, and GIMP to alter the images for tones and other bits.

I used blender to render some planets- pulled in my new textures and turned them into various parts- bump maps made from palm tree texture shots make incredible icy worlds! Amazing fissures.

Tinker around with some things and once you find a method that produces a single good look, you can expound on it to create a bunch of similar effects.

[OddBob]

http://www.aqpm75.dsl.pipex.com/hullgen.html

Now this is an old link I had, I don't have shockwave right now so I can't test it out so who knows if it still works. It makes stuff that is good enough I guess. I've never been a fan of the "random squares" theory of detailing. I say make it look REAL, give it a purpose but, eh, it works. I blame Star Wars.


Best way as far as I'm concerned is to make them from scratch - It's not hard and you can do it with free software like the GIMP. If you're actually interested I will elaborate on these techniques otherwise you get the 2 minute version:

An easy way to get that hull plate look is to start with a base color and start scoring lines with the burn tool (1px reasonably hard brush) and then you can select those plates and use a large fuzzybrush and poaint littel gradients in the corners to give them that classic weathered look if you want (silly, no weather in space)

or alternatively draw lots of little square selections, paint them in (no fills, by hand) and repeat, occasionally fading layers down to almost nothing, adding filters and or cranking the contrast all the way, fades and etc and bam you have some hull plates.

The advantage to doing textures yourself is that it will always fit your ship, and you can add little hatches and signage and nose art or whatever and everyone will love you and bring you nice things and you will maybe become rich and famous.


EDIT: also do what Periculi says, once I made a planet texture from a bowl of corn flakes.

[Periculi]

Good ideas!

I used a quick, short method because planets are viewed from so far away in Transcendence. So the details are easy to leave simple- still, the planet renders I did are done with about 3 to 7 layer textures at different levels and for varying purposes- texture for bumps, texture for coloring, some atmosphere effects.

All in all a very fun and rewarding experience to experiment with building your own textures.

[FAD]

Another very good (free) program to make textures and many other things is Project Dogwaffle. With its filters and options you can make stunning textures with ease. And don't forget to grab all the free plugins and filters that are available as well.

Oh, and for all you modelers, TrueSpace 7.5 (their flagship and latest build) is now totally FREE!!!!

Google will find them. I'm too lazy to post the links.

[digdug]

Bryce 5.5c is now totally free too, the texture generation engine of Bryce is good.

Then Art of Illusion, a free 3D application package has a procedural texture editor that is truly amazing (and comparable to Filter Forge)

I just downloaded from download.com Brick'n'Tiles, a free application that makes seamless tiling of pictures, just for testing it i made this:

http://img102.imageshack.us/img102/5494 ... st1sg8.jpg

[Periculi]

Wow, that's awesome!

When my old XP went down, I had Bryce 5.5 on it- I had paid for it when it first came out. I really was missing Bryce, but hadn't had time to try to find a way to get it from Daz again. Now I have it again!

Hmm.. I wonder if I can get Poser back too...

[dvlenk6]

Truespace - link to Caligari homepage
Bryce 5.5 - don't leave home without it. Bryce has a very nice DTE (Deep Texture Editor) and comes with quite a few presets. Like 25 or 30 types of noises that can be blended in various ways to make a huge variety of textures.
Wings 3d - quick, easy poly sub-d modeler.
- - - - -
CGTextures
I use those a lot. no copyrights, no royalties. Hi res photo jpgs.
You can use some of the metals, concretes, plasters, etc. as a starting point in a 2d editor. Paint of generate some greebled rectangular 'plate patterns' layers over the base jpgs.
GIMP is a free 2d editor that supports layers. Photoshop is the standard; but pricey.

If you are using a renderer with displacement and/or normal mapping, you can use the 'plate pattern' in it's raw form as a displacement map on the hull to give a bit of mesh depth (for specular highlights and reflections).

[evilbob]

Speaking of 3D stuffs, what camera and lighting settings should I use for ships for rendering them to be used in transcendence?