Learning to Texture
 

I'm going to start learning to texture finally. I'm going to start off simple see where I end up.

Any help along the way will be very much appreciated...VERY MUCH appreciated. Going to start out with texturing a box..a dvd case.

Took measurements of a dvd case and modeled it. Then clicked automatic mapping. Here's the uv's in the UV editor.

I selected the faces on the front and half way around each edge and did a planar map. Then selected faces on back and half way around each edge, did another planar map. Then selected the faces on top and half of edges..planar. Then faces on bottom and half edges...planar. Then did the same for each side. I resized each planar mapping using the texture editor.

Since the texture of dvd case covers front, left side, and back of dvd. I sewed the front left side and back mappings together. Then I scaled all the uv's to fit inside upper right quadrant of grid.

There were a few stray UV's so I selected an edge on each one and selected move and sew.

I imported UV snapshot into Gimp and downloaded a dvd cover picture off of internet. saved as jpeg and here's the result.

Now onto something a little more challenging.

you are learning a,b,c,ds in texturing

but here it is looking like a tutorial.....

;)

Very nice indeed.

If I was too be picky - I would say it needs another transparent plastic sheet over the cover (the bit that holds it in) - but I`m not as its look cool man - well done

But I always thought you could texture - maybe I need to go back over some of your older work

I know a few basic things but that's all. I knew I could do projection maps and since a dvd is flat surfaces I would start with that. I'm going to do a round surface next. maybe a ball. I gotta go take care of some things but I'll be back later with my attemp.

Also, the little texturing I did in the past was not really the right way. basically I applied texture to object and adjusted the texture. Now I'm learning to adjust UV's and take snapshot, then import into gimp and apply pictures as texture. Much better control.

Eventually I want to be able to uv map anything. And I still need to use hypershade to create textures which I know almost nothing about hypershade. But I will.

Good Job Perfecto. I am learning texturing as well. I was getting tired of only being able to see clay renders of my models.

I plan to go back and texture some of my previous stuff. Trying to get the Viper and then my version of Jay's sand speeder done to start.

At first I hated UV's but I am getting better at laying them out so they are not as frustrating. The addition of the "unfold" option in Maya also helps. For third party UV help there is Headus UV Layout, very inexpensive and helpful and the free Roadkill UV pelting application.

Now I am struggling to learn Photoshop CS4. Quite frankly I hate Photoshop. It is completely non-intuitive to me and the tools and hotkeys are crazy. I take forever to accomplish the simplest tasks in PS. The over saturation of tools and clunky integration of raster and vector workflows drives me nuts. The complexity of the tools and non-intuitive workflow sucks all the joy out of painting. Some days it's hard to get any work done because I get to a point where I would rather rub ground glass in my eyes then start photoshop up.

Here are some apps to help with painting. There is Maxon Bodypaint 3D, but it's kinda pricy at almost $1000 US for the latest version. I have an older student version of Cinema 4D which includes Bodypaint, but it is very photoshop-like, so I have been focusing on learning PS first. There was Right Hemispheres Deep Paint 3D, not sure what it costs. Then Zbrush and Mudbox have projection painting. A low cost alternative to Photoshop is Jasc Paint Shop Pro.

Cheers and Good luck with your texturing.

Hi Perfecto
Nice for a first, I do know what you mean ctbram about photoshopbut but there are some little gems in there and like I said before a lot of brushes (you can make your own with alphas) layers and masking....dave

Thanks ctbram. I never really have any money to spend on anything so I'll have to make do with whatever free apps I can find. However I'll take note of the things you mentioned so that when I do have some money to spend, I'll have some options. I've heard of the unfold option in alot of the threads on Simply Maya so I'll have to read up on it in the Maya Help Files.

Here's my 1st attempt at texturing a ball. I created a polygon sphere, smothed it and applied a picture I downloaded from the internet. Bionicle is my son's favorite thing :). Anyway, the picture all comes together at the poles so it makes the head look pinched and then it stretches out toward the middle of the ball.

I applied spherical mapping. Again everything is squished toward the top and bottom of the ball and really stretched out in the center of the ball.

I applied planar map to the front of the ball and another planar to the back of the ball. I adjusted the verts on the left and right side a little. The image is much much better on the ball, but as you can see the top and bottom of the ball have some stretching. I'm really thinking that the only solution is to adjust the actual texture so it's made more for a round surface.

Any ideas are welcome..thx.

Try scaling the UVs at the poles out to compensate for the localized squishing.

you need to actually unfold these, mapping them is just the first step.

To get you started Perfecto,

1. Take a sphere and planar make the top 15-25% of the polar faces.

2. Take a planar or cylindrical map of the remaining center section faces.

3. using cut uv's cut a seam up the side of the center section in the UV editor.

4. select all the uv's in the center shell and then right click the unfold icon to bring up it's options. Uncheck everything and select constrain horizontal and then unfold, then select constrain vertical and unfold. That should get the center section unwrapped pretty nicely.

Then you can unfold the pole caps and texture pretty smoothly across the center section.

You will get something like this. I hope the image is not offensive, I have been playing with aircraft nose art and the image was handy.

http://i181.photobucket.com/albums/x...od01_uvMap.jpghttp://i181.photobucket.com/albums/x...estPattern.jpghttp://i181.photobucket.com/albums/x...bs_away_01.jpg

This is just one approach to doing a sphere to render the center section pretty soothly. For a full pole to pole render it is trickier to get a distortion free mapping.