Materials and settings!

Today I textured my models properly, when I first handed them in I had just colour them using basic maps, so now I wanted to make them look more realistic and more like the real Naboo fighter, to do this I used photo shop to create the desired texture, I simply used the colour yellow/gold as my background colour and then used an irregular shaped brush to create the dirty/burnt effect.

I then saved this as a JPEG, this map would be used for the main body of my Naboo fighter. I did the same thing to create the texture for the front of fighter, however using a silver colour. 

In the compact material editor I clicked on the diffuse button and that brought up a list of material maps, I then chose Bitmap and then selected my JPEG files that I created, this then imported the textures into the material editor, I changed the glossiness and specular to desire level and applied them to my model.

I found that the dark parts of my textures weren’t in the desired area of my model, for example I wanted most of the dirt/burnt effect towards the front of the fighter, and also a little less symmetrical looking, I learnt that I was able to change how the material took the model by going into the modifier list, and choosing the UVM mapping option, this allowed me to change the shape of how the material was applied to the object, for example if my object was a sphere I could change the option to spherical which then changed how the maps look on the model corresponding to the shape, I could also change the length, height and width of how the map looked on the model. After playing around with the settings in the UVM list, I was able to change how the colours were positioned on my model, and got a reasonable outcome with the darker areas of the materials at the front of the model, which I was aiming to achieve.