Grill mesh to alpha texture image possible?

Support Materials and Textures
1

Hi,

I have a grill as part of my design, but i need the mesh to be converted into an alpha image texture. The mesh is to much data for my goal.
normaly I would set an image texture node in the material (active) and hit bake in render settings.

But for some reason this mesh is not (properly) unwrapped, how to unwrap this grill mesh?

And when baking, nothing really results.
attached blendfile
bake-grill.zip (3.3 MB)

Any tips?

Or when it is possible to make an procedural material with these triangular mesh shapes, that is also a solution.

grill
grill1220Ă—871 125 KB

2

UV is not released. (Image left)

sa
sa1349Ă—762 300 KB

3

The easiest thing to do would be to make that pattern into a flat, basic square texture, bake that, then wrap the results around a UVed cylinder.

2 Likes
4

This is a tricky one because UV unwrapping unwraps the mesh not the “holes”.

Baking from a mesh to a material is not really what baking is for.

You could make one flat segment like this:

Alpha
Alpha1920Ă—1080 129 KB

Give it a black material and a whit background, render it with an orthographic camera (or even viewport render image) and crop the image.

This would give you an alpha mask that can be repeated on a cylinder mesh.

4 Likes
5

This is basically how I’d do it. The flat plane on the right is, obviously, the geometry I baked the texture from, and the left is the UVed cylinder.

Screenshot (4)
Screenshot (4)2560Ă—1440 1.42 MB

1 Like
6

Nice eye for the crossbar detail

1 Like
7

If it was not for that I would have suggested procedural.

8

You could do that texture procedurally, though it’d be a slight pain in the ass.

2 Likes
9

Those crossbars and the rims would be a real pain.

10

It wouldn’t be too terrible. The rims could be black rectangle with a smaller white rectangle masking all but the left and rightmost edges. The crossbars could be done with two separate shapes. For the left crossbar, you’d just need a black rectangle overlaid with two white masks to mark out it’s vertical position along the left side, then another white mask to erase the top half of it. For the right, you’d do basically the same thing, but with everything flipped.

…this is one of those things that’s easier shown than explained, but yeah, it could be done.

11

thanks for the replies.
I will try the bake option with these suggestions.

But procedural has my preference. cleaner and faster en customisabe.
I already have this procedural holes setup thanks to Point Cloud. But it still needs the triangle shape instead of the round hole shape.

1 Like
12

As I already had a go here is what I got with the image method:
(this is just a cylinder)

Bin
Bin1920Ă—1080 199 KB

Bin2
Bin21920Ă—1080 181 KB

I made the normal map in gimp.

Yes procedural is cleaner and more customizable.

2 Likes
13

Here’s my setup to do it procedurally :

Capture
Capture1273Ă—958 599 KB

Capture2
Capture21528Ă—673 94.5 KB

2 Likes
14

ProcMeshingMat.blend (1.1 MB)
With the blend file

2 Likes
15

i tried to render it in BL 3.5 and don’t get the pattern!
is there some other parameter to get it going in EEVEE ?

thanks
happy bl

16

Make sure the blend mode and shadow mode are set to alpha clip in the material in evee

17

it is already set

i simply opened up your file with your GUI
so it should work
but still not working

what else could be doing this
i can upload my file if you need to check it out

did you do it in BL 3.5 or other version?

thanks
happy bl

18

Works Fine in 3.3, but he did leave the asset manager open so in my case it was bogged down by opening all un-assigned. Took a long time for the file to be un-frozen…

19

Works fine for me on 3.5 sorry about the assets manager causing troubles on opening. You can uncheck load UI when opening the file it will solve this issue.

20

Yep, I might have forgotten on that one, but I usually un-check it as I hate having everything flipped and moved in my in my UI…