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Yes, welcome back Destinysgarden. And this is really great! I've tried texturing before and I did some of that stretching. I'll be interested to see what you do.
Also, I was wondering...when you resize a texture to fit a UV section...like the wood, do you use something like free transform in Photoshop? Or do you do an image resize?
Also, do you use a clipping mask to create the irregular shapes?
Or do you do something else?
Thanks.
I think the Photoshp free transform tool is roughly similar to the Paintshop Pro pick tool. You get to stretch and scale the layer, but you have to sharpen after as it really loses resolution. I've also used layer resize. Use whatever works for how you like to work, and see what happens.
I use the lasso tool set to point to point to select the irregular shapes around the UV sections.
Welcome back from me, too! Glad you had a good time with your Grandmother. Family is important!
Hit somebody over the head? Who? Me? Why, I never.
Not much anyway. I am happy to have you back and I'm ready to give this a try. It will be good practice when I finish the couple of outfits I'm working on in Hexagon and Blender.
There is no one tool that is going to work on everything.
The goal is to match the image to the UV map with minimal distortion and exactly how you cut, poke, prod, fold, spindle and hopefully not mutilate it is quite likely going to vary a bit for each island and definitely for each item. Become familiar with all the cutting/sizing tools in your chosen program...you may need them.
With things like a lasso tool (GIMP has one too) you can zoom in to fine tune the selection. Some of the others don't allow that...or if they do (box selection tools) it's just straight line cuts.
OK, here is my last try. New UV, new texture map, new render. This one is better in some ways and not at all funtional in others. If I do another attempt, I'd leave the stone mapped as Mark had it, because there is some terrible stretching on the top of the stairs with my cylindrical map. You can also see some stretching in the window wells on the main tower, that was not present with Mark's UV, but that isn't bothering me so much. I didn't use the space as efficienty as on the previous map either, but there you are. UV mapping really is an art onto itself.
I need a bit to double check if some of the textures I used are allowed to be redistributed, because I think the brick one might be a problem. I'll give a shout when I have a small pack set up for any that want to try their hand with this model. In the meantime, I'd love to see examples of any other models you have retextured, and do share what worked and what didn't.
Bought your new shader product today, @DestinysGarden. Now I have to figure out were Daz Connect put them and then start using them. (I assume Connect put them under shaders, but I'm never sure.)
I have to ask if you even looked yet.....
No. I hadn't looked when I posted. I was just letting Destiny know that I bought her product. I spent over an hour earlier today looking for where Connect put John Crow. I finally had to install with DIM before I could find it. By then I was frusttrated and I shut off the computer for a spell.
Just a little while ago, when I was looking for Destiny's shaders, which I did find quite easily, I also found some John Crow icons in the Smart Content. I don't know if they were always there and I overlooked them. Or maybe I had to close Daz Studio and wait a little bit, but I'm seeing them now.
It's much easier to find where things went with the DIM. But I keep thinking I just haven't figured out how to use Connect completely yet. I do like the way you can click on an icon and explore the product. That's how I use your lights, Khory.
Kevin:
regarding categories in smart content Where stuff is located there is no difference between Connect and DIM (which you still can use)
Thanks Kevin. Smart content is sort of beyond me as I much prefer the folder view. I've been making a huge effort though in naming presets so they make some semblance of sense in Smart Content.
So, I finally have a small set put together for those that would like to try their hand at texturing a model.. Here is what is in it.
Please send me a forum PM if you would like the download link. I was not able to include the multi colored brick I used due to restrictions from the website I got it from. It can be found here if needed. http://www.textures.com/download/brickoldrounded0118/41438
Okay this is another embarassing stupid question but where do put these? I know that the actual textures can just go in my textures file on my desktop but I have no idea what to do with dson file or the obj files. Sorry I am still learning exactly where everything goes and fits together in Daz and have managed to botch it up fairly badly more than once so I am afraid to just throw them in the program somewhere lol.
You can probably put them in My Library. If you open the file into Studio and then go to save it, it should try to save it in your My Library by default. Or if you want to place them manually, your My Library should be under Daz3d under your document folder. At least that's where mine is on Windows 10 using the default folders and paths that Daz Studio sets up if you don't change them.
I don't have a My Library. I have a Documents library that all the other folders are in...And no I didn't move a thing, that's how Daz set it up when I downloaded it. That's where I drag and drop the freebies and the items I get from other stores. If that's the place which folder does it go in or does it pick the right folder automatically?
Here's my first attempt to texture the tower. Lot of stretching on the steps!
I may see if I can find some other textures from my stash and try another one later.
Sonja
After thinking about this, I'm going to change my suggestion. I don't think you want to add these items to your daz library YET, as they are a WIP. I think you should create a folder under your Documents folder. Perhaps DestinysWorkshop. (You can then add other folders under this parent folder for future projects.) Under that create a folder called Fantasy Castle. (I think that was the name of the model. Put all the items there. Or if you want even more organization, create folders for the different items such as
Geometry (for the obj)
Raw textrues
Fantasy Castel (for the finshed texture(s) - should only be one, since they are all on the same map
I'm not sure what the DSON file is used for.
Then when you open Daz Studio (or Poser), you would import the OBJ from whatever folder you placed it in. Just browse to it. (OBJ files don't have to be located in your library. You can load them from anywhere.) You can then load your finished texture from the same folder you placed them in. (You would have first resized, sharpened and clipped the raw textrues to fit the approriate regions on your map in Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, GIMP or whatever image program you use.
When you're happy with the results, then you can move the finshed textures into your texture library and then re-load them on to your model. At that point, if you want to keep the model, then you can save it to your library. I think it would be a prop in this case.
(If you don't move the textures to your library and then re-load them onto the model before you save the prest to your library, then Daz Studio (Poser) will be looking for them in you Workshop folder.)
NOTE- not related to the above suggestion:
I used the default directory for my Daz Studio installation. I have a Daz3D folder under Documents. Inside that, there are four folders
Carrara 8.5
Daz Tmp
Hexagon
Studio
Inside the studio folder there are four more folders
Look At My Hair AM
My Daz Connect Library
My Library
Render Library
When I save a preset in Daz Studio, it wants to save it to My Library. Of course I can put it somewhere else if I want). When I save a render, the default location is to put it in Render Library.
Thank you! I did actually create destiny's garden textrue tut folder on my desktop and drop it all in there just so I had easy access to it while I figured out where to put everything. That explanation helps a lot and I am hopig I can go ahead and work on this some this weekend. Thank you very much!
Love the roof on this
And here's my questions:
1. How did you scale the tile on the roof. (I guess scaling the whole image would reduce them some, but if you size the map to the size of the area you want to fill and you still wanted them smaller?)
2. If you do a bump map, I assume you have to create from the texture map that you created from all the different textures.
3. How did you get the windows white?
A couple of ways to do it...use a tiling texture in your image editor as a 'pattern' and create a mask/area to fill and flood fill it.
Or scale the image before you cut out the part you need..
Yes, bumps need to be created from what you are assembling.
Need to find the part of the UV map that is the window and put something in it...
Looks good Wendy! I like the stone doorway. Yeah, the UV for the bottom stone is still not perfect. If I can get a break from the 4 things I am working on, I'll give mapping the thing another go. The original one Mark provided looks much better on the stone part.
Kevin, your's is cute. It looks like a little toy. MJC got you pretty well covered, but I'll add a bit more. Everything I provided is already a seamless tile, so that part is taken care of. The easiest way to scale the tile down is to use you image editor, and reduce the scale there. Shown here from PSP, I have the scale set at 40% so it will be a little less than half the size of the original tile. Flood fill your template with that. It can take a little trial and error to get the correct scale.
For bump maps, you can either make them from the final texture map, or you can make a bump map for each tile, and flood fill the color texture on one image, and the bump on another. It all comes down to whatever is easier for you.
Thanks, mjc1016. I didn't think about using a pattern to fill the area. I'll try that.
I think I did fill the windows with a white color. It looks like Destiny used a light grey. I suppose I could apply a glass shader to that part.
Guess I'll go back and re-read what Destiny said about the windows.
Oops. forgot the part about the windows. I put a very light grey over the window section on my texture map, mostly for my own use to mark off the window sections. You could also not use any texture maps at all in the windows, and just set up a glass shader as you said. Using a glass shader will probably look the best anyway.
OK. Thanks again. I used Paint Shop Pro on this. I have Photoshop too, but since they don't let you buy it anymore, PSP is a good alternative.
How would I use a transparency image, say if I wanted to make something look lacey or have a cutout in a shirt?
And another question..what does it mean when someone refers to baking a texture or baking a shader...how is that done?
Kharma, I'm not expert, but I believe you put a black and white image in the transparency channel. Not sure if black or white is transparent, but if it is wrong, you would need to invert it.
And I think baking a shader is to create a jpg image map of the applied shader. I think there was one shader set that was a merchant resource, but you had to bake the shader in order to use it. There's a button called bake shader. I think it might be on the Shader panel. Next time I have Daz Studio open and I look and see where i saw it. Or maybe someone will better advise you before I get back.
Think of "baking" a shader as transferring some information from the scene to a texture so that it does not need to be calculated later.
For example you could bake in the shadow information, making the shadows part of the texture. The advantage is that in, for example, a game or an animation the baked in lighting does not need to be constantly recalculated. The disadvantage is that if the lighting changes you need to rebake the textures or they will not match the rest of the scene, so for that example it would be best used on background items. You can also create some interesting artistic effects by playing around with baking. In the attached image I had wings on the character and baked their shadow onto the back wall, then hid the wings, applied that texture with the wing shadows baked in to the wall and re-rendered.
Here's a really good video on the basic concept and showing a simple example of how to bake the lighting and shadow information in Blender: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sB09T--_ZvU the exact details of how to do it in Blender specifically may or may not interest you but Andrew goes through the basic concepts of it through the video.
You can also use it to create normal maps - if you have a hires version of a model and a lowres version, you can bake the detail from the hires one into a normal map that you can then apply to the lower resolution one in order to fake the details without having to use up so much memory with a very complex model.
I am not sure what DAZ Studio's capabilities in this area are but many other programs, such as Blender, can do it. Inagoni makes a plugin for Carrara that lets you bake textures (Baker, included in this plugin http://www.daz3d.com/advance-pack), which is what I used in my attached example.
I think in basic texturing terms the most common example would be baking the AO (ambient occlusion, mostly the subtle shadows an object casts on itself) which might then be overlaid onto a painted texture to add some subtle detail to it.
Put a grayscale image in the Cutout Opacity map. Black is transparent, white is opaque. You can then adjust the slider as desired.
@KevinH and MDO2010 thank you for the info on baking term and how it's done, and also for the link. I will check it out so I can understand it better, as I am sure some of what you did went right over my head lol
@TabascoJack thank you for the cutout info, right after I posted my question I came across the newest video on the Daz3D youtube channel doing this exact thing. the effect it created was amazing :)
Woot I did it! lol. Some mistakes but since I did this in 15 min with my mouse and not my tablet (its almost bedtime and I couldn't wait another day to at least attempt it) but I totally understand now how its done. Oh my this is going to open up a whole new world. Apparently you can't paint the color you want something to be? I painted the window light yellow and the metal door pieces a steel blue but they don't show in the finished render. Also, once I added the tower to studio I was unable to move it in any direction. Is that normal?