Creating Textures: Bump Maps (2) and the Opacity Map

Originally I was going to describe the finished bump map in this post. However, when I started writing it, I discovered that I have enough materials for at least two subsequent posts. Thus I decided to split this text into this and the next article.

There are many small openings in the aircraft skin. For example ­– perforation of the SBD Dauntless wing flaps, or small slots for control surfaces actuators. It would require a lot work to model each of such details “in the mesh”. What’s more – it would make the model meshes much more complex, which would hinder the UV mapping, and so on.

Fortunately, there is a much simpler solution for all these small openings. Just draw their shapes as black objects on white background, then use this picture as so-called opacity map (Figure 69‑1):

Figure 69-1 Opacity map and its effects

As you can see in figure above, the final result does not differ from the openings modeled “in the mesh”.