I am still new with blender and am struggling with something that should be easy.
I am making a Marco Rodin / Randy Powell toroid. Because I was unable to understand how to do the faces properly with Blender I used both Blender and Wings 3D to get them right. Now I’m trying to map the texture on each face for the polarization, but this is where I’m having trouble. I can see everything fine in the display textured mode but in the render the toroid is blank. I’m sure this is because I missed a step or maybe I did something that I shouldn’t have.
Can someone please take a look at the blend file and help me understand what I’m doing wrong? ( My goal is to eventually export this as an X3D file, if that matters. )
first save your image (the one with a lot of number) with F3 to your desktop or wherever with a name
then go to properties panel then choose the circle/sphere that is material. (look at the picture, the one I selected)
then new
then go to the one next to material (circle/sphere) the one called texture
also new. then load the image you saved (hope you know how, if not then I hope someone else with better english can explain it to you)
Now even though I see the image on the toroid, it isn’t respecting the assignment given in the uv editor. So, it is clearly seen in the display textured mode - but the rendered toroid has the image just slapped on.
ASSIGN THE UV MAP TO YOUR MATERIAL’S TEXTURE: You need to set your texture’s Mapping Coordinates to “UV” and set the UV Layer to “UVTex” (or whatever name you give your UV map)
That will render the numbers in the right place, however it also renders a messy bunch of numbers all over the shape which you probably don’t want. So…
CLEAN UP YOUR UV MAP: In the UV editor, deselect all the UVs, then hover your mouse over the mess of UVs (not the nice diamonds you’ve placed over specific numbers) and press the L key. This selects all the UVs except for your diamonds. With those selected, press the ‘W’ key and choose “weld.” This puts all those vertices into a single dot. Press G and move those welded vertices off the main image. Then go into your texture’s “Image Mapping” settings and change the Extension from “Repeat” to “Clip.” This makes it so the welded vertices, now off the image, don’t return any texture information (so your diffuse material settings control the color for the non-diamond parts of the object).
With the help I’ve received here, I’m able to continue the arduous process of coloring/numbering each of the faces of the toroid.
benu,
I followed your explanation exactly while using the blend file you posted for help finding the location of the settings to change. The only thing I did differently is: while I needed the uv cleaned up as you said I still need to map all of the remaining faces with more diamonds, so I hovered over the mess and pressed “L” nice trick btw, and then pressed g to move it off of the image. So, not knowing if I would be able to easily access the the faces to make future diamonds after having welded them into a single dot, I felt that this was a safer choice.
Thank you everyone. I’m really loving blender the more I learn about it. I still like wings 3D better for geometry manipulation because it’s easier and faster for me, but this project has taught me how much more powerful blender is for geometry creation. For instance I simply added a torus mesh and was able to specify how many major and minor segments I needed. Because I did not know if it was possible to rotate the mesh to make a diamond pattern, I chose twice as many segment than I actually needed in the end. And then, I exported as an ‘obj’ file for import to wings 3D. In wings I began connecting vertices into diagonal segments while deleting vertices that were no longer necessary. Once complete, I exported back to ‘obj’ format for import back to blender and began this process for which I posted asking for help. Maybe I should ask this question on another forum, but does anyone know if it was possible for me to rotate the mesh with blender without needing to include wings3D into my workflow? (just curious)
