UV mapping a curved pipe
 

know i've been asking a lot these days but don't know why so many things come up.

I'm trying to map this cylindrical pipe that looks like this:
http://img259.imageshack.us/img259/4105/pipepz1.jpg


the problem is that it's curved so when I do cylindrical mapping I get some strange texturing on the slanted regions. I'm wondering if there's a way to make the UV cylindrical map follow along the pipe. you guys know what I mean?

any help great thanks,
Dan

Don't use cylindrical mapping. Use planar mapping instead. That gave me a very good layout of this example pipe model.

Forgot to show the model I made. Hope this helps out.:beer:

thanks for the help THX but when I planar map the texture still goes in one direction instead of going along the pipe:
http://img217.imageshack.us/img217/189/mooxb2.jpg

however, I think it's still a good idea I'll just have to manually move the uv sections like the second picture on the right.

Don't planar project in perspective view; instead, planar project from the orthographic top view, in the "y" direction. Try it and see what happens.

Edit: forgot to mention to project in sections and sew everything together in the UV editor so that your texture will follow the curve when you map it to the uv's. Hope i'm not comming of too confusing.

Everything come out ok? Any problems? Use another method that worked out better?

thanks for your help THX.
I ended up just doing the planar mapping from the y-direction and just manually moving the UV sections one by one. I got it to look descent in the end as far as following the map but I'm getting stretched texturing on the side views instead of the all-round smooth from cylindrical mapping.


http://img441.imageshack.us/img441/5789/stretchqq1.jpg


I really thought there was an easier and much quicker way of letting the clyindrical UV tube go along the path but maybe not. thanks again though,

Dan

It looks like some of the uv's are lined on the same position, try moving the uv's by hand to reduce the stretching.

Yeah, your UV's look like they are stretched a bit in some areas.

make the pipe straight. texture it. THEN bend it.

btw thanks for all the help.

yea good point I thought about that too but the problem is that I have to have the pipe geometry follow exactly with the curved path so my only option left is to do an extrude edge causing it to recreate the polygons and UVs. the reason it has to exactly follow the path is because circular rings of vehicles will be following the same path and if the pipe is off just by a bit, the vehicles will look like they are hovering off and on the pipe. Even if I used nonlinear bending methods and tried to do the bending as close as possible to the path it would still look off.

but I guess since the camera and vehicles will be moving so fast most of the pipe texturing will be blurred away from the speed but it would of been nice anyways.