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Oh that's helpful thank you!
Well, maybe there's more than one way to do it. In an earlier post, Szark said:
And I knew that DestinysGarden mentioned some other way to do it. But I didn't relish the thought of looking through the whole post to find it. And then it occurred to me...look for Szark's distintive avatar. I knew that both posts were together. And that's what TabascoJack is saying
You're explanation of baking is very good, MDO2010. My understanding of baking was kind of sketchy at best. But now I can see some uses for it that didn't occur to me.
Well, for some reason, it didn't let me include Destiny's quote in the my previous post, so here it is:
Sonja, that is terrific! I love the vines on the brick, and the large rocks on the roof. And that took all of 15 minutes? Impressive. Just think how cool it will be if you spent a whole hour on it, lol.
As to why the windows and metal parts are not showing the correct colors, that is strange. They should be the colors you had on your texture map. Check the surfaces tab to make sure that you have the texture map showing in the base color for those surfaces, and that there is not a different color sitting in there. The model had some colors saved in it by default to show the different material zones. It is also not normal for the thing to not move. Mine functions like any other prop and can be moved, rotated, and scaled. Weren't you having some other sort of DS issues recently? I wonder if that is related.
Thanks so much for showing your work.
Kharma, Kevin and Mark gave some excellent information. For our example with the Fantasy Tower, the process of filling in the texture template is also baking the texture to a texture map. The seamless tile is the part that can not be redistributed, but the texture map can be.
Mark did a really good summary of the types of things to get "baked to a map" and the reasons for it.
I'm glad I asked and I hope I am not the only silly one looking for the bake textures command in my programs...lol
No question is ever silly.
Daz Studio has a way to save out textures too, and it involves the Map Transfer tool. I'll try to work out a tutorial for that part, when I re-learn it myself. I used it once about 8 years ago.
Yes I have been having some odd things happen with textures but nothing with objects. And only with double clicking not with adding a them in any other way. But who knows. this is what I did maybe I did something wrong? Each texture is on a separate layer and the blue and the gold are painted on a separate layer as well.
I people are making progress on their towers. Very cool. I got a bit distracted with a mini tutorial, a product review and with life outside of DS so I haven't had a chance to do this yet. However, I think I should be able to manage working on this tomorrow morning. Hopefully, anyway! Just wanted to let you know I hadn't forgotten.
Yeah Sonja, that looks fabulous. I like the different textures you came up with. Did you check the surfaces tab to see if there is a stray color in there? It has to be coming from someplace.
Knittymommy, no worries, we are not going anywhere. I look forward to seeing your results.
Haven't had a chance to do much, probably won't get to take another look until maybe tomorrow night or Friday. Left the house at 8;45 and won't be home until after 8 tonight lol. I can be on the forums and stuff at work (my boss doesn't care as long as his work gets done) but I can't actually DO anything lol.
Don't feel bad I JUST got to it this week lol.
I haven't had a chance to do it either, I am hoping to this weekend. It seems every time I get a few minutes to sit at my home computer where I don't have to wait a week for something to render something happens or I get distracted with different things I want to learn..the old 'so much to learn and so little time'..lol
I know. I want to know it all and I want to know it all RIGHT NOW! lol. I suffer from this as well. Some days its almost paralyzing trying to decide what to do first!
Yep, I know the feeling hence my sigline!
I am having a texture problem with a house I am trying to texture lordy I am about to pull every last hair out I have!!!!
Plz tell me what the heck I am doing wrong!!
It looks like the textures are being planar projected - that is, projected from one direction (the right side in this case), which means they will be flat on two sides and stretched out on the others. The result is nice textures on any polygons that perfectly aligned with the projection axis and distorted textures on the others, getting worse the more perpendicular to the projection axis they are.
If you look at the two Carrara screenshots attached, I created a basic shape kind of vaguely like your building. In one I unwrapped it using a planar projection in the Y axis. Notice that the selected polygons all show up as just a thin line on the UV map... when a texture is applied it will stretch crazily in that area because the renderer will be trying to fill all those polys with just a few pixels of the texture. In the other image I used a cubic projection for the unwrap, which splits polys according to what direction they are facing. The latter will give a much better result when applying a tiling texture to it.
I think you need to take it into a program with the ability to create/edit UV maps (Carrara, Hexagon, Blender, one of the many dedicated UV mapping programs out there, etc.) and unwrap it more carefully. Ideally you would add seams and do a more detailed unwrap so that your texture matches up where different sections meet up, but that takes some time and is kind of an art to itself, so for simplicity's sake you could try a cubic/box projection. You'll still get a little distortion on the angled surfaces but it might not be too bad, certainly not as bad as it is now.
Of course it might not be a UV problem if you are using a program that allows you to apply textures in ways that ignore the UVs. For example, Carrara gives the option to apply textures via planar or cubic projection within the shader regardless of how the UVs are set up. But I think it's probably the UVs.
If you let us know what program(s) you are using for this, people might be able to provide more specific help.
I got the house on this site Creepy Clown Downloads but they not come with UV or any textures so was trying to do it on my own in Daz Studio maybe I should try and use blender for this butttt I am still just in learning stages with Blender only made it up to part 4 in the tutorial vids. so if maybe could point me in the right direction for a beginner would be great thankies in advance.
It doesn't have any textures, it is UV mapped - badly, as MDO2010 says just a single planar projection so the side walls and roofs are a line on the map instead of polygons and when you apply textures it simply stretches a single column or row of polygons across those surfaces. Since the terms of use don't allow redistribution no-one can remap them for you so you would need to do the job yourself, or perhaps try the Shades of Life shaders on them if you are rendering in 3delight.
I tried to download a couple of the models from this Creepy Clown site, and my McAfee virus scanner kept freaking out, and warning me that this was a potentially dangerous site...viruses, spyware, adware, etc, and do I REALLY want to risk it?
I didn't get anything.
I Use Avast, which can be paranoid at times, and have never had any problem with that site. and still didn't today.
And the house? well of course you could always try texturing it in Bryce
Here's the first of four really excellent beginner videos on UV mapping in Blender: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2-FfB9kRmE
If you prefer it in text form though, here's the basics of fixing the UV map. Two notes: your layout may not look exactly like mine, as I've customized mine a little bit, and this is just a quick fix to make it minimally useable, it might take a bit more work than this to get every part working well - many of the sections of the model really should be properly unwrapped with seams for the best results. Before you start make a copy of your original model just in case you think the final result is worse than what you started with.
Part One: Import the OBJ file
Open Blender an hit "A" to select everything in the scene, and then "X" to delete it. That way you don't have to worry about accidentally exporting any cameras or objects in your default startup scene.
1.File> Import> Wavefront (.obj) (see attached screenshot)
2.Make sure that Keep Vert Order is selected (see attached screenshot)
3.Tab to go to Edit mode
4.Make sure your cursor is in the window showing the object and hit "A" a couple times so that nothing is selected (selected items will be outlined in orange).
Part Two: Fixing the Bad Material/Surface Names (OPTIONAL)
Looking at this model I see one thing that annoys me right away - the materials all have bizarre names like "planecut15_material.001." These will show up as the surface names in DAZ studio. Attached is a screenshot showing where you can see the materials in Blender. If this annoys you as much as it does me, here is how to fix it, but you can skip this part if you don't care.
5.Make sure you are in Face Select mode (see attached screenshot)
6.On the Material tab click on the first material name and then click the Select button at the end of the list of materials (see attached screenshot)
7.Look at what got highlighted. I selected the material named "planecut15_material.001" and when I hit select the chimney's turned orange.
8.Double click on the material name and rename it something sensible, like "Chimneys"
9. Click deselect, then select the next material, click select to see what it is, double click the material name and give it a better name
10.Repeat until all your materials have reasonable names (see attached screenshot)
11.Once you have everything renamed reasonably you can start fixing the UVs
Fixing the UVs
For this part you will need to change one of your windows to a UV/Image Editor. Again, my screen layout may not look exactly like yours and I don't remember what the default layout.
12.Change one of your open windows to a UV/Image Editor (see attached screenshot)
13.Use the material tab and the select button to select one of the materials. When you do this, you will see the UVs appear in the UV/Image Editor window. Basically what you want is for the UVs to appear neatly laid out and more or less square so that when you apply a texture in DAZ Studio it looks decent. There is quite a bit of art and skill to this, and I am not terribly good at it yet, but I can walk you through the basic process.
Make sure your cursor is in a window showing the object and hit the "U" key. This will pop-up a UV Mapping menu with various options for unwrapping the selected polygons. Most of the time I either use the "Unwrap", "Smart Unwrap" or "Cube Projection" option. See attached screenshot.
14.Select one material, "U" for the UV Mapping pop-up, choose the best option (I usually start with the Smart UV Project - it gives you some options, but most of the time you are fine just hitting OK), deselect the material, then go on to the next one.When you are done doing this with all the materials, go to File> Export> Waverfront (.obj). I think the default options are fine. Then you can go back to DAZ Studio, import the fixed OBJ and start applying textures to the various surfaces (which should now have the names you gave them above in step 5-10.
You can, at this step also export a template/UV layout.
In the UV/Image window, select UVs from the menu bar. Then the Export UV layout...that will allow you to save a png of the selected (or all UVs) for the mesh.
Thank you all for the input and info:
Where can I find these Shades of Life shaders Richard? I think I will try them out see if they will work better, cause I really need this house for special project I am working on. Hopefully I can get them for free as funds are quite limited till the end of summer.
I have avast and it is major picky about what I download and it says it is a safe site so not sure why McFee is freaking out!!!! :D
I never had a problem with the site either and I have avast as well, and I would love to try texturing it in Bryce buttttt I can not afford to get it till the end of summer and I have blender a free program so going to try to redo the uv in there hopefully I can get it done by the end of this week as that is my deadline for the rendering.
I thank you so much for these links @MDO2010 I am sure both of these will help with this confusion. I was almost pulling out my hair big time (The air was a pretty shade of blue I tell ya) no matter what I did it was still just giving me all these lines omg!!!!
Thank you MJC for the additional info this will be great when it is finally done!!!!
Hi all, I'm just checking in. The Really Big Thing I've been working on with my partner is going to get turned in today, so I have/have had zero time for anything else.
Saphire, the Shades of Life product Richard mentioned is this one. http://www.daz3d.com/shades-of-life-urban-construct Useful, but not free, and for 3Delight only. Your best bet would be to try to figure out the UV map thing that MDO2010 so kindly gave step by step instructions for. Either way, please post your results here if you get it sorted out.
Mark, THANK YOU SO MUCH for jumping in and providing that very detailed guide to UV mapping. It is a great addition to the thread for posterity. You win my "Hero of the Day" award.
I'm thinking that next week we'll texture a clothing item. I have not forgotten Kharma's request to make trans maps for the fantasy mask, so that sounds fun.
Shades of Life was actually a bad suggestion anyway - it projects from the camera view, what you would want is a shader that projects from the orthogonal axes onto the model. That could be done, at least for 3Delight, in Shader Mixer (and can be done in Bryce, perhaps the models were made for use there or in another application with the same options) but remapping is certainly the least technical option.
Here's a couple of other tips that can help...
In Blender, if you select one vertex on the UV you can hit ctl-L to select all the vertices linked to that one vertex...so, in the example above if you had all the shutters on one map you could select a vertex on one, hit ctl-L and then move or scale that shutter, one vertex on each shutter and scale all of them at once.
If you have two surfaces (or more) that logically fit together (like the windows and the shutters) you can select BOTH of them, before unwrapping. That will put both (or more, even) on the same map.
And what you do in the UV window...moving, scaling, algining, etc won't be 'locked' into the item until you export it.
Head spinning again. But bits and pieces make sense so that's an improvement anyway.
Glad your guys project is wrapped up and done its always a relief when something big is finished up. Looking forward to the clothing texturing as well. haven't had a chance to check my lighthouse yet for those extra textures, I just finally finished getting my custom categories fixed and finished and have been testing out my now easy to find library lol.
I am really looking forward to the transmapping for clothing, altho I am still working at texturing my castle
Thanks for this additional info MJC, I was watching the video tutorial and I think I finally get it and what I can do to unwrap the house piece by piece then putting it all onto one map it was really interesting. I am going to be trying it tomorrow when I have 2-4 hours to just play around with it.