Joining? two planes without losing their respective textures. How do I do that?

Support Basics & Interface
1

I apologize if this beginner question is the wrong forum to ask the question;

I am trying to combine two planes, one with a leaf texture and the one below it with the ‘bottom of the leaf texture’, but it appears joining them with “CTRL + J” causes one of the planes to lose its texture and replace it with the first plane’s texture. Simply stated, I want both meshes to be joined in such a way that when I move one, the other moves with it, while preserving their respective textures.

It must be a simple two button method but I forgot how to do it.

thanks for any tips!

~Ethan

2

If two objects have different materials and you join them, each face will retain its original material.

Attach or link to your blend file if this is not happening.

You could also parent one object to another with Ctrl+P though you would have to move the parent object if you want to move both objects at together.

EDIT: Moved thread from Discussion to Support forum.

3

Objects should behave as Richard has indicated, although if your 2 texture images are different aspect ratios you may get some distortion on at least one of the textures when the objects are joined.

If your two planes are occupying the same space you will get problems with the render. In Blender Internal you will get a z-fighting effect where some pixels are from one texture and some from the other. A quick experiment suggests that in Cycles if 2 coplanar faces have different materials it will render the one in the top material slot for all such areas.

Unless you are doing an extreme closeup of the leaf in a way that its actual thickness will show, you will probably get better results with a single plane. If you are rendering in cycles you can put different materials or textures on the two sides of a single face by mixing two materials (or two textures on the same material) with a mix node driven by the “Backfacing” output of a “Geometry” node.

If you need to use Blender Internal I can’t give you any more information as I rarely use it

4

Thanks guys! I forgot that I could just parent those two planes together.