Applying Materials to the Models

After doing some Animation tests and looking at the overall quality of the images I have realised that, for this sort of animation with spaceship chases and high speed scenes, it was a bit pointless to put a lot of detail in the modelling and in the texturing. Here there is an example of a single frame of one of the test animations I rendered:

As you can see, the overall quality of the images are low (I am rendering the animations using the default  Scanline rendered, rendering them in .AVI format and at 800x600 of resolution). The X-Wing in the image has almost 13,000 polygons but this is not visible at all.

SO WHY MY ANIMATION LOOKS LIKE THIS WHILE THERE ARE GREAT QUALITY ANIMATIONS IN YOUTUBE DONE WITH 3DS MAX? Well, so far the answer seems to be MENTAL RAY. It is a way of using the lighting, textures, and rendering that apparently improves the quality of the images a lot. I haven't been able to successfully finish any of the tutorials I've watched, plus the rendering seems to take an insane amount of time so I will stick to Scanline and low quality images for the moment.

To make the test I have tried the same animation with both types of renderers and the result is insignificant:

Another of the ideas I had was to ditch the textures and use PRIMS COLOURS in order to make and define the objects more clearly. The problem with this option is that the models seem a bit out of place.

So I will go for simple materials and textures for my spaceships and I will eventually use the UVW MAPPING to texture a building I am going to model a bit later.  

In this post I will explain how I applied materials to the ships.

X-Wing

I will start with the body and the wings of the ship. I will use an architectural material (With a flat metal template) and an aluminium texture I took from Google images to create the material and apply it to the ship. I do this selecting the DIFUSE button and choosing the Bitmap button and then browsing the texture in my computer.

The texture looks fine in some of the surfaces but in some other it seems to be stretched. I have figured out why this happens: Because some of the prim's polygons are pulled out (like the wings and the nose) the textures are also stretched. I did not have this in consideration when I modelled the ships but for the next time I know.

Then I will do exactly the same for the rest of the parts of the ship. To add the side bands I will simply spawn a box primitive and I will give it the shape of the sidebands. I will place them in the sides and then I will give them a texture.

TIE Interceptor

For the Tie Interceptor I will do exactly the same as for the X-Wing.

Anti Air Turret