I’ll be straight, I have NO idea what the heck I’m doing here.
Honestly, I hardly know what to ask, so please bear with me.
Ok, I’m trying to figure out the difference between UV mapping and Texturing and Materials.
I’ve been creating models for a while now, but when I’m trying to export them say to video games or make a 3d comic the color doesn’t show. What I’m doing wrong here? I’m pretty sure it’s something I over looked, but it’s been a few weeks now of all nighters, and I just need some help to understand here.
Again, I’m sorry if this is simple to know or I’m on the wrong forum.
UV mapping - the art of laying out your mesh in a 2D fashion. Often you’ll need a UV map where the mesh don’t overlap, so a 4 sided box (no lids) would require a seam in order to unfold. In some cases the UV map can overlap but will result in mesh faces sharing UV space, which is acceptable for some texturing work. Typically you want to unwrap for least amount of stretching, but in some cases there may be other factors driving what the unwrap should be (such as keeping xy direction consistent), which is why we can unwrap several times different UV maps.
Texturing - in real life “texture” is what we can feel, like a bumpy or uneven surface. In CG texture covers anything that can be represented with a 2D image map (or 2D/3D procedural pattern generator). For 2D maps to work which has only an x and y direction, they have to know where to put pixels, and the UV map is the lookup table on how to do that. Can represent color/albedo, glossy levels, or bump/normals (and tons of others depending on software used).
Shading - personal interpretation, but is the rules set up on how a surface reacts with its surroundings such as light and environment. This would be accomplished with the shader nodes.
Material - The combination of all of these, although in some cases UV mapping may not be needed if we’re using a 3D procedural pattern generator instead or don’t use any textures at all.
That answers only the first part of the question. I have no idea about the second part, why things don’t work, because sufficient information is not provided. Anyhow, I’m not exporting to game engines myself, so I probably wouldn’t be able to answer
The colour won’t show on export if you are using things like nodes etc as they are all very much part of the Blender software. If you UV your object and apply image textures, then export that as say OBJ or Collada, then most other packages can interpret those UV’s and so the image maps will show. You may have to “re-locate” the textures in the other package, depending on how it handle file paths. Again, things like the full node tree won’t be pulled across, so in order to get the full material, you tend to bake it in, so the final UV image uses the baked version which is used in games etc.
Here is a small file showing the difference between UV’d, baked and non UV textures.
If you export all 3 objects one at a time and save the image UVBaked from the image editor so it has an external copy, you should find that only the RoundcubeBAKED object would import into other software fully textured. (Assuming you locate the image it is using for texture).
The other objects are not likely to exprot with anything other than the material name and a standard “clay” colour.
I have packed the images into the blend file, the key point for exporting as I said is to bake the texture, which is easier in Cycles than it used to be, there are plenty of tutorials on youtube about baking.
Thank you for the tips and samples to work with. I’ll play with them to see if I can understand it better, I’ll post again if I have questions.
But if interested or if I want to get some help texturing and uv mapping, can I post here or is it another forum?
