I don’t know if this is the good place to post this, and I’m sorry if this is the bad place.
Me and some friends started a new game project, and we have divided our labor, one is the coder guy, the other is the marketing guy, and I’m the designer guy. Got Blender for a month now and I can finally model properly and rig it good but I have only one problem:
Texturing.
I really don’t know from where to start, there are so many different techniques on the internet and I just can’t choose the correct one because I don’t know which one is the correct one.
What I want is after creating my 3D object, to texture it in blender with Diffuse, Normal maps, Occlusion and Specularity so that after I export the model in whatever file extension is needed, Unity 3D will apply these textures.
Modelling in Blender for me is kinda straight forward, but I can’t understand texturing.
Can somebody please tell me the steps I should take to learn how to texture 3D models? Or share some relevant links?
Don’t like to say this but consider me a total n00b in texturing.
I don’t know if this is the good place to post this, and I’m sorry if this is the bad place.
Did you not think Support / Materials & Textures would be a better place to ask a question about texturing than a forum to discuss blender itself. Please spend at least 2 seconds to think where would be the most appropriate place to ask a question.
Moved from Blender & CG Discussion to Support / Materials & Textures
Forget about normal, occlusion and specularity for now and focus on diffuse. What you need to do is to unwrap your model and create a decent uv layout onto which you apply the diffuse texture. That’s what you need to understand first of all. Just google for some tutorials, shouldn’t be difficult to find some decent ones.
Once you got that sorted out, there are numerous techniques you can use. Depending on the look you are aiming for, you may first create high poly models and bake them onto a low poly one to get the normal map and a more decent occlusion map.
If you are aiming for a less realistic look, creating a high poly model may not be needed. Instead you could use the diffuse texture to generate the normal and occlusion map out of it using other tools As far as I know, Blender doesn’t have some built-in solution for that.
Okay, I did this like this: Selected everything, Pressed U and used “Smart UV Project”, I’ve exported the UV Layout, applied texture in photoshop, opened the image in UV/Image editor and selected it. The texture is not applied, what do I have to do next to apply the rest of the textures so they can work after getting imported in Unity?
Lets say that I don’t want to bake the normals at the moment and I want to apply the normal map/occu/spec textures. How do I do that? Watched alot of tutorials on this subject and most of them had different techniques. I’m so lost on this subject
Let’s get the first step sorted out before we proceed with the next one.
You simply need to google Blender uv unwrap to find a bunch of tutorials about it. If you open the .blend file in Unity, you may have to drag the texture into the Diffuse/Albedo slot of the material to make it visible.
Applying a texture means adding it as a material texture. Or in other words, what textures do is influence materials/shading. UV map is just the coordinates to get the 2D texture mapped on a 3D surface and the other way around so you can also paint on the model itself.
When you assign (non-node) materials and put textures in place for those, you can then export those definitions. Whether or not those get imported or how they look in another application depends on that other application. If material import doesn’t work, at least you have UV coordinates to get the textures mapped on the model the same way, textures in image form, and just have to make the textures influence materials/shading in that appplication. Of course lighting has an effect too.
@Dantus, Ok, started from where you told me I should start, watched a bunch of tutorials, finally managed to properly unwarp, export the UV layout, add the texture in photoshop and apply in unity the texture, posting a image to show the result:
A quesiton, in the image I have posted I textured only the blade of the knife, is it ok to make different textures for different meshes of an object (one texture for the blade, one texture for the knife body, one texture for the bolts) or should I create an UV layout for the entire object?
This depends on your actual use case. If you e.g. use the new standard shader in Unity, you may easily just define the differences with the smoothness texture. However, that means you need an additional texture. At the end, both approaches have pros and cons. The best bet is usually to try it out for your use case.
What do you mean with apply? If you have them, you simply drop them into the slots in the Unity material. If you don’t have them yet, you need to create them. There is a bunch of applications that help you to at least generate normal maps from the original texture.
And as mentioned, there are a bunch of ways to generate them. You may also generate them based on a high poly model.
