I presently in the process of learning blender to suppliment/replace max as main my 3d app, modelling and animation is coming along nicely I only have texuring and materials to get into, I am however not the best texture artist and depend heavily on max’s multi-subobject materials, procedural generation and texture baker to get maps for my game characters.
my current work flow-
assign material ids to faces and groups of faces
assign materials develop procedurals
assign UVs based on IDs
bake materials to UV map texture
reassign the entire mesh to one material/ID to use the generated map, in max UV coordinates are maintained separately from mat ids and are not affected when IDs are merged
my understanding is that blender can now multi materials can it also support this kind of work flow aswell can someone point me to docs, tuts and the like.
can’t anybody point to something, either it can or can’t, it’s amazing how little support or answers you get when it seems like “blender can’t” I’m not intending to be critical just looking for answers, I’ve been a blender convert damn near 9 flippin’ months now.
If you are looking for information on how to do what you want then I can tell you the first 2 atleast. I’m sure someone else can help with the rest. I will try and work it out myself but not tonight.
Achieving your first goal is relatively simple. I’m using Suzanne as an example object. Give her a new material named Monkey_Mat or something similiar. Select her eyes (these are seperate from the rest of the mesh so you can use Ctrl-L to select just those vertices). Then go to the Editing buttons (F9). In the material index buttons select “New”. This creates a new index to a material. Now press the Assign button with the vertices you wish to assign to that material ID selected.
Go back to your material buttons (F5) and you will see just below the name of the material a button with “1 mat 2” or something like that on it. This selects the current material index. Select the 2nd index and then create a new material for this. You can colour it red so you can see the difference. The eye you selected should turn red.
I’ve attached an example render.
To create procedural textures all you have to do is give a material as many textures as you want in the textures buttons (F6). Then when you go back into its materials options you can determine how those textures affect the material in the textures settings window. For example using Nor will use the texture as a bump map. You can see from the surface of the attached image that I assigned several cloud layers of differing size. One as a colour layer and a smaller as a Nor layer. You can use the same texture layer for multiple purposes.
it helps a bit yes what I basically want to is can I bake the multiple materials I place on my mesh onto a single uv map texture and reapply that to the same mesh I know that blender has a texture baker but does it bake to uv maps.
I am not a good texure artist and this functionality, if it exists, would bring me alot closer to a full blender transition
I’ve been testing out the Proc -> UV texture baker but there seems to be a bug in it for my version atleast. Theoretically it should do what you want which is to paint blenders procedural textures onto the UV unwrap map which you’d then be able to use as the objects UV image.
thanks man I’ll check it out, can you do me the favour of uploading that example blend from your first post somewhere it would make for a helpful guide
