I have worked with fur and know how to colour it with textures. However, I need more control over the shape of colour patches than the random shapes that texures provide.
Let’ say I want to model and animate a tiger: I want to be able to colour the dark lines and make the belly part lighter. I was hoping that I can accomplish this with UV mapping, but the fur does not take on the colour of the UV map.
At the end of the day I want this animal to move - based on an armature too, so I tested the following: I created multiple objects (meshes) and parented them to the same armature. I was glad this worked, so I can now have “blotches” of different-coloured hair meshes moving in unison with the single armature. BUT: these meshes obviously don’t mix in smoothly, nor can I effectively control the colour areas, e.g. “tiger stripes”.
Can anybody help me? It would have been great to be able to do this via UV mapping or texture painting!
As the particles’ texture is determined by a material channel, you can use UVmapping.
Set up UVmapping as normal, with regard to unwrapping and creating a texture.
Instead of importing the texture in the UV window, go to the materials buttons and create a new texture (not material) for the particles.
Make that texture an image texture and import the texture you created from UVmapping from there.
Go back to the materials buttons. In the “Map Input” channel, choose “UV” instead of “Orco”. You can now use UV mapped textures as you would a normal material texture.
I tried your suggestion, but could not get it to work:
I’m not 100% sure what you mean by “create a new texture (not material) for the particles”, as one cannot create a texture unless a material is defined for an object. (There is no “texture” button to press)
After defining a material, I followed the rest of your posting, which showed up the UV beautifully on the object… but not on the hair
I’m not sure whether I’m missing something, but I still can’t get it to show the UV colour on the hair. What is strange, is that the hair has the same colour (or an average – I’m not sure) of the deneral UV map’s colour – and not the material’s colour.
(I’m re-sending as the previous off-line copy-and-paste stuffed up the fonts)
Thanks Techmeology
I tried your suggestion, but could not get it to work:
I’m not 100% sure what you mean by “create a new texture (not material) for the particles”, as one cannot create a texture unless a material is defined for an object. (There is no “texture” button to press)
After defining a material, I followed the rest of your posting, which showed up the UV beautifully on the object… but not on the hair L
I’m not sure whether I’m missing something, but I still can’t get it to show the UV colour on the hair. What is strange, is that the hair has the same colour (or an average – I’m not sure) of the deneral UV map’s colour – and not the material’s colour.
I’m not very familiar with all the members and their expertise. Do you know whether there is any intention to implement this at some stage in Blender? - This is quite a limitation to modelling realistic-looking animals, for example.
Otherwise, do you know of another mechanism one can use in the mean time, e.g. vertex painting (which I also couldn’t get to work)?
As a new member to Elyusion, I suppose you are making the above remarks to some other guru, as I am not involved in the software development, but I would really LUV to see this sorted out, as I think it is fundamental to doing decent models in Blender.
