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Images and bumps and textures
About Truespace Archives
These pages are a copy of the official truespace forums prior to their removal somewhere around 2011.
They are retained here for archive purposes only.
Images and bumps and textures // New Users
Post by TomG // Feb 19, 2007, 12:33pm
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TomG
Total Posts: 3397
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Yes, there is an infinite number of ways to unwrap it :)
The best general process to follow is something like this. First, the automatic results for a complex kind of mesh are likely to be messy and not usable. Simple meshes you can get by with default mapping or applying a simple UV mapping like cubic or cylindrical, but doesnt take much before that just doesn't work.
So, do this. Work out what areas of the model will UV map well together. For instance a torso. The front chest might map flat (Planar). Each arm would have its own Cylindrical mapping. You would then map the back Planar too, and maybe then planar on the two sides. Or maybe cylindrical for the whole torso at once.
Once you have mentally divided the object up into good maps, time to do it for real. Use the poly select tools to choose the faces that belong to the same map, eg all the faces for one arm. Paint those one color (select then use the Paint Face tool, and it paints all selected faces only). Select the next group, eg the other arm, and paint a different color.
Now you can select all the faces easily as you can select all faces of a particular color with one click. Do that for the first arm, apply cylindrical UV. Now select the next arm, apply cylindrical UV. And so on.
Now open the UV editor. You can now select all the faces on the model, or all the faces in the UV editor, and you can then move them around to lay them out so they don't overlap in a big mess. You can use up and down arrows in the UV editor to look at only one UV map at a time.
Now you have it laid it out, you can export with all the UV Maps shown at once, and then color them in appropriately in your 2D package.
Note that editing in a 2D package is simply producing an image, not related to what is going on in trueSpace - now you can hook up the "Edit in external application" button to auto run a 2D editor and bring the image back in, but I dont like to do that - generally I paint my image using PSD format so I can use layers, so I can't use the auto edit function.
So what I do is export the image with the UV Map shown, paint in Photoshop using layers, then save to PNG.
Now I simply create a material in tS that uses that PNG as the color texture map, and I paint over my whole object, and presto, my texture is applied!
I usually keep the version with the different selections painted different colors, just in case I need to go back to it for any reason.
There are more advanced techniques, where you can decide to split the UV Map and move those split faces away, and resize faces to avoid texture stretching, and so on. I find that the "basic" approach above covers a lot of ground though and works well in many cases, and I wouldn't tackle anything more ambitious than that for a while until I got used to the concepts in UV Mapping (best thing to do there is to read, experiment, read, experiment, experiment, etc!).
HTH!
Tom |
Post by GraySho // Feb 20, 2007, 2:04am
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GraySho
Total Posts: 695
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The first link is not in English but is very good (get the popcorn for the little movie).:) I'm trying to get Graysho to update it.
I hear you :D It's in the making as I speak |
Post by 8-bit // Feb 20, 2007, 10:57am
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8-bit
Total Posts: 84
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I noticed while watching the SpaceRat video tutorial that after they have selected an area, placed a UV projection on it and resized it in the UV Mapping editor window the user clicks on the blue bar at the top of the UV Mapping window and the window closes. I can't seem to do this in my version, version 6. I can't seem to place more than one UV projection in the UV Mapping Editor window like they do in the video. |
Post by jamesmc // Feb 20, 2007, 12:26pm
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jamesmc
Total Posts: 2566
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I noticed while watching the SpaceRat video tutorial that after they have selected an area, placed a UV projection on it and resized it in the UV Mapping editor window the user clicks on the blue bar at the top of the UV Mapping window and the window closes. I can't seem to do this in my version, version 6. I can't seem to place more than one UV projection in the UV Mapping Editor window like they do in the video.
I'm not sure this is the correct way of doing it, but this is how I do it.
When in the UV map editor and I want to go back into the Edit screen where my project is, I simply move the UV window where I can see the object and click on an object other than the one I am doing the UV work on.
Also, when you want to go back and see all of your objects in the project workspace, you use the control key and left mouse button and go around the all of the objects you are UVing to select them.
When you click the UV Mapping Editor Button again, just right click on the blue arrow in the lower right corner and drag down to see all of your objects.
The UV Maps don't go away, you just have to select them all by the method I suggest or what ever works, glueing them I think works ..
I get confused as I use several programs. heh |
Post by 8-bit // Feb 20, 2007, 1:19pm
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8-bit
Total Posts: 84
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Im beginning to think my install is a bit corrupt. After I've arranged all the UV maps and exported them I either get a blank image or an extreme close up of one section of it. (???) |
Post by jamesmc // Feb 20, 2007, 2:07pm
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jamesmc
Total Posts: 2566
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Im beginning to think my install is a bit corrupt. After I've arranged all the UV maps and exported them I either get a blank image or an extreme close up of one section of it. (???)
Try exporting a plain cube and see what you get.
Also make sure you have transparent background set on your Paint Program so it doesn't hide the lines.
The one on the left was exported in BMP format. The one on the right was exported as a PNG format (PNG is transparent with an alpha channel and may be harder to see.) |
Post by GraySho // Feb 20, 2007, 3:30pm
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GraySho
Total Posts: 695
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To close windows, right click and drag the title bar until a big X appears upon the entire window. You can also hit space bar or simply click the X icon in the upper right corner. I recorded the tutorial again today, this time in english. I'll post an extra thread with some explanation and the video tomorrow, it's quite late here. |
Post by 8-bit // Feb 21, 2007, 11:45am
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8-bit
Total Posts: 84
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Theres still something Im not doing right. If I apply a planar map to the top of an object then apply a planar map to the side of an object when I open the uv editor I only see the last side I mapped and not both. How do I get both uv maps to appear in the uv editor? |
Post by TomG // Feb 21, 2007, 12:53pm
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TomG
Total Posts: 3397
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Most likely both maps are there, but are sitting directly on top of one another. Several things to do.
Select all the faces that had one UV map using point edit. This will select all those faces in the UV editor too. Now scale that down. My guess is the other UV map will be "revealed" underneath it.
Now select all the faces for the other map, and scale those down too. Now you can position both UV maps side by side.
You can also use the arrows in the bottom right of the UV Editor to switch between UV Mappings. You can go from displaying all at once (the default), to displaying just one and moving through the one displayed using the arrows.
You could do that instead to reposition the UV maps (use the arrows to display just one, select all points in UV Editor rather than using Point Edit on the model, scale down, move to the side; use the arrow keys to display the next UV map, select all in the UVE, scale down, move them all to the side).
HTH!
Tom |
Post by 8-bit // Feb 21, 2007, 1:25pm
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8-bit
Total Posts: 84
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Thanks. I tried that but all that happens when I click on the small arrows is the view cycles through different sections of the current uv map. Either my TS version has totally lost it or I have! ;) |
Post by 8-bit // Feb 21, 2007, 1:30pm
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8-bit
Total Posts: 84
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Think its finally sunk in!
I tried colouring the various sections, selecting them THEN appling a UV map. What I was'nt doing before was actually selecting the portions of the object I wanted a UV map of!! DOH! Thanks for your help and your patience! ;) |
Post by GraySho // Feb 21, 2007, 1:38pm
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GraySho
Total Posts: 695
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To make all faces show up at once:
-open mapping editor with the object selected, no point edit mode
-only ONE (or no) texture map painted on the entire object.
As soon as you have more than one texture map painted on an object, you have split your uv layout. |
Post by 8-bit // Feb 22, 2007, 12:09pm
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8-bit
Total Posts: 84
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One last thing. After Ive exported the map, textured and loaded it back into TS, will the textures automatically map back onto their correct surfaces? |
Post by Chester Desmond // Feb 22, 2007, 12:14pm
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Chester Desmond
Total Posts: 323
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Yes, that's the idea of setting up the UV in the first place, athough you will have had to save the object with the custom UV assigned to it.
for example, if you messed around with the UV of a sphere and painted your texture based on that, it won't work on every sphere. By the same token, if you painted your "UV altered" sphere with a new texture, the texture will be warped to the UV you assigned. |
Post by GraySho // Feb 22, 2007, 3:52pm
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GraySho
Total Posts: 695
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One last thing. After Ive exported the map, textured and loaded it back into TS, will the textures automatically map back onto their correct surfaces?
Truespace generated objects are also mapped before you edit the manually, but as soon as you edit them and add geometry, the default mapping quickly becomes unusable. UV maps are always stored with objects, it is just not that obvious.
Some more explanation:
Objects are 3 dimensional, textures 2 dimensional. That's where the problem starts. The software needs to know how and where to project the texture onto the surface of the object. That's where uv's come in to play. Why "UV"? It's like X, Y and Z for the object/world coordinate system. U and V represent the X and Y in the texture space. As textures are 2 dimensional, there's no need for the third dimension (W).
So by editing the uv-space of an object, you generally define a map of your faces to tell the software which faces of your object use which texture section. If you scale one face up to cover the whole uv-space, the whole texture will be projected onto it. If you scale it down to the lower left quarter, only the lower left quarter of the texture will be projected to that face. Quite easy, isn't it ;) |
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