Pioneer dev forum

I'd be interested in checking this out, with the new decal technique, in engine.

See if there's anything easy/obvious we can do to make any rendering artifacts go away

Will do.

I am really liking the latest pictures. Is Decalmachine worth getting?

The latest aren't made with decalmachine, but I actually cut up the geometry. Edit: actually they are, I didn't posted the latest images here it seems. But I will do what fluffyfreak suggests to see how the decal way would act with the current rendering, maybe it would work.

Decal machine automates quite a few things, and is very handy, but there's a level of finicky-ness to it, with errors even, and some unpredictable parts, especially with baking (but in other places too). 20 bucks isn't that much money for it in my opinion, but expect rough edges. The author put out at least two or three updates to it since summer.

@Fluffyfreak: I think one important thing (to me) that would not work is the weathering of the hull. Not sure how to approach that. My guess would be that if the decals could multiply or overlay the underlying texture somehow in the fragment part, then it could work. (Does that makes sense?).

I've started a Decals repo, so I won't loose them, and others could contribute too.

It seems like with the technique you could either use tiling textures + decals, or a global texture + decals.
A hybrid pipeline if you like.

I think I'll go with a global texture, because with tiling I can't do weathering. Or the weathering will be made with decals too, but that feels counterintuitive, even wasteful.

I played a bit whit the Bluenose while I was thinking about the surface details.
This is the view you'd get from the bottom (outward) window of the front ring (links to a video):

Some details painted over: