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Image Planes tutorial
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Image Planes tutorial // Roundtable
Post by Jack Edwards // Oct 21, 2006, 10:34pm
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Jack Edwards
Total Posts: 4062
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Promised these a few weeks back so figured I'd better just sit down and get them done. I'll keep it to steps that should work in older versions even though the images will be from 7.1.
Image Plane setup tutorial:
Click here to set up a new scene:
http://www.motbc.com/ForumStuff/newscene.jpg or http://www.motbc.com/ForumStuff/newscene_66.jpg
Create a plane by clicking here:
http://www.motbc.com/ForumStuff/polyPlane.jpg
Then left click once in the modeling window. Right click once or press space bar to deselect.
Right click on the Plane icon to see if the plane was created as a single or double sided plane:
http://www.motbc.com/ForumStuff/singlesided.jpg
If "single-sided" wasn't checked, you'll need to check it, delete the plane, and create a new one.
Right click here http://www.motbc.com/ForumStuff/objectInfo.jpg to open up the object information panel.
http://www.motbc.com/ForumStuff/infobox01.jpg
Pull up Windows Explorer or "My Computer" and browse to the directory where your images are stored. Select the image, then check the "Details" pane on the left side. You may have to click the expand icon to see it like in the image below:
http://www.motbc.com/ForumStuff/dimentions.jpg
Go back to trueSpace and enter the width and height values for your image in the object information box for the plane, but divide them by 100 or 1000 so that you get a more reasonable number. In my case the front_view.jpg image was 438x346 so I entered 4.38 and 3.46. Basically you want your plane to be the exact same ratio as your image that you are going to map to it:
http://www.motbc.com/ForumStuff/infobox02.jpg |
Post by Jack Edwards // Oct 21, 2006, 10:35pm
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Jack Edwards
Total Posts: 4062
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Click the icon to open the Material Editor and click the tab to expand the material editor:
http://www.motbc.com/ForumStuff/materialeditor.jpg
Once the material editor is expanded, right click on the color selector. This will pop up the color shader library. Left click on the texture map shader.
http://www.motbc.com/ForumStuff/materialeditor_expand.jpg
Right click on the button beneath the thumbnail of the currently selected texture in the material editor. This will pop up the Windows File Open dialog. Browse to your image and select it, then click "Open":
http://www.motbc.com/ForumStuff/imagebrowse.jpg
Click the red X's to reset the bump and reflectance shaders, then move the luminance slider up about halfway so that your image shows clearly. This is so that you image planes will display even if not lit by lights.
http://www.motbc.com/ForumStuff/materialeditor2.jpg
Now with your plane selected, click the Paint Object icon to apply the material to the plane. I also changed the x,y position of the plane to 0.0, 0.0 by editing them in the info panel:
http://www.motbc.com/ForumStuff/paintObject.jpg
Go ahead and close out the material editor for now.
Next we need to rotate the image plane to the correct orientation. You can either type 90, 0.0, -180 into the info panel or use the widget by right click-draging on the cylinders to rotate in 90 degree increments:
http://www.motbc.com/ForumStuff/rotateplane.jpg
Switch to Front orthographic view to make sure we got it right. You may have to zoom out (right click-drag on the view nav widget) and pan around (left click drag on the view widget) to line the view up:
http://www.motbc.com/ForumStuff/frontview.jpg
Next I normalize the rotation for the image plane now that it is rotated the way I wanted. Select the Axis icon to show the object axis:
http://www.motbc.com/ForumStuff/showaxis.jpg
Select the Normalize Rotation icon:
http://www.motbc.com/ForumStuff/normalizerotation.jpg
Then select the Axis icon again as shown above to re-hide the axis. (Don't forget to re-hide the axis or any transforms you make will be done on the axis instead of the object.) |
Post by Jack Edwards // Oct 21, 2006, 10:36pm
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Jack Edwards
Total Posts: 4062
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You can go back to Perspective view by selecting the angled house on the same flyout bar where you found the Front view icon:
http://www.motbc.com/ForumStuff/perspective.jpg
Your object info panel should now show the rotation values at 0.0, 0.0, 0.0.
Rename the image plane and save it to your object library.
Next I'm going to make the side view.
Copy the current image plane by pressing Ctrl-C or by clicking on the Copy icon:
http://www.motbc.com/ForumStuff/copy.jpg
Rotate the copy -90 degrees in Z axis:
http://www.motbc.com/ForumStuff/rotate90.jpg
Normalize the rotation as done above: Click Axis icon. Click Normalize Rotation Icon. Click Axis icon. This will set the rotation back to 0,0,0 while leaving the plane rotated.
Bring the material editor back up and right click on the button to choose another bitmap for the texture. Browse to your image location and choose the side image:
http://www.motbc.com/ForumStuff/browsesideview.jpg
Click the Paint Object icon again to paint the side image onto the plane for the side view:
http://www.motbc.com/ForumStuff/paintside.jpg
Close the Material Editor.
Go back to Windows Explorer and get the height and width for the side view image:
http://www.motbc.com/ForumStuff/dimentions2.jpg
Enter equivalent dimentions into the Object Info panel with the side plane selected. In my case the side image was 975x324 so I made my dimentions 9.75 and 3.24:
http://www.motbc.com/ForumStuff/sidedim.jpg
In my example and likely in many of your own, the images don't line up completely perfect. So I'll need to move the image up or down a bit to completely line it up. Some times you may need to scale one of the the planes as well. This all depends on how careful you were when making the image planes in the first place. The more accurate you are in your image processing application the less work you'll have to do in tS to line everything up.
When you are happy with the position. Rename and save the side view to the library. Repeat for all your aditional views.
Some times it is hard to model with the image planes directly in the center of the workspace so I'll move them back in an axis perpendicular to their orthographic view. The Front view for example I'll move to -10 in Y and the side view to +10 in X. They still show up in the same place in the Front and Side views but are no longer in my way when modeling. Also you will want to Lock the layer that the image planes are on and do your modeling on a separate layer. That way you don't accidentaly move or select the image planes:
http://www.motbc.com/ForumStuff/layers.jpg
If your images are not displaying very well, you may want to check and see what your texture display size is set to. Click on "File" from the main menu and choose "Display Options". Then make sure that "tex res" and "tex res for Player" are both set to at least 512x512:
http://www.motbc.com/ForumStuff/dispres.jpg
Hope someone out there finds this useful.
-Jack. |
Post by Jack Edwards // Oct 21, 2006, 10:56pm
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Jack Edwards
Total Posts: 4062
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Oh yeah forgot one more useful tip:
Bring back up the Object Info panel for the image plane. If only the basic info panel is showing up, you can expand it by clicking on the red triangle at the top of the panel. Then click on "Render Options". This will bring up a pop up dialog called "object render options". By unchecking the cast and recieve shadows boxes you can make the image planes not cast or recieve shadows. ;-)
http://www.motbc.com/ForumStuff/nolighting.jpg
If you're working with tS 6.6 or lower you may also want to use the "constant shader" in the reflectance chanel since that will prevent the scene lighting from affecting the image planes at all.
-Jack. |
Post by Jack Edwards // Oct 22, 2006, 1:10am
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Jack Edwards
Total Posts: 4062
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Awww crud. Just realized that my side view image is backwards and it's that way in several of the images. So I can't just re-edit just a few... what do you guys think? Should I just leave it or re-do the messed up images?
It does bring up a good point though, what if your side image is facing the wrong way? LOL
Solution is to use the current side view for the opposite side. ;-) Just rotate it 180 degrees in Z, and move it to -10 X instead of +10 X:
http://www.motbc.com/ForumStuff/sideflipped2.jpg
To fix the view for the current side, just horrizontally flip the image in the paint program, save out to a new file, and load that in as the texture map:
http://www.motbc.com/ForumStuff/sideflipped.jpg
I though about flipping the UV coordinates but the problem is that unless I'm missing something, tS really doesn't have any tools to accurately flip uv space.... so just creating a second image horizontally flipped is a much simpler solution.
-Jack. |
Post by TheWickedWitchOfTheWeb // Oct 22, 2006, 1:42am
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TheWickedWitchOfTheWeb
Total Posts: 858
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A very comprehensive tutorial, Jack. I'm sure many will find it useful. It looks complex but in practice is much easier than it seems.
It does bring up a good point though, what if your side image is facing the wrong way?
As someone who's had a bit of experience recently with image reference planes (!!!!) and ran into that exact situation on more than one occassion, there's two very simple options. One, if the plane is double sided, you can just rotate it 180 degrees and look at the other side! Two, flip the texture in your painting program (PSP, PShop, etc) and re-save (with same name). TrueSpace will just reload the corrected image . |
Post by Jack Edwards // Oct 22, 2006, 2:39am
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Jack Edwards
Total Posts: 4062
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Thanks for the reply Kate! :-)
The two sided image planes can save some time and effort and are how I've normally done it in the past, but they don't really work when you need right/left or front/back views that are different. By using the single sided planes, the "wrong" side wont be visible when looking at it from the opposite orthographic view.
Another interesting way to set image planes up would be to do a cube primitive, scale it to the right dimentions, flip the normals so that it shows inside out, then map each of the faces with the different image maps. Of course that would require quite a bit more care in the construction of the images for the image planes....
I've also seen it done where artists use the image planes to construct NURBS spline outlines, then hide the image planes and use the spines as 3 dimentional guides to help them figure out where to place their polys.
-Jack. |
Post by GraySho // Oct 22, 2006, 8:08am
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GraySho
Total Posts: 695
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You can mirror the uv-plane in the uv-editor by dragging the left side over the right side and readjusting to fit the image. Or you can rotate the projection plane 180° while still active (after you click planar uv-projection).
One thing you left out and is very helpful is the "Draw object as solid" button. If activated for the image planes, they are drawn as solid, no matter what drawing mode you are in (wireframe etc.). You can access this function by right clicking on the blue sphere of the manipulator cage (3D controls must be activated in preferences), or you simply use the icon finder and drag the button to your workspace (CTRL+drag). |
Post by Jack Edwards // Oct 22, 2006, 1:50pm
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Jack Edwards
Total Posts: 4062
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Thanks GraySho,
Editing it in the UV editor won't work because there's no way to get it exact. :(
Tried the reprojecting, problem is that I couldn't get it to do an "exact fit". So even if I rotated it, I'd have to manually reposition and scale it, that defeats the whole purpose of sizing the plane to specific values....
Doh I figured it out.... it's a bug. :o tS can't project it right because I changed the rotation of the plane and reset it's axis. That's why it keeps trying to project it on the edge instead of the face.
Solution: Rotating a new UV projection 180 degrees works if the plane is at it's original axis orientation since tS is still able to do a "best fit" projection.
Do you guys have any crits about the tutorial? See anything I should change to make it clearer? Thanks to Kate and Graysho's contributions I think we've covered in the follow-up posts how to adjust a texture map facing the wrong way. :)
Also if anyone is trying to follow the tutorial and is stuck or needs help, feel free to post or private message me. This is fairly straight forward stuff and I'm sure someone here would be more than happy to help out.
Plans are to do the UV mapping tutorial next. Need to finish up the generic head model I'm working on first though. LOL of course I never seem to be able to follow my plan...
-Jack. |
Post by trueBlue // Oct 22, 2006, 2:10pm
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trueBlue
Total Posts: 1761
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Did you know that there is almost all icons that are available in trueSpace7 in the :) Show all smilies?
:icon_UV_MappingEdit :icon_UV_Unwrapper: :icon_UV_Slice: :icon_UV_MappingRect :icon_UVE_PickFace: :icon_UVE_BreakAlong |
Post by Jack Edwards // Oct 22, 2006, 2:21pm
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Jack Edwards
Total Posts: 4062
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One thing you left out and is very helpful is the "Draw object as solid" button. If activated for the image planes, they are drawn as solid, no matter what drawing mode you are in (wireframe etc.). You can access this function by right clicking on the blue sphere of the manipulator cage (3D controls must be activated in preferences), or you simply use the icon finder and drag the button to your workspace (CTRL+drag).
Wow that's pretty cool, I didn't even know that bar was there! :banana: Here's an image:
http://www.motbc.com/ForumStuff/drawassolid.jpg
-Jack. |
Post by Jack Edwards // Oct 22, 2006, 2:31pm
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Jack Edwards
Total Posts: 4062
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Did you know that there is almost all icons that are available in trueSpace7 in the :) Show all smilies?
:icon_UV_MappingEdit :icon_UV_Unwrapper: :icon_UV_Slice: :icon_UV_MappingRect :icon_UVE_PickFace: :icon_UVE_BreakAlong
Thanks trueBlue,
:o
For all those out there like me who didn't quite figure out how to get to them:
http://www.motbc.com/ForumStuff/icons.jpg
-Jack. |
Post by TheWickedWitchOfTheWeb // Oct 23, 2006, 12:23am
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TheWickedWitchOfTheWeb
Total Posts: 858
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One thing you left out and is very helpful is the "Draw object as solid" button. If activated for the image planes, they are drawn as solid, no matter what drawing mode you are in (wireframe etc.).
This function is also available in tS 4-3 to 6.6 with the Rotoscope plugin from CK Game Factory. It's available free from: http://ckgamefactory.hp.infoseek.co.jp/tsxe.html
It's an absolute godsend for this type of modelling setup. |
Post by Alien // Oct 23, 2006, 9:48pm
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Alien
Total Posts: 1231
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Some people [especially those with older/slower machines] may also wish to use OpenGL mode, but anyone who's tried it may have noticed that the texture distorts as you view it from different angles when using a 1x1 resolution plane. The simple solution to this is to either set the resolution to 8 before creating the plane, or quad divide an existing plane 3x. |
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