I have downloaded a .dae file of a character to pose for a game I am modding (she is not animated - just posed to sit in the passenger seat of a vehicle).
When I import her, I am able to pose her, etc., but I cannot see any of the textures she came with. According to Blender, the materials are there, and when i downloaded her she did come with a bunch of TGAs for textures. However I cannot see her with textures in Blender. I have followed all tutorials and did everything as instructed.
On the bottom bar I am in object mode, which is where I need to be. So this is correct.
For modes, when I select Rendered mode, she has her details, but she is all grey and “noisy”. On Material mode she is just solid white. On texture mode she is just a darker white. Same with Solid.
On the top I am in cycles render. This is correct also, so I do not need to change anything there.
On the right (see screenshot) I am able to see the filenames for the textures as I select the meshes.
I want to see her posed with the textures before I export her as an .obj because I need to make sure she even HAS the textures to export.
Thanks for any advice. See the screenshot to see what I am looking at:
P.S. - Please answer as if I am a beginner, because i am. I am NOT a 3D modeler. I am just a modder trying to pose a character to import into Euro Truck Simulator 2 as an accessory for personal use (I do not upload or distribute my mods). So if you are the author of this model, I thank you for it and assure you it is not going to be uploaded anywhere. I’m just trying to make my personal gaming experience a learning one for modding.
I see no link to a blend file so how are we to check it ?
What happens when you use Blender Render instead of cycles, you can see form the material you have shown it is not a cycles material (Use nodes not enabled)
Sorry in my last reply I forgot to add that I cannot attach the file here because the forum rules forbid it. A zip file can only be up to 15MB in size, and when zipped this dae and the needed textures package is 21 MB.
I take it you have that model from here? (Warning: Imagery on that site may not be suitable for children - lots of those absurdly sexy manga-ish females.)
I have bad news, then:
You will have to assign the textures manually to the materials, be it in Cycles or Blender Internal. For every material you have a diffuse, a normal and a specular map; the alpha maps for the eyelashes and the hair seem to be missing, though.
As soon as all maps are applied, the model renders fine:
Once you decided which render engine you want to use, we can help you further on how assigning textures to materials actually works - the workflow is different between Cycles and Blender Internal.
That’s not the variant I downloaded, but yeah. She’s called “Juliet” but there are ones with her almost nude and the one I have has her more or less modest even though I was going to try to texture a t-shirt under the suit she has on. I want something suitable for the passenger seat of a truck and she was one of the only models on that site that didn’t have 50,000 things hanging from her waist (people on that site are obsessed with weapons, swords and crazy dresses it seems). It looks like you found one of the MUCH less modest variations of her.
So in the texture case the news is not all bad - that will give me a chance to make a different shirt for her. Is there a good tutorial for dummies somewhere on how to assign such textures how you describe? And also, if I assign these textures, will it export as an obj file so I can import it into the program I need to convert it to a pmg file?
OH! And also it does appear I downloaded the wrong model - I couldn;t tell because all I see is a white figure and not what clothes she is wearing. THIS is the one I am trying to work with: http://tf3dm.com/3d-model/juliet-44936.html
From Poser I exported the default Simon character. This is what I get from the Blender 2.71 importer. NOTE: Poser did export all the images correctly, but the Blender Importer only assigns the texture for the first material. All other materials are created, but it looks like image search fails on the second call. I would call this a bug in the Blender importer. It seems like to me that the same code that is in Import Images As Planes needs to be migrated into the other Import systems.
After a little more studying the imported scene it does look like Blender 2.71 brought in all the textures as well, however, for some reason it left the map for the head unassigned.
If we take a look at the XML in the actual Poser exported DAE file we can see this…
So a valid file is being exported and named correctly. What would cause the importer to fail? Think about it, this DAE importer has been around since the 2.4 series and if we remember one thing about the 2.4 series it is that internal names can not be longer than 21 characters. This name, “image-MTshirt2TEX” , that works is less than 21 character. This name, “image-SimonHeadTexCasual”, is longer than 21 characters. I would guess that the importer needs to be updated to handle the longer names that the 2.6 series now supports. We can have up to 64 characters in our names now.
Ah, I always forget that .dae files are human readable…
In that file from the OPs model the texture file names are mostly plain wrong and some of the textures are simply missing - crappy (and most likely pirated) Poser export, I guess.
So, your justified feature request for the .dae importer nonwithstanding, in this case the model is to blame…
Hey, relax! I don’t judge. If you want something half-naked on the passenger seat of your truck, that’s perfectly all right for me - whatever floats your boat…
I don’t really know the exporter or that “pmg”(?) file you want to export in. But I realized that there is something weird going on in your screenshot:
Is that some special material creation tool just for the exporter? If so, you might want to check the exporter’s documenation about its usage.
Apart from that I’m not quite an expert on exporting to game engines. But I would assume that Blender Internal materials translate better to .OBJ than Cycles materials do(?) - so, it is Blender Internal, then.
Let me get this straight: You have no experience or knowledge about texturing in Blender? Zero? Well, give me some time to prepare a very basic video tut or something. If anyone else has a decent tut at hand…
Mind you, though, that your model will still not look like mine afterwards, because I added alpha textures to hair and eyelashes that are missing with your downloads.
Hmmm. I most certainly hope that the model I am using is not pirated. I signed up with that web site and have an account there so I can use those models to learn with.
I guess I should ask: Is there a more reputable site then I can be using to get free personal use models from of humans? I just want something that is female, lifelike, rigged, and decent looking (ergo not fat/ugly/distorted/etc).
I think the file names of the texture files I am using are definitely all more than 21 characters. More like 30+. Is there an easy way to shorten the filenames and correct the assignments on the model to use the new filenames?
bear in mind these are NOT textures. These are UV Maps, so am I correct in the assessment that I cannot just reassign them to this model? I would HAVE to completely re-texture her by hand from scratch and remap a new UV set? Unless my terminology is different from other folks here, to me a “texture” is a single seamless image, such as wood surface, skin surface, etc. and a UV map is an image that already has a layout of multiple textures to be used by a model.
An image texture is any image file that can be assigned to a material and influences certain material properties: Diffuse color, specularity, reflection, surface shading (bump, normal), surface displacement, etc.
Whether those images are painted, seamless, following the pattern of a UV unwrap etc. or not is not really a defining aspect for being a texture. So, of course you can assign those image files to your model, as the model itself is UV unwrapped accordingly. You just have to tell Blender to use UV coordinates for mapping those textures onto the mesh.
You have four basic materials on that model (cloth, hair, skin and eyelash) and three of them come with three textures each (D = diffuse map, S = spec map, N = normal map). The eyelash material is missing the alpha texture, so is the hair material.
As promised, here’s a short and very basic video about texturing that mesh in Blender Internal: Link.
The file is uploading to my Dropbox as I speak - type - and should be available in about 30 minutes from… Now!
Awesome. In 30 minutes I’ll be asleep for work, but tomorrow is my “Friday” so I will have a couple days after my shift in the morning to sift through and check that out.
Thank you so much for the kind and informative answers, as well as the patience. I am so new to 3D modeling that this is exciting and frustrating at the same time. But once I learn it I am hoping that I can contribute back to this community somehow with something halfway artistic.
Just an update on the bug. Initially I exported the DAE file to my desktop. All the files just spewed all over the place. I gathered them up and put them in a folder and conducted the test, however, the image map for the head I missed and it was not in the folder when I imported the DAE mode. That is why my model’s head was left white. I located the missing image map and conducted the test again and have to come to the conclusion that 21 character limit is not a factor in this situation. All image maps were located and translated to the model just fine as Blender Internal materials even the filenames longer than 21 characters.
LOL It wasn;t you I am worried about. Once I get my truck decorated the way I want, I am planning to do a YouTube series with tutorials on driving in Euro Truck Simulator, so I do want the final product to be fit for anyone age 16+
I have not gotten to the point of exporting anything yet. That part you noticed is a special plugin that, once i DO figure out these skinning issues, will be able to convert and package everything into a special model that is readable by Euro Truck Simulator 2. It also enables Blender to import models directly from ETS2 for editing, but at the moment I have not even gotten that far as I am working with models not related to ETS2.
My screen layout is set up per this tutorial (even though it is a TERRIBLE tutorial - the guy moves his mouse faster than his recording software would record, so i couldn;t see everything he clicked and whenever I tried to ask him to re-record with a slower mouse movement his response was always to “slow the video down when i am watching it” . . . WTF?)
From what i understand the model I downloaded is just a dae. I have no idea if it was created in Blender or how to tell
I have found a few tutorials on texturing, but I have found absolutely zero tutorials on how to apply an already existing map back to the model. In this case, the models I downloaded came with tga files that were already mapped to fully skin the model - just for some reason they are not loading with the model. And the skin files are in the same folder as the model, so they SHOULD be loading, but they are not, meaning I am doing something incorrectly with the import. That’s what I am trying to figure out here is what I am doing wrong when importing a dae file. If I were doing things correctly on the import, then all I should have to do is pose/scale the model, then start worrying about exporting to the game, right?
No worries. Not sure how Alphas are even used in the game, other than transparency purposes, but it can’t hurt to have them included.
Yeah in my case it appears nothing is scattered. When I download models from the site everything is in the same folder. I’ll try that tool and see if the textures start appearing. I keep looking at tutorials on the web and comparing them with what i have and for all intensive purposes Blender thinks the bloody thing IS textured - but she just renders as a solid color.
Okay, Atom, I tried that converter tool - apparently tga files are not Blender files - so it didn’t work here. I installed the addon, and it appears in my Blender, so I pressed BLENDER>CYCLES and it just threw errors:
