Aztec

[eric2575]

Greetings:

I need some specific advice on creating sharp, detailed texture maps. Trust me, I've done my homework and scoured the web for the answers, but so far have come up short. We are talking about the infamous Aztec map for the top saucer.

Basically I've found two tuts, one for doing it in Photoshop, the other for Illustrator. The PS tut is located here:

http://www.meshweaver.com/tutorials/Aztec_Patterns.htm

the Illustrator one here:

http://discovery.scifi-art.com/aztec/

I've tried the PS one and don't like the stretching that happens when you use the Polar Coordinates filter. I have not tried the Illustrator one since I am not familiar with Illustrator and figure it should be doable with Photoshop.

Rusty's created his terrific Enterprise here:

http://www.foundation3d.com/forums/showthread.php?t=9920

and shared his textures with the model. I UV'd my own model and tried his saucer texture on for size. It looks fantastic - his texture - and I would like to be able to make my own texture with the detail he has in his 4000x4000 map. I tried starting out with a 6k x 6k map, drawing my pattern, using polar coordinates, and then scaling the image down to 4000x4000. It doesn't have the crisp lines and detail that Rusty's has, and as stated above, it has a slight difference in thickness of the panel lines due to the polar coordinate filter. Don't get me wrong, it's quite passable, but just not up to par with Rusty's. I have a feeling the photoshop Polar coordinate filter isn't the way to go. Question is, what is the right way, and/or, is Photoshop even the app to use in this case?

Rusty, if you get a chance to read my dilemma, could you shed some light? Any help is greatly appreciated. Attached is a pic of my JJprise WIP and the texture map I have so far. At this range, it looks fine, but I would still like to know how to get a better map for very close shots.


Thanks

Eric

[nightfever]

Its the Illustrator way you should go. Photoshop has the same tools for that.
I tried it that way, too. But for me it was more comfortable doing the aztecs with some 90° discs in my 3D app and layering them in Photoshop afterwards.

[rustythe1]

just remembered something i did, i created a disk in modeler, then sup devided it to a high poly count, then went around and selected every other poly, gave it a new surface (made one black,one white) to create a checkered texture, you can then render that out at a stupidly high resolution to use as a pattern selection tool in photoshop by adding more squares to the selection to create the patterns, that way your round edge will be as smooth as you want (the higher the render res, the higher the selection res, then just shrink the image at the end)