What do I do now? Also Blender Help?

[AdeptRogue]

Well it seems I won't be able to play The Alpha of OG.....
Big surprise... One more game I can add to the list of never going to have the chance to play,
Either due to money issues, or just not having a good laptop.
((There's a LOT! Seriously I have 3 games systems, an N64, Ps2, and Wii.
Guess how much fun I have.. None. Ever. XD ))
However I don't even know what that means...
Will it just not work or...? Or, Would it play but with tons of lag?
((Lag doesn't bother me, if anything I embrace it.. I have to...))
G-mod seems to play perfectly fine so I don't know what the big problem is.

But at any rate I'll most likely just watch the progress from the side lines..
Sorry I couldn't preorder, and support the devs, but hey,
I guess that just the curse I have to bare.
An unfortunate occurrence for a such a good game,
not to be more widely use-able by less capable,
and less fortunate Pc//laptop owners.
But I guess for now it'll just be missing
that tiny-little-demographic. Oh well. *shug*

But that's not what I wanted to talk about... So I'm getting off topic here.

Back on; I'd actually like to inquire more about was if anyone could help understand a little more about blender, I've been using it for about a year now, and UV maps still give me trouble.
Don't know why I'v seen countless people do it, but they never explain simply what they are
doing, instead they say why, And I don't need to know why, I already know why, I need to know what and how, it's so frustrating and I wish I could just paint straight onto the model and it would create it's own UV maps. I only ask here because it seems Blender is being used to make some of the in game models and I figured at least one person could help me. Hopfully.

Also Game of Thrones Rocks my socks... Now I'm just being random...
And yes I like Salmony-Coraly colors.... > w <

[Korban3]

Well, don't give up hope yet. The game is just very unoptimized. It hardly runs on my PC, due to a crappy GPU in general and the fact that David has focused on core game elements and components rather than framerate, for the most part. Expect the game to be running smoothly on more computers later on, once David starts optimizing.

Well, you have two options here. Do things the hard core, pro way by using the Mark Seam command in Blender to mark edges where the model's texture should be cut from and the using the Unwrap command to tear the model down to it's UV, sending it to the Image Editor window.
The other option is to use something like Photoshop or Sculptris, which allow you to paint on the model. I don't know about Photoshop, but Sculptris also generates the UV map itself. Photohsop may or may not do that, I just don't know.

[AdeptRogue]

Well I'm hoping that in the future I will get to play. I haven't lost hope.. I just gave up. XD

I've mark seams before, not to difficult, but the UV maps seem to unwrap oddly, but I can deal with that.
My biggest problem comes when trying to get the UV mapped image to still have the
Vector lines and what not on the image file so that I know what I'm coloring//where.

I've seen people do it but I'm just not sure what they did to show the lines on the image file.

[Korban3]

Yeah, it can be tough, especially with characters, to get the UV to unwrap perfectly. It's something that takes time to get the feel for, where to put seams to get a good UV pelt.

I believe you can export the UV Layout and it keeps the lines from the edges. One hing that will help is if you get the UV in as large and continuous island as possible. It will help you to locate a lot of the parts. If you use Sculptris, you can paint on the model. I also believe that there is a texture paint feature in Blender itself. Not painting on the model, I don't think, but you can paint a rough-draft/reference texture before exporting it for further texture work. I haven't used that feature though.

[AdeptRogue]

Yeah, it can be tough, especially with characters, to get the UV to unwrap perfectly. It's something that takes time to get the feel for, where to put seams to get a good UV pelt.

I believe you can export the UV Layout and it keeps the lines from the edges. One hing that will help is if you get the UV in as large and continuous island as possible. It will help you to locate a lot of the parts. If you use Sculptris, you can paint on the model. I also believe that there is a texture paint feature in Blender itself. Not painting on the model, I don't think, but you can paint a rough-draft/reference texture before exporting it for further texture work. I haven't used that feature though.

I've used the in-app texture painter, but I don't know much about it so for now it doesn't do anything.
But thanks a lot for your help. I'm very glad for it.

[Endoperez]

So, you know edge marking, you know the 'u' menu options, you know the UV - Export UV Layout menu option, and you know how to use the texture painting mode. That's a good start.

When you've just chosen the the normal unwrap option, in the 3D view, in the toolbar (the one on left by default, toggled on/off by 't'), there will be a few options. The most important one is a selection between Angle-Based and Conformal.
If you're unwrapping something like a sword blade, a cube, something with long straight edges and precise angles, change the UV mode to conformal.

Do you know the Pin UV option ('p')? Basically, it tells Blender to not move the pinned vertices, although in some specific cases that doesn't work. Any way, that's surprisingly useful. Choose a part of the model you want to unwrap, and that unwraps well. Unwrap it first, and then pin the resulting, clean UV. Now choose a bigger area, and unwrap it again. The remaining parts are unwrapped into the previous, clean UV. This is very handy in all kinds of cases. You can also pin the borders of a UV island (island is one, connected whole of UV faces), edit, relax etc some vertices inside it and pin them, and then unwrap again. Now the inner UV geometry will be unwrapped to the best mathematical fit when considering the pinned parts.

Very useful.

This won't be useful for Overgrowth modding, since Overgrowth needs the objects to have unique UV space for all parts, but it's a good technique to know. You can overlap UVs of identical areas, so that they all read the same part of the image. The best way to do this is to unwrap one part, and then duplicate it, and move or mirror it to its correct position. The Mirror modifier is great for this. For example, if you're doing a character, you can unwrap the arms, hands, legs first, then apply the mirror modifier, and then unwrap the torso and the head. Now you have a character with mirrored hand textures, but the chest, back and head, where mirrored texture is more noticeable, are normal.
If you've already modeled that part, you of course have to remove it. This is very easy to do for e.g. the guns of a space ship, when they're modelled as independent pieces.


What else, what else...

Oh. Blender's texture painting is useful for its paint-over-3D-mesh features. If you use it to paint over the 2D image itself, the lack of layers will cause trouble. Good layer support will make everything much easier. For example, you have one layer on the bottom which marks the big areas with specific color: metal parts are green, wood parts are red, some special part is yellow, etc. This could've been painted with Blender's built-in brush tool. Above this layer you have the layers you're painting on. And above this one, you have the image you get when you Export UV Layout as a separate file, so that the UV borders are drawn over everything you do.

So, I recommed getting a 2D image editing program.

I'm unfortunately most familiar with Photoshop, which might be out of your price range. Gimp has layers, but I found the UI somewhat confusing. Paint.NET is free and has layer support. There are probably others as well. These will be important for proper texturing any way, but the layer support is one of the more noticeable things. So, even though Blender seems to be getting built-in image layer support eventually (http://ruesp83.wordpress.com/), it's worth starting to texture in one of these.


When you're working on these, a good preview option is really important. You can have Blender open, and choose Reload Image every time you save the file you're working on. Blender reads at least one image format that supports layers. I don't remember it at the moment, unfortunately.


Do you know texture baking already? If not, that will be useful for texturing. Bake an Ambient Occlusion map of the object, and add it into the 2D software as a Multiply layer over your paint layers. That's a nice and easy trick to make your texture look better.

Do you know that you need to paint so that the color extends at least a few pixels above all UV areas? When you look at the model from far away, the texture size is reduced. This blurs nearby pixels together. If your textures are too precise, and there's pure black right next to the UV area, the UV borders will be blurred with black and you'll get visible dark lines in weird places. For the same reason, there should usually be a few pixels of space between the UV islands' borders and the image's borders.

Have you seen how tightly professionals can pack UV spaces? Here's a good thread for seeing people really stretch the limits of UV space. The artists are of very different levels. Some of them are scary good. Try not to get too depressed.

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthre ... 2&page=112

For example, look at the red car model there, and how the roof and the side match each other so closely, and how the sides share a UV space. In Blender, that might be done like this:
1) Mark seams around the roof and the side, and unwrap them, perhaps using Conformal mode instead of Angle Based. Make sure the relative spaces match (Ctrl+
2) In UV mode, move them close to each other so that the corresponding vertices near the roof match.
3) Clear seams and unpin the vertices in the side. Unwrap. Now the roof and the side are connected, but unwrapped independently to have better individual shapes.
4) You can repeat the 3rd step for other parts, as the guy with the red car seemed to do.

Pictures below. The Angle Based/Conformal toggle is marked. I also marked the rather useful toggle box under Display which lets you preview your textures without lighting (the textures are shown in Solid view mode too, not just Shaded).

[AdeptRogue]

[quote="Endoperez"][/quote]

OMG, wow, this should help immensely. In fact I'll most likely be referencing back to it.

The object I'm trying to texture is this:: [x]
Eventually, Hopefully it'll look like this:: [x]

In case anybody wanted to know. I won't be trying to put it in overgrowth of course.
But it's was fun to make and it's been a good learning experience. ^ u ^
Also someone else boned it for me... I'm not so good with that. X3

[Endoperez]

For that, something like this should work:

Head is separate from the body. The seams are behind the ears and the head (the one separating the head from the torso), and below the chin (this one allows the UV to spread open. Avoid seams running across the face.
The ears are separate from the head.

The neck an the torso are all one, big, combined part. The seams there are in the neck (where head UVs separate from the torso), around the four legs, and around the tail. Also, there should be a seam running through his stomach. That way, his back has no seams. His stomach will likely not be seen as much. If you don't have much experience painting over seams, try to make much of the stomach and neck UVs straight. Choose a part of it, and scale one axis to 0 ('s', 'x', '0' (zero), 'enter'), pin, unwrap again. It's much easier, although still tricky, to hide the seam when the UVs would have a straight seam when they were "folded together". Of course you have to leave some parts for the normal unwrapping, otherwise there will be much stretching, but you could probably have large parts of the neck and stomach cleaner that way.

The legs and the tail should be separate pieces. The seams should be on the inside (starting from under the stomach) so they're less visible.

[Endoperez]

Wait, was this thread always here?

[AdeptRogue]

Wait, was this thread always here?

On that one the head ears and tail unwrap quite well,
it's just the body that unwraps in an odd way. But I'm going to try what you suggested.

Always? It's been here a week or so. I think. Why do you ask, good sir?

[Korban3]

Hm, Not sure how well it would work, but it's worth a shot.
Try out MyPaint. It has good layer support, excellent painting and is easy to pick up and just use. You can go and be as detailed or cartoony as you cant paint. So a guy who does ultra realistic digital paintings can make an ultra realistic texture, while the less experienced and skilled can still make tasteful, charming or whatever mood-suited textures they need.
You have to be careful though. MyPaint has an odd issue with opening PNG files. So saving and loading the PNG file over and over is risky, since it has to export the PNG and is likely to generate an error when opening a non-MyPaint-exported one.
Maybe I'll do a bit of modeling and texturing later on this week, see if I can come up with a cool example.

[Endoperez]

Always? It's been here a week or so. I think. Why do you ask, good sir?

For some reason, I thought this was on the Wolfire general forum, not in the Randomness. I was a bit unclear there, sorry about that.

[AdeptRogue]

Always? It's been here a week or so. I think. Why do you ask, good sir?

For some reason, I thought this was on the Wolfire general forum, not in the Randomness. I was a bit unclear there, sorry about that.

Oh lol, it's alright. Seems rightly so, since it doesn't have much to do with WolfFire, it'self.
And once again thanks for the advice//help. c:

[29222908]

So, you know edge marking, you know the 'u' menu options, you know the UV - Export UV Layout menu option, and you know how to use the texture painting mode. That's a good start.

When you've just chosen the the normal unwrap option, in the 3D view, in the toolbar (the one on left by default, toggled on/off by 't'), there will be a few options. The most important one is a selection between Angle-Based and Conformal.
If you're unwrapping something like a sword blade, a cube, something with long straight edges and precise angles, change the UV mode to conformal.

Do you know the Pin UV option ('p')? Basically, it tells Blender to not move the pinned vertices, although in some specific cases that doesn't work. Any way, that's surprisingly useful. Choose a part of the model you want to unwrap, and that unwraps well. Unwrap it first, and then pin the resulting, clean UV. Now choose a bigger area, and unwrap it again. The remaining parts are unwrapped into the previous, clean UV. This is very handy in all kinds of cases. You can also pin the borders of a UV island (island is one, connected whole of UV faces), edit, relax etc some vertices inside it and pin them, and then unwrap again. Now the inner UV geometry will be unwrapped to the best mathematical fit when considering the pinned parts.

Very useful.

This won't be useful for Overgrowth modding, since Overgrowth needs the objects to have unique UV space for all parts, but it's a good technique to know. You can overlap UVs of identical areas, so that they all read the same part of the image. The best way to do this is to unwrap one part, and then duplicate it, and move or mirror it to its correct position. The Mirror modifier is great for this. For example, if you're doing a character, you can unwrap the arms, hands, legs first, then apply the mirror modifier, and then unwrap the torso and the head. Now you have a character with mirrored hand textures, but the chest, back and head, where mirrored texture is more noticeable, are normal.
If you've already modeled that part, you of course have to remove it. This is very easy to do for e.g. the guns of a space ship, when they're modelled as independent pieces.


What else, what else...

Oh. Blender's texture painting is useful for its paint-over-3D-mesh features. If you use it to paint over the 2D image itself, the lack of layers will cause trouble. Good layer support will make everything much easier. For example, you have one layer on the bottom which marks the big areas with specific color: metal parts are green, wood parts are red, some special part is yellow, etc. This could've been painted with Blender's built-in brush tool. Above this layer you have the layers you're painting on. And above this one, you have the image you get when you Export UV Layout as a separate file, so that the UV borders are drawn over everything you do.

So, I recommed getting a 2D image editing program.

I'm unfortunately most familiar with Photoshop, which might be out of your price range. Gimp has layers, but I found the UI somewhat confusing. Paint.NET is free and has layer support. There are probably others as well. These will be important for proper texturing any way, but the layer support is one of the more noticeable things. So, even though Blender seems to be getting built-in image layer support eventually (http://ruesp83.wordpress.com/), it's worth starting to texture in one of these.


When you're working on these, a good preview option is really important. You can have Blender open, and choose Reload Image every time you save the file you're working on. Blender reads at least one image format that supports layers. I don't remember it at the moment, unfortunately.


Do you know texture baking already? If not, that will be useful for texturing. Bake an Ambient Occlusion map of the object, and add it into the 2D software as a Multiply layer over your paint layers. That's a nice and easy trick to make your texture look better.

Do you know that you need to paint so that the color extends at least a few pixels above all UV areas? When you look at the model from far away, the texture size is reduced. This blurs nearby pixels together. If your textures are too precise, and there's pure black right next to the UV area, the UV borders will be blurred with black and you'll get visible dark lines in weird places. For the same reason, there should usually be a few pixels of space between the UV islands' borders and the image's borders.

Have you seen how tightly professionals can pack UV spaces? Here's a good thread for seeing people really stretch the limits of UV space. The artists are of very different levels. Some of them are scary good. Try not to get too depressed.

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthre ... 2&page=112

For example, look at the red car model there, and how the roof and the side match each other so closely, and how the sides share a UV space. In Blender, that might be done like this:
1) Mark seams around the roof and the side, and unwrap them, perhaps using Conformal mode instead of Angle Based. Make sure the relative spaces match (Ctrl+
2) In UV mode, move them close to each other so that the corresponding vertices near the roof match.
3) Clear seams and unpin the vertices in the side. Unwrap. Now the roof and the side are connected, but unwrapped independently to have better individual shapes.
4) You can repeat the 3rd step for other parts, as the guy with the red car seemed to do.

Pictures below. The Angle Based/Conformal toggle is marked. I also marked the rather useful toggle box under Display which lets you preview your textures without lighting (the textures are shown in Solid view mode too, not just Shaded).

first i would say paint.net is by far my favorite of the three. second,
cud u send me that car as a solid model plzzz

[Constance]

WHY?
WHY WOULD YOU PUT ALL OF THAT IN QUOTES?