Mark, I used Texporter to unwrap and export a bitmap for each piece. I just used the default setting and made them all 800x400. Then I changed the display setting on Texporter to display the alpha channel only, did a screen grab, opened up the exported (colorful) unwrapped bitmap in Photoshop. Then created a new image, pasted the screen grab, and cropped it just a little larger than the unwrapped bitmap, drug that pic of the alpha into the original bitmap, aligned it with the original, then deleted the original layer--there's my template, complete with black background and nice thin black lines for the edges. This was to be the top layer in darken mode, to be turned off and on at will and when saving as a jpg.
As far as the textures, I found a few photos on the web for reference, but they weren't very large so I got a children's book from the public library, and scanned the cover. I had to do a lot of Photoshop work to the scanned image to make it usable, mostly with the CloneStamp Tool, like getting rid of the legs and such. I had to do a lot of free transforming of imported pics to get them to somewhat resemble the right size and alignment for the textures, but that was really only the beginning. Lots and LOTS of clone stamping going on in this project, but a lot of it also had to be done from scratch, with different brushes in Photoshop. I've attached the body texture, in full size, as an example. I could've made them larger, for better detail, but it really wasn't necessary for this project.
This was my first time making textures for a model in 3DS Max. The last few projects just used standard colors or modified procedurals. It got pretty frustrating at times figuring all this stuff out, but was a great learning experience.
Danny Huff
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