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Uv Frustrations
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.
Uv Frustrations // New Users
Post by johnhoward // Nov 10, 2007, 8:19am
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johnhoward
Total Posts: 231
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I am now trying to learn UV mapping in 7.51.
I find that the manual will not tell me how to apply a UV to an object face. The manual seems written as an ad - "you can do this and you can do that" - but it never gets to a step by step instruction telling me how to do it. Where in the manual are the very first basic steps?
In the screen shot below, you can see that I have loaded a photo of clouds in the UV editor, I have created a simple cubic wall shape (same proportions as photo) and selected the front face of it, and I have opened the UV editor.
1st question: Why is my photo repeated as such a tiny tile pattern (about 80 times too small)? Can I change that so it is a reasonable shape and size, or must I shrink the wall face down in UV to fit the tiny tiles?
Next question: How do I say "Go!" "Apply" "Do it!" "Put the photo on the face of the wall". I can find no reference to this in the manual.
Thanks again for any clues. |
Post by Jack Edwards // Nov 10, 2007, 9:00am
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Jack Edwards
Total Posts: 4062
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Select the face and click the planar mapping icon. That brings up the UV widget. You can then drag on the parts of the UV widget to fine tune the projection if needed. Right click to exit the widget when done.
If you click on the icon that looks like a pencil drawing on UVs, it will open the UV editor and you will then be able to edit the UVs by hand to more exactly position them to your image. |
Post by johnhoward // Nov 10, 2007, 9:54am
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johnhoward
Total Posts: 231
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Thanks for the help Jack. As you can see in the attached JPG, I have selected the front face of my wall and then (thanks to you) I have found and clicked on the Planar UV tool to bring up the UV widget. But there are still no clouds on the wall (you can see the cloud image is loaded in the UV editor panel).
When does the image appear on the wall? Should I be able to see it as I adjust its size and placement? When I right-click, as you advise, the wall face just returns to its normal self, still with no cloud image. I see that I can adjust the image placement and size with the UV widget, but so far, the image does not appear on the wall, either during or after using the widget.
Thanks again. |
Post by Jack Edwards // Nov 10, 2007, 11:08am
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Jack Edwards
Total Posts: 4062
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You have to apply a texture material to the object. Then load your image into that texture material.
The Background image for the UV editor is just for using as a guide to line up your UVs, it doesn't show on your model.
The section of the manual on surfacing covers this topic. How you approach it depends on whether you are targeting for realtime render or VRay render. For realtime render you'll want to drag a DX texture material onto you object. Keep in mind that using the realtime textures involves a bit of LE work, so you may need to read up on the sections on the link editor before going too far down that route.
For VRay, choose the materials inspect tool which will bring up the material editor, then double click on the color channel. Double click on the texture map shader in the window that opens up. Click on the browse button to load the image into the texture. Then with your object selected click the apply material icon.
I don't have TS open right now, but that should be close enough to get you started. Let me know if you still need help. :) |
Post by johnhoward // Nov 11, 2007, 4:44am
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johnhoward
Total Posts: 231
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Thanks Jack, that did it. What I wasn't understanding was that the photo had to appear in BOTH the ME and the UV editors. |
Post by Jack Edwards // Nov 11, 2007, 9:30am
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Jack Edwards
Total Posts: 4062
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Glad it helped.
You shouldn't need anything in the UVE, that's just a feature to help with aligning things and doesn't show in the workspace. Materials are changed via the LE and ME. Sometimes Truespace loses the materials across the bridge though which can get annoying. |
Post by Mirador // Nov 11, 2007, 10:33am
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Mirador
Total Posts: 14
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Hi John
I had one or two problems understanding how uv mapping works in truespace. I found some useful tutorials by following this link....
http://www.spacekdet.com/tutorials/
Couple of tutorials about uv mapping there.
Paul |
Post by Emma // Nov 11, 2007, 11:21am
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Emma
Total Posts: 344
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As I'm just also messing around with object texturing / materials , just add it as another short example.
Goal was to create the wings of a trueSpace butterfly as the small editor view on the left side of below picture shows.
9547
- So first step was scanning in the image from the box, size was 1063 * 1220 dots
- selecting in ME from the VRay Shaders Color the caligari texture shader
- loading the butterfly image into the shader
Creating a single cube now looks as the one to the left. The values of S repeat and T repeat decide in which scale the image gets mapped on the faces of the cube
From left to right I changed the values of S / T as written on the boxes. They are all equally sized, like the values of BB Size show.
Size of an object and type of object have a dependency to the size of the image. As larger the object, as more the image will get repeated, like one tile beneath the other.
9548
- the image on the left cube , on the the upper small stretched cube and the single small cube are all from the same material set up. The left cube has still set S=1/T=4.23 that is why the wings are smaller in vertical direction.
But this shows now the other objects are mapped different
- cones and spheres get a single mapped image while the cylinder gets differently mapped at the ends against the surrounding faces
Well, I selected now the Cubic UV projection to arange the image as I wanted it. The cage that appears now allows sizing / turning / twisting of the image so that it would fit ones needs.
Going back to what I initially wanted to create, the wing, not formed by mesh but visible through material configuration. So what is needed is something to make unnecessary parts invisible, masking.
9549
For this example this is done in two steps
- setting up a transparency mask (black and white) to let the wing be visible
- setting up a totally black transparency mask to make everything invisible with the help of the paint faces tool
The last transparency mask is necessary to make the side faces, back, bottom and top face invisible, so leaving left only the front face with the wing image on it.
T and S values are generally used if tiling an image is needed, like for eample the brick stones of a wall. You have a texture, which is also an image, but which has the edges arranged so that the image can be tiled beneath each other, horizontal and vertical. |
Post by nowherebrain // Nov 12, 2007, 12:25am
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nowherebrain
Total Posts: 1062
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I don't know if it is mentioned, but one caution...
Never use UV widgets on small selections, they are next to impossible to manipulate due to their use of geometry for editing handles....the BIG FRIGGIN red disk in the center can really kill you. |
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