Texturing a curved tube (noob alert :))

Support Materials and Textures
1

Hello fellows!

I’m only started to learn texturing and I want to make something like a first attached image.

I have made a texture image which I want to tile along the curved hose I modeled, but I fail to make something nice looking :slight_smile: I made the texture image repeat by increasing it’s sizeX,Y,Z, but it still bends and twists at some points and I can’t understand why? I made it to map as a Tube.

I’ve modeled a hose like this: I created a cylinder, removed top+bottom, applied an array modifier along Z several times. Then I created a simple curve and applied a Curve modifier to that “arrayed” cylinder.

See the second attached image for render result.

Is it because the way I made a hose? Or because of the way I apply the texture?
Do I have to do UV-unwrap? Even for such a simple case? :slight_smile:

Here’s a blend file (2,5 mb): http://www.dpimka.org/files/curve.blend
I hope my image will pack well :slight_smile:

Thanks in advance for your answers.

Attachments


render_res.jpg800×600 18 KB

2

To start, you don’t need that many vertices for a simple tube (hey, that’s 2.5mb for a single object). Cut down the number of vertices to a fraction by using (1) a subsurf modifier and set smooth, (2) make the original segment a lot shorter/simpler.

I’ve attached a blend file to this post using your material/texture. Have a look at the geometry – the tube is a lot longer than yours and the file size is about 10%. The images maps well onto the tube too.

Attachments

curve-001.blend (282 KB)

3

Ooh, thanks much!
Yeah, I knew I made it too complex.

But i’m still interested what was causing those texture stretches in my original file?
So I won’t repeat this same mistake again.

I understand that my tube was way too complex, but shouldn’t texturing work ok even with large number of vertices? I guess it should. And I beleive it works in blender if done right, so that means I’ve done something wrong :slight_smile: What?

4

so to make this tube you use the array and follow a curve

the map is done on the first segment then it is repeated along the curve

whic wont distort like if this was a sinmple mapping or using the Color ramp for instance
like in corners!

but is there a way from F6 to save the image use as a texture and re use it somehwere else?

Thanks

5

Hello Dimka and all others who have replied to this thread,

my approach to map the hoses is the “UV Orco” Mapping feature
in Blender for 3d Curves, so i tried this out and it turned out
quite nice ;).

First I have created the hoses, so i added in a Bezier Curve, and
turned on “3D” in the Edit Buttons, turned off " “Back” and “Front”.

With the “BevelDepth” you can increase the “thickness” of the Curves.
You have to crank up the “BevelResol” and the “DefRelolU” a bit to get
some smooth Results. Also press the “Set Smooth” Button.

“UV Orco” is turned on by default in the Edit Buttons…

Now to the Materials:Colormap-> “Map Input” Panel:
[INDENT][INDENT]Use origianl Coordinates “Orco”
Map it “Flat”
Map it to the “Y” and “X” Axis, turn off “Z”
Adjust the “SizeX” and “SizeY” to your needs.

“Map to” Panel:

I´ve used your Imagetexture, desaturated it and mapped it to “Col” as a color map. I also used the same texture as a reflection map and mapped it to “Csp”, “Ref” and “Spec”.
[/INDENT][/INDENT]The overall shader Settings for the hose material, Hardness “20” and “Ref” to 0.2

I also could not resist and and modeled some shiny metal parts on top of the hoses, and give them some shiny reflective Materials. The reflections on the Metal parts are faked with a HDR Image “Ref” mapped onto them.

I´ll pack the textures to the blend.file and upload it to my web space, so you can have a look at it… :slight_smile:

http://www.blenderuniverse.de/download/Hoses.jpg

Here the Link to the Blend File: http://www.blenderuniverse.de/download/curve.blend

Bye, and I hope this is somewhat useful to you, Olaf.

6

Thanks for the blend file Olaf.

Yes, that’s a better use of curve. It’s just that your file is 4,2mb, mine was 280kb. I don’t understand what makes your file so much larger. As far as I can tell there is only a single image in both files.

7

The biggest part of the blend.file is the HDR-Image (3,86 MB) packed in, that I´ve used for the reflections on the top metal parts.

Bye, Olaf.

8

Thanks, olaf!

Really interesting for me as I learn texturing :slight_smile:

I tried to model hoses with 3d curves too - this was actually my first attempt. But I ran into some issues with mapping texture to them, thanks for showing the right way.
I really feel that I need to read more on how the texture actually maps to a surface - i.e. how axises get laid out as currently I don’t have a clean picture of that in my head and click on those X,Y,Z buttons mostly w/o thinking, but trying to find out what happens if i click this or that :slight_smile:

After Mats’ post i’ve remodeled my hoses and then did almost the same as olaf did - desaturated, applied to Ref and Spec.
Btw, I also created a nice bump map by deepening a shadows where patches on texture go beyond each other.

Can’t show you the screenshot, my files are on the other machine.

Btw, this hoses are an example from a very cool book “Digital Texturing and Painting” which I read at the moment and try to follow some examples in it.