How to wrap a nice AZTEC?

posted on September 5th, 2013, 2:47 pm

I made many ships with many textures, but one thing I couldn't figure out: How to make an aztec pattern (i.e. the hull plate pattern on Federation statships) for rounded parts, namely the saucer section of a ship. It is easy to make such textures were you don't have to bend them, but on the saucer section it's a royal pain. I know that there is a way in Photoshop or Photoimpact or God knows what where you can create your textures then bend them into a circle, I just can't figure it out, how. I was looking for tutorials, but I couldn't find any, so now I'm turning to the community, maybe you could help me out

posted on September 5th, 2013, 4:28 pm

You're looking for something called "rectangular to polar coordinate transform". Sometimes just called polar transform.

Rectangular Coords

rtplates.png (416.48 KiB) Viewed 1332 times

Polar Transform

ptplates.png (397.04 KiB) Viewed 1332 times

There is also sometimes a "polar to rectangular" transform which will not give you what you're looking for.

Polar to Rectangular from Rectangular

ppplates.png (476.04 KiB) Viewed 1332 times

Sometimes this is useful for mapping spherical objects, but you really should use a spherical UV mapping tool instead.

posted on September 6th, 2013, 3:51 pm

Thanks, it's exactly what I was looking for!