Using photos for textures?

[Fumetsu]

Yes, you can use photos for your textures. But most of the time, your the photos will need to be edited in Photoshop to remove any highlights, shadows and reflection.

[wannabeArtist]

Thanks,

I thought, I would try something like that and also I would take the photos on a cloudy day to minimize the reflections.

However, there's still the issue of the photos being slightly distorted because of the camera lens, well, perhaps something as simple and small as a taillight cover it wont be that much of a problem as it would be for a bigger surface.

[Riperton]

To minimize the distortion, you can step away as far as your camera zoom allows it. That will change the focal length to achieve a more planar result.

[wannabeArtist]

Thanks for the tip!

Actually I think I heard that one before and I do have a zoom lens that might work for that.

I started thinking though, if I should try without a photo after all. Bump map inside the lamp cover to give the ripples for it and a smooth colored glass surface on top of that. what do you think? Would that work better?

Here's a picture (http://i39.tinypic.com/2wofxow.jpg)(I just took this for modeling reference, I wasn't even thinking about textures yet).

[Riperton]

Depends on what you need(/are willing to spend in terms of effort/rendertime). If you aim for a naturalistic look you might even wanna use displacement or model the car lights. But I've seen nice usage of bump maps as well ( but bump maps can go just so far...).

But fact is, a texture like this will always produce pictures that are somehow off, because the lighting of the rest of the car will be different from what the car lights textures suggest. So, I suggest to step away from the idea of using such a pic as a texture. If you have stickers on the car you'd like to incorporate in the model, taking fotos might just be fine under the right circumstances. But if the car is supposed to look real a simple photograph won't be satisfying.

Since Displacement is sometimes hard to treat I'd go for modelling the car lights.

[wannabeArtist]

Hmm, I guess your right.

I do need to study on the bump maps etc. before I can do that properly. I know next to nothing about surfacing right now and quick testing shows there's some learning to do: I managed to make a glass wall cube with sort of a grid pattern, but the render time became ridiculously long, so definitely not done right. The modeling bit should be easy enough :)

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