Howard at another topic you said you use some kind of procedural mapping in max to get a used look. Could you explain that a little bit?
Sure. The basic idea that I use is that the materials in MAX can be as complex as they need to be in order to get the object looking good. I will use whatever combination of materials and textures required to get a decent looking ship. One resource I use is
www.cgtextures.com - there are some wonderful grime and wear textures on that site.
My basic workflow is creating a texture in Photoshop - usually panel lines and doo-dads - and exporting that to 4 different image maps - usually the diffuse color, black and white bump map, colored decals, and glow map. The decals are separated out because I use Max's RGB Multiply material to change the color and tinting on the base diffuse texture - to give the different paint types - and overlay the decal texture over it to keep the decals for being affected by that. I then go in and use various combinations of Noises, Mix Materials, and F-edge materials (
http://www.ddag.org/f-Edge/builds.html) and those aforementioned grunge maps to make the texture as beat up as it needs to be. I also don't worry about UV coordinates at this point - I'm using almost completely Box-Maps - I'm roughly laying out the UVs on the general texture to get the details in the areas I think they should go.
Once I have a more complete model, I then generate the separate set of UVs - automatically generated to have as much coverage as possible. I then use Max's Render to Texture utility to bake out 5 maps - Diffuse, Spec, Normal, Ambient Occlusion, and Glow - by this way all those Max materials are put into a game-usable texture.
That's basically it.
Dundradal: Yeah, it's gonna be pretty neat. We're gonna have a few different variations or dirt maps, so the type of damage will change too - everything from just scummed up to battle damage and scarring - will be available to be used on just about any ship.
t.c.cgi: Vroom!
JasonRocZ: You're using the same programs as I am, right? Photoshop and 3DSMax? Anyhow, it's not really that difficult. It's all in the methodology you use.