Screenshots of what you're doing

[Rad Ished]

OK , so the uv mapping is kinda scewed on the pipes , so they're now black xD, just plain black, like charcoal y'know.. also it's kind of a bit too waspish now ...

[MC SE7EN]

OK , so the uv mapping is kinda scewed on the pipes , so they're now black xD, just plain black, like charcoal y'know.. also it's kind of a bit too waspish now ...

[large image]

the ends of the pipes closer to the barrel should be glowing red hot..as they get closer to the opening, they should even get white..

[Flying Steel]

OK , i kept the mesh manifold and played with seams.. for a long time

A note/clarification, you don't need to keep the mesh as one continuous mesh over the whole thing, with all vertices welded together. You can and should separate the mesh along edges that are around 90 degrees so that they shade correctly. When you do this you are also essentially creating seams in those places, which will make some seams unnecessary.

But like I said earlier, you still just don't want alot of intersecting surfaces and surfaces covering surfaces facing in similar directions.

This is only a preliminary texturing. Just playing with ideas atm, it's my first weapon (kinda) so im in no hurry.

Once you are geometry complete, you should bake a much, much higher quality ambient occlusion map, like 16 or 32 for your final. But first set the Energy value up to 2.0 instead of the default 1.0. You'll use this in the texture.

[Flying Steel]

OK , so the uv mapping is kinda scewed on the pipes , so they're now black xD, just plain black, like charcoal y'know.. also it's kind of a bit too waspish now ...

If you post your .blend file I could take a look at the pipes.

Also, remember to separate the parts of the texture that are actually glowing into a separate "glow map" or luma map, whichever it is called around here. These areas shouldn't be part of the diffuse texture in the end.

[SavageX]

just playing a bit with textures

Is there a finished version somewhere? This looks very promising. I never quite liked my texturing in the original version.

[Rad Ished]

Hey flying steel, thank you for offering to fix my mesh, but i managed to do it.
I'll start a thread when I've got something new to post.
A good point about separating out the glow maps.
I decided to start texturing again from scratch, I am not really to happy with it so far.

[cortez]

2 different design concepts

[KillaGrunt]

The one on the left looks cool.

[paperclips]

2 different design concepts

yes, indeedily. I can has downloads links, if available?

[Sepelio]

Cortez - I prefer the left/red it goes with the lava

Looks nice though