I use Blender for modeling and Gimp for my textures. I kind of run into an issue when it comes to things like borders between pieces of an object. Here is an example…
Also, some of my textures seem really… not so fitting. I really like the lighter colored wall section, that came out how I wanted it to. The wooden door part is fine too, even though it doesn’t have a handle yet… For things like the gray part of the steps and the outer roof part, I don’t know what to do. Maybe someone with experience in Blender/Gimp can give me some pointers on how to make a more realistic transition between objects. I can make a nice looking texture in Gimp. I can usually get it on the UV map not so bad too… but the border between them is kind of… too obvious. Any help would be much appreciated~
Edit: I added a point light so the door would be more visible. Also, I’m not very good with the whole forum thing… so my image link is messed up. Just copy/paste it without the img things.
You’re always going to have seams. Best bet would be to place the seams where the geometry already has a hard edge so it’s not noticeable. The join between the wall and the stairs will probably have to be masked with a decorative post or something so it looks like it should change material there.
Also, for the stairs, you should bake an ambient occlusion map in blender. Open the diffuse texture and the AO map in Gimp as layers with the AO on top. Change the blending to multiply and merge down. You can tweak the blend value some if you wish, but 100% often looks ok. This will help to bring out the geometry a lot.
I redid all the textures. It took me a bit to figure out what that AO thing was, but it is neat, especially for the stairs. It doesn’t work in several cases because I was taught that it was a good thing to overlap UV layouts to save space if it’s a big texture like… a wall or something. If I bake the AO it gets all messed up because of the overlapping UV layout.
Covering seams with temporary torch thingies… Quite difficult to get things to look high quality.
You could use a second UV set for the AO texture that has non-overlapping UVs. But you’d have to write your own shader that would use it. Or wait for 3.0 which might bake AO (not sure if AO will be available in the free version or not).
I’ve heard a lot about Unity 3.0 Apparently it is going to be very good O.o I already prefer Unity over UDK. UDK seems to handle graphics and particles better, but Unity does well with running smooth and having physics work much easier. Unity 3.0 might bridge the gap. I think for now I’m going to stop with that crypt thing in the screen shots. It isn’t that important, just a background building in a cemetery. I have to work on other things I suppose. Thanks for the advice on the AO. I will find some more places to use it~
