Is there a fairly easy way to do starship hull plating in the P5 Material room? I'm not trying for something as nice as Davo's beautiful work, but I'd like something to suggest such an effect. Thanks, Guy Hoyle

I don't know exactly what you are looking for, but RuntimeDNA (www.runtimedna.com) has lots of free P5 stuff and there is a set "Tech Materials" that has several materials that can be used for spaceship hulls.

Message edited on: 01/30/2005 16:54

Thanks! I'll take a look at that. Guy

Also have a look at what Mapps has put in the Freestuff here. Not just painted and bare metal, of various sorts, but a lot of useful textures. Look at them and see how they're put together. And don't be misled by the names. "Granite" and "Marble" aren't limited to stone. Choose different shades of the same colour, fiddle the size of the patterns, and the uneven patterns can make paint or bare metal or skin look more real.

if you can use jpeg textures, you can try L.E.M.O.G's site, which has a few hundreds..actually, if you do a search in Bryce, Agent Smith put up several links to texture sites, a search in the gallery should pull them up..

Not really materials, but have you seen ALIEN51's Greeble series in the Marketplace? You could easily accomplish a similar effect on an undetailed hull, using displacement and ambient mapping.

Hmm, that's definitely something interesting to think about, Little_Dragon. Thank you and all the rest for your suggestions! (Feel free to keep them coming, too!)

Any particular look you're trying for? Interior or exterior? Clean and glossy like Star Trek, or something more like Babylon 5 Even human or alien.

More along the lines of babylon-5, I guess. Not clean and glossy. Guy

It's probably best to use texture maps as you can really get the little details like paint flecks at the edges of panels and stuff. BUT You can use procedural's to get what you want too. I don't know how, because I imagine it would be pretty involved but I assume you could get a tiling panel line procedural by combining nodes. (Then plug it into the bump channel) Griming up your material is a much easier thing though... The cloud node is very versatile at making a surface look dirty, (Though the effect is best when subtle so play with the cloud settings and colors a lot) and you can use it in conjuncture with texture maps, it's a great way to break up obvious tiling.

Cloud shader, yes, but don't forget the others. The names are only labels. I shall have to do a little fiddling. If you want warning stripes, look at making the strip a distinct material, and UV map on a diagonal. Then use the Tile shader with an extreme difference in scales, which turns the squares into stripes.