I'm working on a car at the minute for rF2 - it's my very first mod and it's being made in Blender. I couldn't get my head around 3DSMAX at all, Blender made life so much easier! When I come to texture map the car I'm having a lot of trouble getting it to look anything near the paint templates I've used in the past. The parts are a lot more separated and I'm finding it difficult to piece them together without distorting the whole thing. Does anybody have any tips or know of any good guides on how to texture map a car? I've tried Googlefu but it's failed on this occasion. I don't mind putting my model in to 3DSMAX to do it as it's just as complicated on both programs it seems!
The trick is to not painstakingly try to connect everything together but keep large slabs separated where they can, abusing the cars natural seams where possible. Especially with logo's and text, let alone striping, you want as little distortion as you can get by. What I usually start out with for a car is literally a box uvw and start sorting out the big chunks which make up the body, doors, trunk,hood, roof, etc.
Thanks for the response, can you explain what you mean by abusing the seams? I meant for mapping, modelling in Blender is easier than 3DS, texture mapping is just as difficult on both it seems.
Doors are a great example, they are separate objects in 3d, no need to start attaching them to anything else in 2d Or even better, the hood vs the side panels
One tip for MAX for "regular" shape cars, not prototypes or open wheelers, is, for ex. detach the right doors and right panels and make an planar right side unwrap and put the results outside the map box, take the hood and roof and make the same but from a top view, for front and rear bumpers you can make a front/back planar unwrap but you gonna have to relax the sides of them, when you have all the parts collapse then attach them add the unwrap modifier and take all your results and put in into the map box. That works for me, another tip is use an specific software like SILO2, never use it but some people recomend it.
Thanks guys much appreciated! I've still go the doors attached to the body which is probably where it's all going wrong. Things like bumpers, fenders and bonnet (hood) are all separate already.
Download one of the skin templates, they have wireframe in the PSD file so you can see what the UVW looks like on ISI cars
