Thanks RD, I need all the tips I can get. I am however sailing along with layers now in photoshop. I was pretty sick of this thing yesterday after all the bitmap work, but after my housework and some fooling around today, I finally dove back into bitmap heaven after dinner. What was I up to?
Scratches
Paint chips
Rust
Soot
Dings
Divots
Streaks
Yup, about 3 hours worth of weathering the WASP. It got a bit tedious towards the end but I knew that if the maps rendered up like I was hoping I would have a pretty effective look when you zoom in close to inspect the paint.
Did 4 maps..the midbody, the butt segments, the jets, and I re-did the patch on our buggy pilot's flightsuit.
Did all the maps, one by one - without converting them through DXTBMP to look at them in the sim. Then when they were all done I converted all 4 and threw them into my texture folder. Time to fire up FS9 and have a close look at my baby on the tarmac in the mid-day sunshine of Barbados.
Folks...this may be the last time I need to re-visit these textures....they look...
darn good, if I don't say so myself. Sorry, that sounds like horn-blowing...what I mean is that for once a project has turned out amazing to me and now with countless meticulous hours of texture creation and refining, learning all the way...the paint job has enhanced my model beyond my hopes...this is A BLAST!!
It's funny...as I was typing this little gleeful update post I realized that while checking my weathering job I completely forgot to open the canopy to see what my flightsuit tags looked like...I put a little wasp logo on his chest, with a nametag and some gold 'wings'. Gonna go have a look now.
Thanks for listening...you'll see what I'm talking about very soon, here's a list of the few things I need to wrap up before a
quick shipment to RD for some
quick beta testing and maybe a wing-paint job.
Body contact points - easy.
Clean up texture folder - yipes!
Consider cleaning 75 or so unused materials out of gmax to facilitate one final, smaller .mdl file export. - Yipe, yipe, YIPE!
Re-name .AIR file and configure small final details. Should be straightforward.
Sort FX files and appropriate textures and include properly in package.
Clean up misc. crap leftover in .CFG file and write a description and some brief performance statistics.
Final packaging, Zip-up, unzip, retest and UPLOAD!!!!!!
I'll chip away as fast as possible early in the week, get an invite off to RD and maybe he can 'get 'er done' fairly quickly as well - I'm getting sort of excited and anxious now that I'm this close! WOOHOOO!!!
