It was just supposed to be a test of setting up the camera in Blender for a texturing experiment. Fast forward 48 hours later- oh look we have a complete bus exterior!
Loaded this picture in Blender:
I originally intended to just model the front bumper and use this picture to project the texture from this image. I made the bumper, textured it and was amazed how well it looked.
Hmmm... Might as well go up from the bumper to the headlights area. That turned out good as well, so I went all the way up to the roof. And then... oops. I did the whole bus.
I used two other pictures beside this one to texture the sides and the rear end. Turned out WAY better than I expected.
Aaand et voilà:
Render time!
As long as the pictures are good quality, the bus that is photographed is well lit and (relatively) clean, the photo textures can turn out really good!
Of course, this result can be further enhanced by adding AO and fiddling around in Photoshop, but just photo textures alone do the job quite well.
The model itself is low poly, just 35k polygons. But since the photo textures add a lot of detail, it's not really noticeable. And such models are very good for games like OMSI.
