Things I Don't Know About Texturing

Support Materials and Textures
1

Hey guys, I’ve been using blender for years, but the one thing I never really worked at was texturing, but can’t seem to figure it out how custom textures are made. At the moment I’m trying to texture an airplane I made with realistic textures from metal on airplanes. Problem is, I don’t know how that exactly works. I don’t know if people actually paint it or use pictures. If they use pictures, how do they make it into a UV map? I;m hoping i can get a realistic and organized texture on this… Thanks

2

The whole process of texturing aircraft is little complicated. Try studying basic UV mapping first. There are lots of tutorials out there, just search for Blender UV mapping tutorial.

3

I’ve already done a couple tutorials on basic UV mapping, but I’ve been trying to find out how to texture more complex things :frowning:

4

Really its more or less about the seams and placing them in a logical spot to make it easier on you and to reduce distortion when UV mapping. There are good ways to place seams and not so good. UVs are only one way to go about this without projecting images through the objects, but you can always isolate and assign materials to individual parts of the object as well.

You can paint textures from images onto your object, or you can use an image in a UV, or you can project images onto your object. So, as you can see there are many ways to go about the same thing, but some results are better than others.

I follow this for UVs, but there are other methodologies and opinions:

  1. Place seams in areas that are hard to see, or where a seam would occur naturally on the object
  2. Place as many as you need to simplify the surface and reduce distortion, or isolate specific areas if need be
  3. Use fairly high resolution images that will hold up when zoomed in close, but if seen from a distance this is not always needed. These can be photos, or hand made, or a combination of the two.
  4. Remember texture is not the same as material. Material is the base characteristics of the object, texture adds the “feel” so let the material settings do the subtle detail in properties while the texture adds the subtle detail of feel and can help define areas of influence of the material settings. Material would be like the base steel and its overall properties like spec, mirror, and the like, the texture drives the spec in certain areas, and can provide rust, bump so on and so forth.
  5. experiment and learn from any source from any package out there as it can be applied to Blender as well. A big mistake is the thought of viewing Blender only tuts for Blender, when many concepts from all over can be translated.

One non-Blender specific site is http://cg.tutsplus.com/
There are many more out there. And specific questions provide specific answers.

5

Yeah, I’ve understood warp and such and logically UV Mapping to reduce warp and such. The only real problem I had was with how to create the textures, because I’ve been pretty confused of what people usually do to texture their models. Thanks for the answer that helped.

6

There are some great videos on youtube and vimeo, here is one I watched today:

7

First acquire as much knowledge as you can about UV mapping.

Then acquire as much knowledge as you can about Render baking. I think that is the way to go.

8

Yeah, after practicing UV mapping and gimp painting I’ve been getting the hang of it.

9

I find that mapping an image adds lots of nice variety but then I will add a procedural texture as well to increase fine details in a bump map or hardness map.

Or you can add a larger procedural to give broad variation over a surface, that can hide a repeating image map.