i am used from 3ds Max to quickly texture a furniture using simple primitive projections (box, sphere, cylinder, etc…) so i just apply a material to my object, apply UVW map modifier, move and rescale a projection gizmo in viewport while seeing it affecting texture mapping and once i am happy with result, i just deselect modifier and i am done. With this workflow, i can quickly texture a piece of furniture within 20 seconds. Is there any way to texture an object quickly and and in WYSIWYG fashion like in 3ds Max?
Currently i cannot even get texture to display in viewport, i saw a few tutorials but they always textured an object in UV map editor. I do not want to need to open UV map editor and mess with every single face. It would be acceptable on a single cube, but not on a cube with bevel, let alone organic shaped chair. I just want to connect a bitmap into my material, right away see it in viewport and adjust a box texture projection rotation, position and scale… that is all…
Blender supports Reprojection painting. And painting with alternative programs over yuo model. But that I don’t think is what you are after.
There is global co-ordinates that automatically place textures loaded in straight onto the model, and can be baked to UV maps. Blender only has one option for realtime textures and that is the UV image editor.
I am not a texturer, and I don’t know much about many texturing features, but searching “Projection Painting” should get you half way to your answer fairly quickly.
Learning to use Generated and Global mapping is also a great plus to ease of use.
I have seen projection painting, but thats a lot different thing than what i need. I found an old video on youtube, which i did back in the days when i was using XSI. It clearly shows exactly what kind of process i need to do.
Generated and global mapping coud probably be what i am looking for, but the problem is it does not display in viewport, which makes it impossible to map the way i want. Only if i did test render everytime i move it little bit. And then 20 second process would happen to be a 2 hour process
Thanks, but i am affraid you do not understand me. There is a quite few ways to get this done in blender, but i need to get it done fast. Setting up cameras around my objects just to map texture using simple UV projection is just ridiculous! Usually at work, when i create a piece of furniture (let’s say a wardrobe) i got the texturing done in literally 20 seconds. Imagine i had 10 pieces of furniture in my scene, each made of 5 objects… 50 objects * 6 cameras to map everyone of them… that would be insane, let alone that i would spend eternity getting it done…
I miss the real-time simple-projection widget that Maya has as well, but in Blender, so far there ain’t no such animal afaik. Maybe something for an ambitious add-on developer to look into?
You can get this effect in the rendered scene by using Object coordinates and Cube projection for the texture mapping, with the Object being a cube that you move and rescale as desired. Unfortunately, the working view in the editor window does not show the effects of moving the cube. In 2.49 you can use the render preview (Shift-P), but that’s sluggish, and not available in 2.57.
Edit: Note that the extra cube is mostly just to make it ‘feel’ like the video referred to. Unless you need to rotate the texture you can get exactly the same results by using Generated coordinates with Cube projection and adjusting the scale and offset to taste. No, you still don’t get a real-time preview, and that really is a flaw in Blender.
I liked blender so far and enjoyed learning it, but it seems like this is where it ends. Impossibility to quickly map objects using basic UV projection makes this software useless to me This is probably the most basic texturing feature that should be implemented long before UV map editor…
Ok, i found a way… go to edit mode, select all, press U, and apply cube projection, and then fiddle it in UV editor… It is quite slow and the need itself of using UV map editor, having it open and having it take up my screen estate just drives me crazy and frustrated, but it is the best i could find so far. Is there any, just any quick way to map objects without UV Map editor?
With GSGL, Textured Solid mode does not work… and texturing in texture mode lit by scene light is quite a pain.
No matter if i choose cube, flat, sphere or cylinder, object in viewport is always mapped as flat
I have tried creating empty object, but it does not show in the list of meshes usable for projection. So i tried adding cube, picked it as a projection mesh, but moving it does not affect texture mapping… it does not move at all.
Hi,
yep, this annoys me too. Sometimes it’s really annoying to come into UV editor for primitive things. The solution is the control of texture using the object. (It has a similar effect as in the video you just posted.)
(Coordinates - Object (Empty) )
The only thing left to do is a real-time preview.
Since Blender 2.5 is capable to display the changes depending on e.g. modifiers in real-time, I hope that it shouldn’t be too hard to do it even for textures (Campbell or another coder) …
The “house” with the different textures is available as a sample-blend-file to play with.
But you will be lost until you understand the buttons of the uv-project-modifier
and how to limit the faces in its edit-mode (the little icons - activate edit-mode, change faces-list, disable edit-mode or you might always change the faces-list again every time you enter edit-mode of the textured-mesh-object)
A limitation I see in the UV projection modifier method is that it doesn’t seem to deal intrinsically with the UVW space of the texture being applied. The mapping manipulation widgets of the other apps do, making fast alignments of textures possible. It seems to me that some of the methods used for projection texturing, plus those used for the manipulations in texture Mapping, could be consolidated into a single widget-based tool. I get a feeling that all the parts are there, they just need to be assembled in a new way, but maybe I’m looking at it in too simplistic a manner.
this is a example with a cube
like shown in the screenshot.
In GLSL-display the texture can be positioned and rotated and scaled
with the projection-object (there are 5 empty set for the sides).
The blend-file (for Blender-2.57) is ready to scale, rotate, move the
texture (simple wood-gimp-png) and then press the Bake button
to bake the setting into one image, with the unwrapping of the cube.
