I'm not a modeler.  But I need a custom-looking spacecraft for a story.

I have the spaceship constructor set:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/space-ship-constructor-set-1/96176/

(and #2 through #6)

Lots of neat parts, however they look a little cartoony and I'm looking for something more realistic.  The structure is fine but they're just basic colors and I want something more realistic.

So my thought was to get some realistic textures (find something at cgtextures, etc.) and retexture them.  I've never really used textures before...not really sure what I'm doing, but hey that's how we learn.

In theory is this a good approach?  Any gotchas I should know about?  I don't need this to look like Industrial Light & Magic, just reasonably realistic.  I'm handy in photoshop, though I'm thinking I can just use Poser's materials room for this...?

Hi, you won't have much trouble if they are uv-eed. If they are not you will need to unwrap them in a uv program or use procedural textures (don't know much about poser materials sorry)

If you go to their textures and open them in photoshop and they look like they make sense - eg flags or porthioles or doorways etc, then they probably have uv  coords.

Just save the original textures under another name and make your own textures over the top of the old one.

If you can't figure out what texture goes where or the orientation just put different colours in parts of the texture map, then reload the textures on your 3d model and it will give you a clue.

Just remember save the originals first :) That will save you having to change texture maps in the materials room

show us the resuklts when you are finished Ron Deviney has great texture brushes for grunge and Old Technical stuff (at daz site)

Ships like that generally have few basic texture maps which contain all the details needed to cover the hulls.  By applying layers in a either Photoshop or GIMP, you can brush in finer details here and there, but if you are considering a major overhaul, then the project becomes more involved.  This is particularly true if additional maps like displacement/bump, specular, and normal are necessary to enhance the final image.  Replacing sections with a combination of procedural and image textures will help in the long run, and introducing other effects like reflections will make the model a little bit more realistic.

That particular set comes with the UV templates as part of the package, as do the other sets in the same range.  Also they are split into a large number of material zones which are well named making it easy to identify the parts of the model.  If you are unsure of the parts represented by a material you can always make the material bright red or some other distinctive colour in the material room and then undo the changes when you have identified the parts.  That said I did not need to do that with this set.

You can make the crafts look very different from the standard just using other materials but if you are good in Photoshop the UVs should help.

 

Above is one I prepared earlier...ohh and I have no interest other than being a happy purchaser of many items from the same vendor.