I am using Autodesk Maya 2008. I have an experience of around 2 months.
Please refer to the jpeg images given below
F1 Car Pic 1
F1 Car Pic 2

As you can see the overall rendering and everything looks pretty good but what the formula 1 car is missing is a bunch of sponsors and some nice paint effects which makes it look rather boring.
So my question is
->keeping all the shading applied till now intact is there a way to add a separate layer of logo texture? Please explain how to do it 'coz I just could not find it anywhere.

-> I tried to add the logos by making a jpeg image and adding it as a material. But the problems I faced are:
- I could not see the effect in the workspace... only if i rendered the scene can I see the text coming on!!
- I could not map it properly on the car body. I think I need to apply planar mapping but I could not use it properly.

So please help... in case you can suggest some other means to do the same please go ahead. Also some comments on the modeling is welcome.

well what you have to do it use the UNWRAP option in maya.
texturing without that can never be proper (atleast i feel like that).

To start with see the image


here i have just created a box and made 4 extra loops to it. they will act as my row of windows.

then i go to the windows > rendering editor > hypershade option and create a lambert and named it building. Then double click the new labert you have created to get the attributes at the right hand side as shown in the image below.








then click here to load the jpeg texture, you can even use a psd file. the option you can check in the previous image.



once you get the texture on the lambert, it will be reflecting on the sphere. select the box, right click the lambert (building) and then click the option - assign material to selection.
once done you can see the texture on the box. dont worry how it is coming as we will fix it (that's the whole point of this tutorial )


now i open the obejct's uv in uv texture editor to work on the UVs.



and you will get something like this at the start.


now that we have the matter unwrapped, we will go to face mode and select all the faces. go to the uv editor, select scale tool. (if you dont get it directly, first select the move tool as shown in the imaeg and then press R to scale.


then i have scaled down the whole thing to fit in a brick section so that the whole building gets a brick texture and then later i can easily fix the other parts of the building with the texture that i might need.









then what i did was just simply select the face of the box and then in the uv textutor editor i have moved and scaled the part to the respective palce in the texture and got the desired result.


remember the better you place the better it will come out. and overlaping will not give you any trouble. you can have more than one face having the same texture. so you can place one over the other.

Hope this will help you.
Also you can contact me at venombarca@rediffmail.com

-thanks
Venom
Creativeporta