decals...and symbols....

[Ashrak]

Ok...for as long as I have had max...there is one thing i havent really thought about and dont really want to play around to figure out.... here we go..I have a ship and its textured...but i want to add some decals or symbols to it..what is the methods you guys use to apply them. Eg., have a klingon ship textured...and i want to add a klingon decal that is a seperae jpg. than the hull texture. What do you guys do?

[Jackshit]

OK, this is a little complicated.

here's on way.

In the materials editor, open up the texture that is applied to the piece of the mesh you want the decal on. If you're using the Oren Nayer Blinn shader you can have your hull yile effect on the difuse level channel and you can put your decal on the diffuse colour channel.
In the bitmap settings for the Diff colour channel select the view map in viewport icon and turn off the tile tickbox
change the UV tiling and offset settings for the bitmap and watch the image in the viewport as it moves around the surface. in this way you can position the decal very easily.

Alternativly you could use the blend material type. You'll need a mask but you'll still have to position the bitmap manually with the UV offset and tiling settings.

I hope this helps.

[Kenny_Z]

Or you can get the trekbats font pack and then shapemerge the klingon symbol (or other symbol) directly to the hull.

[Jackshit]

That adds unnessasary detail to the mesh. plus if you want to use the same mesh for different ships with different markings, it would be realy unweildy to have to do the shapemerge process (which is unpredictable at best) each and every time to the base mesh, and as shapemerge discards all texture mapping information, re-map the whole thing.

The decal material is much better, for customising different ships you just have to go into the material channel and replace the image. You don't even have to reposition it.