IMHO good looking objects can be made when the UV-Mapping is done properly. Several Tools can be used. Deep Paint can be found for free these days, and there is Tatoo for more intuitive freehand painting. Personally I prevere the classic method, using a UV Unwrapping tool to align the Triangles the way I want them on the texture, and then save a UV Map as a Bitmap template, then paint it using some decent Graphics software like Photoshop or the free "the Gimp".
As an UV Unwrapper I suggest to use the free "Lithunwrap 1.3" or the cheap "UltimateUnwrap3D" (actually UU3D is Lithies sequel, and it's also one of the few Apps that are capable of converting From/To animated .B3D - surely worth the money!)
If you decide to use the free LithUnwrap, you need to fix a little problem: it exports .3ds as unwelded and therefor flatshaded meshes. You need to load them in third party apps that will allow to WELD a mesh and to SMOOTH or AUTOSMOOTH a mesh (not talking about adding triangles!). If you plan to lightmap your objects in Gile[s], you don't have to worry too much about smoothing because Gile[s] using its own smoothing algorithm AFAIK.
Anyway, good looking Objects require good UV-Unwrapping, eg:
Here's 2 photos of a gun:
and here's the 3D Mesh:
This is the texture used:
The UV Wrapping template was made with Lithunwrap 1.3.
BTW feel free to use the model
http://www.melog.ch/models/SIGp220_se.zip
Depending on the Tool you are going to choose for UV Unwrapping, you will have to read some tutorials, since good UV Unwrapping/Mapping is a science by its own.
As an UV Unwrapper I suggest to use the free "Lithunwrap 1.3" or the cheap "UltimateUnwrap3D" (actually UU3D is Lithies sequel, and it's also one of the few Apps that are capable of converting From/To animated .B3D - surely worth the money!)
If you decide to use the free LithUnwrap, you need to fix a little problem: it exports .3ds as unwelded and therefor flatshaded meshes. You need to load them in third party apps that will allow to WELD a mesh and to SMOOTH or AUTOSMOOTH a mesh (not talking about adding triangles!). If you plan to lightmap your objects in Gile[s], you don't have to worry too much about smoothing because Gile[s] using its own smoothing algorithm AFAIK.
Anyway, good looking Objects require good UV-Unwrapping, eg:
Here's 2 photos of a gun:
and here's the 3D Mesh:
This is the texture used:
The UV Wrapping template was made with Lithunwrap 1.3.
BTW feel free to use the model
http://www.melog.ch/models/SIGp220_se.zip
Depending on the Tool you are going to choose for UV Unwrapping, you will have to read some tutorials, since good UV Unwrapping/Mapping is a science by its own.