Specific UV mapping for linked duplicates

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#1

Hello everyone,

First of all, I’m pretty new to Blender, and I’m still in my learning stage, so I’m sorry if my question sounds dumb to you.

I’m trying to create a keyboard 3D model, and when I started, I was wondering whether there was a way to easily update all same keys at once. Then, I found linked duplicates from the Blender documentation.

With this information, I made this:

keyboard-blender.jpg917×324 59.8 KB

Now, I would like to map all keys UVs to match the corresponding part of my texture. But UVs seem to be linked too with linked duplicates.

keyboard-blender-2.jpg1920×1050 314 KB

I know it’s possible to break this link, but I want to keep the same geometry for each kind of key. Do you know if there is a way to do what I want ?

#2

Could use a helper object and get object coordinates from that, which would be used to map all letters on one image to all of them.

Or, could change the linked duplicates to use duplifaces, UV map the dupli-object faces, and use those to offset the texture coordinates on the original. It uses instancing which puts an object on each face, and the coordinate is a point on the UV map.

Or, could set material link to object instead of data, which allows to use different material on each object, instead of binding it to the shared data. I wouldn’t do that though because it would mean material and image per key, which is time consuming.

#3

discoveryThanks a lot for your answer JA12.

As expected, I’m not really sure to understand all you said.

For the first solution, when you speak about a “helper object” to describe the UV of all my keys, do you mean I need to have an object with the same geometry of my keys but with a proper UV mapping? So it would mean I need a “helper object” per key? And is this really possible to link the UV of my linked duplicates to these helper objects?

For the second solution, I didn’t know the DupliFaces, so thank you for this discovery. But I’m not sure to understand how I can apply it to my problem. What kind of object will be replicated?

I understood the third solution, but as you said, it’s not convenient at all, not to mention that I will import it into Unity3D, so it would need to rebind all materials in the editor…

#4

discoveryThanks a lot for your answer JA12.

As expected, I’m not really sure to understand all you said.

For the first solution, when you speak about a “helper object” to describe the UV of all my keys, do you mean I need to have an object with the same geometry of my keys but with a proper UV mapping? So it would mean I need a “helper object” per key? And is this really possible to link the UV of my linked duplicates to these helper objects?

For the second solution, I didn’t know the DupliFaces, so thank you for this discovery. But I’m not sure to understand how I can apply it to my problem. What kind of object will be replicated?

I understood the third solution, but as you said, it’s not convenient at all, not to mention that I will import it into Unity3D, so it would need to rebind all materials in the editor…