More Blender queries

Back with more queries, folks, as I'm still getting my head round Blender.

1) I've modelled a sculpty component using the PLANE mesh and it looks fine in Solid view but when I go to Textured view it's outside in and I found I had to use the 'inside-out' option on the sculpty properties to get it to view correctly when I did a test import to SL. Is there a way I can reverse the faces in Blender to get it facing the right way without having to remodel?

2) If I use one of Domino's non-square sculpty formats, when I'm following Gaia's tutorials to apply textures and 'consolidating to one image' with composite texures, do I need to make the new map the same proportions or does the programme scripts do that bit and match the square texture map to the rectangular sculpt map automatically?

3) If I make a botch while doing one of the unwrapping to view steps how do I redo it or delete it without having to start from scratch. I get the impression that the programme retains the association with the UV maps as they're made and so if I do two good ones and one wrong one, when I try to cosnsolidate to one image the bad one is included.

Thanks for any help.
Drifter

You could scale it "s -1" or Mirror it e.g. "CTRL m z" followed by recalculate normals "CTRL-SHIFT n".

I think, that the proportions of the consolidated image is irrelevant. The UV mapping tells blender which portion of the consolidated image has to be mapped to which face in the model. So you have to assign the correct areas by yourself. probably you will need to scale and possibly rotate the UV faces to adjust your texture to your model. When you finally bake the sculpt-texture, ecerything gets mapped to the right place. Did that answer your question ?

The only method i see, is to use "CTRL z" for redo. It is often a good idea to make intermediate backups of your work, so when you are satisfied with one part, save it and go on. If you make a botch, revert to the last saved version...

You can mirror the UV Map on X instead if you prefer your model to remain the same.



Next to the UV layers in the edit panel, there are X buttons to delete each layer. You can change the active and rendering UV layers there too. So you could set the bad layer to active and redo it's unwrap, or just delete it if you've since created a good one.

Thanks, Dom and Gaia.



I understand the buttons - that wipes the whole layer. My query was more about one step within the multiple image process - if that makes sense. The tutorial has the multi partial unwraps all on the same newly created layer, or at least that's the way I've been reading it, and if I've done one half - say the outside - then screw up with the second pass - inside half, I'd like to just restart that partial step without going back to square one. Maybe answering my own question - does simply deleting the vertices in the UV Image Editor to restart have drastic consequences?

I'm also having trouble with the final bake texture at the moment. Using a rectangular sculpt map, I did the inside and outside thing (without mistakes for once!) and consolidated the image to a square map - the recommended 2048 x 2048. Got an image ok, made a material and linked it to the texture and baked the texture only. The texture view shows the texture applied to the sculpt but the UV Editor window is just a black square - nothing for me to save to file. Any idea where I'm going wrong?

And while I'm on a roll................ lol
The component I'm trying to make is a car roof so I need clear window panels in the surface texture. The original images I use in PSP has the alpha channel set up ok but the resultant texture doesn't seem to carry this over, and for an earlier test I found I had to take the result of the texture bake and re-edit it in PSP to recreate an alpha channel to get it to import to SL. Again, am I missing a step in the bake process that takes account of the alpha info embedded in the original images used to create he texture?

One final one for now - promise! How in heck to I get a sharp image as the texture? The ones I'm coming up with are awfully fuzzy. What's the best resolution to use?

Thanks again, guys.

You just can select the faces, which you want to texturize, then do a partial unwrap. As soon as you do the unwrap, the uv-map gets adjusted accordingly. All faces, which belonged to another unwrapped part of the mesh previously, are simply reassociated to the new unwrapped part of your mesh... You can see how that works in the tutorial "texturizing with multiple images"

huh, many things can go wrong. Is your object selected in object mode? Do you have taken care about possible typos in the map input ? Have you clicked on the [UV] in the map input tab ? Did you select uv-faces in the uv-editor ? Sometimes you must use "pin" in the uv-image editor and then reselect the image you want to see... it is a bit complicated to answer this question without seeiong the blender file...

I create a subsurf modifier, then i add up to 5 levels (which is very huge!!! You better start with 3) then i render. The result is much (very much) better. But of course it also depends on how you did unwrap (e.g. if the unwrapped faces need to bend the texture too much, the rendered output texture will become bad) take care to start with very high quality textures. You will always loose quality when it comes to fotorealistic texturing. So better have a HUGE starting texture at hand (and some time for rendering)i would say, that you loose more quality, the more the original image has to be bended around the object. So it may help to have many fotos from different angles and apply these fotos to different regions of your model. I still did not get further with my texture blending tutorial, which will show, how you can blend several fotos all together over several faces. that tutorial is realy missing...