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OK... redid the collar and the arms and got them VERY close to perfect in my other UV program mentioned above. Turned out rather well.
This is a render in DAZ Studio with a foliage texture applied over the entire thing and used the bump and displacement channels to make the details pop a bit more to show the tiling is pretty good. It's not perfect. There is one area under the suit crotch that's a bit of a mess but not sure how to correct that without messing up the really nice mapping that I got all the way around the main visible parts using a cylindrical mapping on it.
EDIT... here is the underside. Yea, not pretty. :-(
(Edited, no longer relevant since he fixed the arms.)
The room on the map is filled. So can't really scale things up much there.
EDIT... here is a screen grab of the mapped suit in the Unwrap program.
OK.. remapped the shorts and the TShirt zones. Split the shirt in halves and the under crotch is now a separate area allowing the shorts to have the more flat mapping that keeps things looking right.
EDIT: render in DS. Notice the nice mapping on the crotch area now. Got it pretty well lined up.
Looking good. I call that a very workable map.
Added a render above... and THANKS hon! I really appreciate your taking the time to comment! :-)
Speculation: any reason for not splitting across _two_ maps? ... one for legs/crotch/shorts detail, one for shirt/arms/collar?
(just thinking about available pixels ;-) ).
Nope, not so... luckily I got your email notice from DAZ so have the info. What I needed to know and understand more is which one is the area I need for setting up the UV's so show the UV pattern image so it shows up all over the model to check for how things are flowing. Can you elaborate on that a bit more??
Ok - can do.
(( ... Editor died on me >_<... ))</p>
Hmm... we can't embed descriptive text between pics (>_<)... I'll put some words on the screenshots... short answer to your question - "None of it"... and you'll see why in a moment ;-).</p>
(( ... gah! it puts attached pics in reverse order of uploading?!... reuploads in order hopefully...))
(( ... argh! ... the listed order is NOT the displayed order... uploading again... !@#$%!@ >_<... ))</p>
(( ... sigh... now the first is the last... trying yet AGAIN... >_<... ))</p>
((... wtf?!... ok... just one pic here, the first pic... ))
(with apologies to your inbox... I really can't believe this is a "mature used-in-lots-of-places" piece of forum software... >_<.</p>
(( aaaand the editor timed out on me again... >_<... ))</p>
... and now the 'magic'... creating an Image to put under the UV-map on the left... and selecting the 'Textured' display mode (the little red/white sphere) on the right, will cause the UV-mapping to be dynamically displayed on the mesh. Now you can whip around your model on the right checking it out from all angles, and adjusting the UV islands (or the individual UV points if you need) on the left, and get instant feedback on how you're doing (^_^)d.
Note, you don't necessarily have to use just the UV-grid image... once you're happyish with your stretching and pixellation, can replace it with an actual painted image (or whatever -- Image -> Replace Image...) and see how your hand-drawn textures look as well.
HTH (^_^)n
No comment *lack of emoticon here because they're broken*.
*phew!* ... well, _that_ was a learning exercise for me (how to post image sequences).
Now that you've (presumably) got an Image mapped to your mesh, you can now start using the "Texture Paint" mode in Blender to paint colour onto your texture, or painting shadows... or baking an AO shadow map for use in GIMP/PS...
(following was achieved by going to the 'Bake' panel on the Render properties... setting Bake Mode to "Ambient Occlusion", and pressing the Bake button. The chunkiness around the legs is a subdiv issue - mine isn't high enough, because I wanted to keep things quick. I also jacked up the AO calculation quality on the World properties 'Gather' panel... 5 is the default, gives a very spotty (but quick) AO map... I normally push it up to 25 or, in this case, out of curiosity, 100... and the texture bake took a couple of minutes and really showed up my chunky mesh >_<).</p>
Minor detail: unfortunately, the Cycles renderer can't bake (yet?)... so you'll have to focus on the Blender Internal renderer to get other stuff out of it (automatic specularity maps etc).
ETA: heheh, sorry SY <(^_^)... if you spot any mistakes I've made, please feel free to correct - better that RAMwolff gets the right instructions...</p>
Actually not quite sure how to do that. I'm sure it's easy but don't know how easy! LMAO
NICE MFM...... I'll hunker down and read through that. I got allot of info to save out here between you and SY's posts. WOWZERS! :-)
Actually not quite sure how to do that. I'm sure it's easy but don't know how easy! LMAO
NICE MFM...... I'll hunker down and read through that. I got allot of info to save out here between you and SY's posts. WOWZERS! :-)
You'd have to hide one half and enlarge/rearrange the other one, then show both, hide the fixed one, and enlarge/rearrange the other half. When you get done it looks like they overlap (as with body meshes) so you need to copy a version to a different layer to split up for creating templates.
Hmmm..... I'll check it out and see how it goes then! :-) I know folks like 4000 X 4000 these days. HA!
Note: the process of UV-mapping is independent of the size of the image you actually lay under it. The UV-coords are normally stored from (0.0, 0.0) to (1.0, 1.0), and then scaled up to whatever size the image happens to be (including rectangular). I didn't show it on any of my screenshots, but if you show the UV properties panel (View -> Properties (or [N])) and select 'Normalized' on the Display panel, you'll see the UV Vertex coords (above) shown in the actual floating point values that are stored, not the pixel-values.
The upshot of all this... is that you can unwrap / work with an image of whatever size is speedy, and it will only affect things like the snapping of UV verts, and the chunkiness of the display. Once you're happy with the overall layout, can then drop in your 4000x4000 textures for a test.
Unwrap Pro has a nice hide feature so this is what I got so far. This is the Collar, Shirt and Sleeves...
Overlapping on one of the collar strips a little there, but yeah, that's what I was thinking of <(^_^). (more pixels! more pixels! ;-) ). Nice 'n regular across the chest area too -- just right for blatting decal logos on (^_^)d.</p>
Another question. Seeing how I've gotten the main obj already fitted to Genesis and have begun the weight mapping ..... I know there is a way to "switch" UV's for the item in DAZ Studio. How? I've exported just the two maps but I'm pretty sure that's not all there is to it.
Thanks for catching that. Fixed that re exported. Ahhhhhhhhhhhh ;-)~
You may also wish to widen the gap between the two sleeve pieces... so that people can paint a bit further "outside the boundaries". The "margin" in Blender can be set when baking, as an area that duplicates the edge pixel colours of the UV islands and stretches them outward, so that any UV inaccuracies won't appear on the final model. In this case, having space for a slightly wider border would help avoid the possibility of white 'lines' at the seam where the arm joins the shoulder.
As far as providing multiple UV-mappings to DS... I don't know the answer to that. Hopefully somebody who knows will chime in v(^_^)v.
Got both tutorials from SY and MFM saved out in "Angel Writer" a free and pretty good "Word Pad" type of application for Windows. Now I can read at my leisure. Read through most of it all while I was formatting and copying all the images into Angel Writer. Looks so simple when experts explain stuff! Thanks you two. You been so WOOFY in helping me! :-)
You're welcome!
Thanks MFM.... fixed the spacing..... What would I do without you & Shay? lol
Totally forgot about this thread I started. Explains how to make a multiple UV set!
Thanks to the fabulous Nicci for her help too in many areas of this learning process! :-)
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/19416/
Here it is added in to the suit in DS. Surfaces area selection for the upper part of the suit and shows up in the UV View. NEATO! :-)
Hi...
Sorry I've been MIA for a few days... been very busy at work....
And you are very welcome and thank you... I am happy to have been able to add my assistance to your project and glad it was helpful...
I see the UV mapping process has been covered, great work everyone... My process is very much the same as SickleYields and I tend to agree with MFM's opinion in that it is an art in it's self... especially on very complex models...
Blenders UV tools are very comprehensive and powerful once you learn them and get a workflow that suits you... but what ever un-wrapping program works for you and does what you need is all that really matters...
I might suggest working with a simpler model to get familiar with UV mapping in Blender while following the tutorials... that way you are not worrying about messing up and dragging out your main projects... that's what I did to learn Blenders UV mapping...
I thought I had posted about how to import UV sets in to Studio before, forgot it was in response to you, lol... glad you were able to find it...
Well, hopefully I can be around a little more to chime in here and there... it's looking great btw...
nicci... ;)
I find the easiest way for me to do a series like this is to type up the descriptions in a text editor in separate chunks on a page, have the finished and optimized images on the desktop, then I can just copy/paste/add image one after the other. This also helps keep them together so that it's less likely others will post in between, thus disrupting the flow.
Something interesting happened. I started creating the fitting morphs for the suit. I do that in ZBrush as it's easier for me right now with their brushes. When you get your models into ZB using the GoZ bridge you can click on an area called "Polygroups" and assign using the UV... well in past cases the UV appears in colored sections. Now when I import the suit (along with Genesis) I get a really odd issue, this doesn't seem to affect how the textures work in DAZ Studio so I'm not overly worried about it but it's got my attention.
First image shows a floral design I created a while back (I think for the Windy Robe for M4 that Connie made and I did a texture expansion for). Still love this texture. It's great for showing the flowability of the UV layout I came up with. So as you can see it's fine but then..
Second image is a screen grab from ZBrush. This is showing the UV's "morphed" which flattens out the figure showing the UV layout.
Third image: See what's going on there when I invoke the polygroups using the UV's? It's really odd behavior to me. Not sure if it's a bug in ZBrush or what.
I don't have Zbrush yet, so I can't help you.
If you're just using it to do morphs now, though, that shouldn't make a difference, since the UV information is not read from an obj when it's picked up through Morph Loader Pro.
Looks weird though yea? Esp since the shorts and the shirt zones are showing normally!