HELP! Texture map and render problems with Blender

I'm slowly learning Blender and have made an exhaust for my bike that looks really good in Blender. I was following the Machinimatrix beginner tutorials to make the UV map and texture map and ran into some problems. I made the UV map ok, but when I previewed it in Sculpty Space and it looks ok except the round tube is now flattened somewhat and doesn't look good. How can I fix this?

Ok,so now I wanted to see about making a texture map for my new pipes. I followed the tutorial and the result of the UV map seems like it might be turned sideways. All I see is a thin sightly slanted section of the map on the left side the all black UV map window. I can't rotate it to see the rest. I can only move it around and spin it. What went wrong?

Here's a link to the Machinimatrix video tutorials:
http://blog.machinimatrix.org/video-tutorials/

hi, Layla;

I do not exactly understand, what you describe
Can you provide some screen shots, or maybe your .blend file ?

Which texturing tutorial do you refer too ? there are 2 of them:

http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2008/05/12/blender-surface-textures
http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2008/09/01/texturizing-with-multiple-images

Whith completely different workflow...

Concerning your distortion problem: well, it is not easy to get as nice looking Sculpties from your beautyfull plain vanilla blender objects. The reasons are manyfold. You will have to take care about vertex shifts (you have only 256 vertex points on each object axis), level of detail (a whole story on itself), compression artefacts (which seem to be mostly solved by now when using "lossless compression" during import to SL) ...

one good workflow seems to export the sculptie-map, then reimport it into blender and compare the 2 objects. If you see vertex shifts, go and look at our tutorial "The arch example" where we described a (rather time consuimg) workaround for precision sculpties...

in short: You need experience. and some time to get around each quirk in the process.
And yes, blender sometimes drives me nuts too

Hi Gaia,
I made sure not to change the vertex count and used only set smooth in object mode to see what the final outcome should look like. I uploaded the scuplt map to SL using lossless compression. The pipes look a little better in SL then they do in Scuplty Space, but still have some flattening.

These are the tutorials I am referring to I applied to my sculpt:
http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2008/05/12/blender-sculptie-creation/#more-11
http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2008/05/12/blender-surface-textures/#more-12

In the second turorial, when I create a new UV texture the UV edit turns all blue with only one face and no smaller faces and stays this way when I add a new 1024 x 1024 image. Ok I found out it is doing this becuase I did not have Multirez enabled. I tried again with it enabled and now have the small squares, but still when I add a new UV texture it does not turn dark gray as in the video and still looks like the UV scuplt map. I continued to add a new UV image and now have the black back ground.

I can't seem to upload the image. It's 22kb 512 x 409, the forum is telling me: "There seems to have been a slight problem with the SL Forums database." I will try to re upload it later.

If you picture the UV texture map as looking all black and on the left side going from top to bottom on a slight angle is what must be my model as the helmet would be in the video, but it does not appear the same as my model does in the other window. When I zoom far in I can see the vertices and edges. I cannot rotate it to see the side that should be showing but I can move it side to side and up and down and spin it like a propeller in the screen.

I'm determined to learn the basics of Blender for SL, I know it will be a long road and learning to model with a set count of vertices seems very hindering at the moment but I have seen some nice detailed scuplties in SL.

Hmmm... You will add a new UV-map for texturing purposes only. So that the original (first) sculptie-map can be kept untouched and used as guide for blender to create the final sculptie compatible surface texture. And when you add this new uv-map, it only would look like you described ("one blue face" only) if you have "reset your UV-texture somewhere before in the process.

Although Domino told me yesterday about some weird thing in blender 2.48 which could cause this behaviour automatically, but i did not fully understand, when it happens and could not reproduce it yet.

In general please note:

1.) Even if you see only one face, the new uv-map indeed contains as many faces, as the first one had, they are just all laying on top of each other and need the "UV-unwrap process" before you can actually do something reasonable with them.

2.)I wonder, why this happens at all, because usually the secnd UV-map starts as a copy from the first. So i expect to see a rectangular UV-map containing 1024 faces. it was reported, that such thing happens, when you create the secnd uv-map in edit mode. creating it in object mode would still create an exact copy of the first map. But it doesnt matter at the end ...

3.) "multires enabled" does affect many things, but although it is a good choice to work when you do modelling, it is more complicated to keep track off the changes in all the different multires levels when you do texturing. Also texturing and vertex moves on the UV-editor can only take place in multires-level 1. The higher levels can't be directly modified, but follow smoothly what you do on level 1 though. For newcomers i recommend to disable multires (by clicking "apply multires" if it is enabled at all) and to be honest, i almost always disable it, when i make my texturing...

In any case, you seem to have oberlooked the UV-unwrap process for your surface texturing ? Otherwise you would not suffer from this "all faces lay on top of each other" effect...

concerning your sculptie itself i am still not understanding, what your troubles are. So i still would need to see, what you have done in order to respond in a meaningfull way

Gaia,
I still can not upload the image due to errors. Can we meet inworld, I can upload the images to SL to show you and also show you the scuplty. It looks fine once it's stretched out. I can meet you almost anytime from about 10am to midnite SL time.

I made a new sculty tank and it looks pretty good in SL too. I have to see how the texture map will go for it yet, but for now I am using inworld textures on it.