I have a 3D model of a piece of flint from an archaeological dig. After imaging it I had to remove where the support for the object was showing which left a hole. I’m quite new to Blender but have used ‘Edge select’ and ‘F’ to fill the hole in the mesh but the resulting texture is striped and not like the flint color.
My query is how do I cover the hole with the relevant local color? I have tried the ‘Clone’ tool in ‘Texture Paint’ but that just adds effects all over the object. Do I need to do some UV editing?
I include an image showing the stage after the mesh hole filing (not yet allowed to post more images) where a stipped pattern now shows.
Welcome to BA
Probably the easiest thing to do would be to select just this one face, rotate around until you’re looking at it more or less head on, and press U> Project From View. Keeping that selection, open the UV Editor and move it until it looks good
Thanks for that. Given that the relevant surface is made up of lots of polygons, after the hole has been filled, can I select the whole face with the ‘face selection tool’ selected?
Once that is done then ‘Project from View’ will unwrap that surface into a second screen. After that what do I do in the UV editor and how do I colour the hole area of that face using surrounding colours? By using Texture Paint - Clone?
Why filling it if you can just select the area, use proportional manipulation and scale down to zero and then merge by distance. This way your are not creating new faces with reset UVs.
I will have a go as having done nothing like this before.
So I select one of the many edges vertices instead of an edge (with edge select on) at the side of the hole then merge them to the centre with the keys you have indicated? And this will allow the texture to infill the hole without changing the colour etc?
Ok, I have had a go and dragging the vertices to the center only works if the Proportional Editing is off, otherwise using the mouse only zooms the whole model in and out. Having done that when looking at the texture there are black stripes in it so it has partially worked. As I can only load one photo here is a compilation.
If I go to Sculpting and smooth the area it doesn’t make it any better. So how do I now ‘paint’ over just this area with some local texture and not in the process, as happened before, affect other areas of the model?
Since the black stripes come from the little bit of black left around the hole on the textures it would be better to clean that up before I do the hole filling but using Texture Paint and Clone doesn’t seem to work.
I have cleaned up the edges by deleting some polygons and then repeated the infill method above and this leaves a cleaner infill using the surrounding textures, or at least the colours. So I then tried to improve on the texture to blend the finish better with the surroundings using the Clone tool in Texture Painting but it doesn’t seem to do anything. I’m sure it’s something simple I have to do to get that to work.
Just seeing this, just this week I tested if Stable Diffusion can be used to fill in missing textures - it can, however by now just single channel(color), not PBR.
Julian, you are missing the point of the proportional editing tool.
Let me explain:
when you manipulate your vertices, a circle will appear, it will show you a fade-in manipulation radius in which the manipulated area follows a proportional editing pattern (which by default is a curve).
When the circle appears, you can use the mouse wheel to increase or decrease the radius.
In your case, all you did is achieve in the edge to be centered.
You should select the edge, hit s+0 and while you do so use the mouse wheel to increase or decrease the manipulation area to gradually stretch the area until it no longer looks like a impact spot or star (with regards to the texture).
I’d highly suggest that you look into proportional editing.
I have tried what you say and scrolling the mouse wheel after pressing S+O does nothing and the double arrows just sits there, unless Proportional editing is off and then it will draw the vertices towards the centre. I will try and do a screen recording so you can see but the video will have to be hosted elsewhere as too large for the forum. I’m aware of PI’s potential in filling gaps but I haven’t been able to get it to work.
