Enough with the bruises........

Hi Folks

I've been using Blender now since February with varying degrees of success. I've made quite a few shoes with it and decided that its now time to really understand the texturing side of things. I have looked at a ton of tuts and watched Gaia's tut -- but why is it that something always seems to be left out? I think the Machinimatrix tuts are awesome, personally but i missed something on the texture one.

It may seem trivial to some of you -- but I cannot figure out the unwrapping part of the texturing process. Sure -- I can select one half of the object and get it to come up in the UV window to the right but..............then what? I tried to follow these tuts step by step and I know somethings missing. I just want to unwrap the mesh, place my 4 broken out views (side, top etc) into the UV window on the right -- and then take it out to photoshop. Can anyone post a step by step process to how to do this? Its driving me nuts. I don't need explanation or extra baggage as I get confused easily (its a self inflicted college wound)

Thanks so much in advance and Cheers!

CC

hmm...
i thought, we did show the step by step process in both of our texturizing tutorials... Ok, see below you might have missed one
I guess, you have 4 images (side views) of your model. So this sounds like you should take another look at our new tutorial titled:

http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2008/09/01/texturizing-with-multiple-images/

There you see, how you can prepare your sculptie texture with an arbitrary amount of views (images from several sides of your model). you even get the benefit, that you could in principle export the intermediate texture (the consolidated image) to photoshop and tweek it there, then reimport it to blender and go through the final step of remapping the intermediate image to the final sculptie texture.

Of course you also can go through the whole process (as we show in our new tutorial) and just take the final result out to photoshop and tweek it to remove the seams. You just should be aware, that the final mapping of your texture to your object is in general not very obvious.

What i can offer: If you can give me some more details about where exactly do you see derivations from what we show in our tutorial ? Which parts are not understandable ? Then i can take care of this and try to give some advices...

And maybe i will learn, where i have to take another look to make a better texturizing video...

BTW: We currently have one more video in the queue for blending multiple input files and showing an easy way to get rid of seams, just to "whet your appetite"

http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2008/05/12/blender-surface-textures/

from the same set of tuts. It took watching it a few times...but this is the easiest way i have found.

=)

edit: Thanks btw for all those tuts! They are a wonderful reference.

Alisha -- yeah thats the one I watched. And let me say that The Machinimatrix tuts are by far the best (I wish i found them where i first starting digging into Blender) They really helped me under stand proportional editing instead of going through vertice by vertice before :X Shhhhhhhhhhh


Gaia -- I know I must have missed something. I am trying to texture a shoe wedge. I throw up my UV map in the right window; go back to the left and select one half of the shoe from the 'side view.' It shows up in the window on the left.

After cleaning up the stray pixels and adding the missing ones (for a perfect half of the shoe) I switch to the top view to select the other half of the shoe (so I can get an inverse of the wedge to stack on top in the texture field)

Where I get stuck is that after I select the 'top half' of the shoe -- it never shows up in the UV map window. If I knew what i was doing wrong, in getting that other part of the UV Map placed in the right window (UV window) I can figure out the best way to lay out the maps for the texture.

I suspect its an ID 10 T error but I have been banging my head for three days LoL. Sorry to you smart folks out there for this convoluted mess of an explanation but it's all i got.

Cheers

CC

That sounds like you have only unwrapped half of your shoe. You have 2 options here. Both options presuppose, that you are working on your "projectionmap" and NOT on your "sculptie" UVTexture!

option1 : (explained in our first texturizing tutorial)
http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2008/05/12/blender-surface-textures/#more-12

- You FIRST select the entire object, and unwrap it in one step.

- After unwrapping, you need to separate foreground from background. This is where we sequentially select first the front, then the back and finally the inner part of the helmet.

- We move (and scale) the UV-faces in the UV-image editor so that we eventually get a good texturizable layout for the projection-texture.


option2: (explained in our secnd tutorial)
http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2008/09/01/texturizing-with-multiple-images/

- You partially unwrap only the currently visible faces, thus you create several different projections: a.) adjust your view, b.) select visible faces c.) unwrap from view

- open the corresponding image (in the uv-editor) and adjust the faces to the image.

- do this repeatedly for each view, which you want to use (top,front,.back,side,bottom... as you need) One very unpleasant caveat: Do not select the same face(s) in different partial unwraps (see below).

Both options mentioned above lead to an intermediate texture, the "projectionmap". Once you got that projectionmap, the last part of the process is exactly the same, so both tutorials show exactly the same procedure (we believe, that the secnd tutorial is a bit clearer and better to follow thanks to improvements suggested from many people here )

This sounds like you want to work with overlapping images, so you get a texture without seams. Well, the above described processes do not work good with overlapping images. You will have to wait for our third texturizing tutorial, which will adress multilayered texturizing and blending. although i am afraid, that we will have to use the apricot-branch of blender (huh?... that's the game engine enhanced version of blender) when we want to get visual control over the process...

i hope, that helps. Maybe it is as Alisha says: watch the tutorial(s) often, use the pause-key and follow the process several times step by step. I myself do it too. It sometimes takes me several tens of trials, before i get it right. And the smallest derivation from the described processes tend to end in disaster

Oh Thanks a ton Gaia -- I will continue to plug at it and eagerly await your next tut. I watch all these videos over and over and try to do them step by step.

I appreciate the help folks.

Peace

CC