| Drone Design Experiment |
| 09-29-11 |
So I have had a bit of a conundrum lately, I really enjoy modeling in nurbs, for certain types of models it is simply the easiest and most enjoyable way to model. I also love texturing, and grunging up my models to make them look worn out and beat up.
The problem is nurbs models exported to a polygonal format are usually very difficult to UV map and texture paint. I have had some success with automatic packing algorithms and 3D painting tools, but the results have been unpredictable. Usually suffering from ugly artifacts in the UV seems, and slow performance due to the fact that every patch of the nurbs surface imports as it’s own UV island.
To overcome this obstacle I had an idea to experiment with procedural texturing, and avoid the whole UV mapping issue entirely. This is the result, I have to say I was extremely pleased with the amount of control, and the realism of the surfaces I could create with the procedural textures inside of Modo. Coupled with the occlusion layer that I used heavily as a mask for the different procedurals, I really felt that I had a lot of control over the final look of the surface. Now that I have proved this to be a viable workflow I expect to create more projects using this technique.
