UV image + texture issues, I'm struggling.

Hello everyone,
I’m using V2.64 on a mac, os 10.8.2.
What I want to do: render an image of a virtual gallery wrapped canvas.
My workflow: generate “canvas” in a cad program and export to wrl file, import to Blender, map image. At this point I’m stumped.
I want to make my image look like canvas wrapped around my “frame”. I have created a simple box(20x14x1.5 units) in cad. I have no problem exporting it and importing it into Blender. I have managed to UV map my image to it, albeit with some stumbling around. I can get it lit pretty well and get it to render.

What I can’t seem to accomplish is getting the surface of my “canvas” to look like canvas. It is just smooth.
I have watched a number of tutorials on texturing but I haven’t had the “ah ha” moment yet.
I have tried bringing in a bump map of a texture and have had no luck getting my image over it.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?
Thanks in advance
Beagle

Well you probably should watch this tutorial on texturing from blender guru.
http://www.blenderguru.com/videos/the-secrets-of-realistic-texturing/
He textures a cobblestone road but the techniques would work for a canvas as well.

I took a photo of an oil painting I made on wood (so there was no native texture to it) and used only a displacement modifier on it to a texture I got from cgtextures and texture maps created (from it) with crazy bump. (Notice the face hiding in the reflection in the lower right hand corner.) You could get better results using all of the maps (normal, occlusion,specularity…) created by crazy bump – this is covered in the tutorial), but this isn’t a bad starting point. If you are going to use displacement you’ll need to subdivide the surface several times as you’ll need plenty of vertices for the displacement to work on (canvas being a small detailed texture)

You may need to click on the image a couple times, as it will probably be scaled down:


I will definitely watch that tutorial, but you may have already hit on my first problem. I did not subdivide my surfaces. They are still just 2 tri’s for each side. I never occurred to me to do that, so I may have had my mat’l. and texture slots correct but never saw it for the lack of subdivision. thanks again for the reply. Beagle

blenderallday, Thanks, the ah ha moment…subdividing. I got it working, more or less. I just need to fine the correct bump map now, one that more closely looks like canvas. I will still pay close attention to that tutorial vid. Thanks again Beagle

Nice. Yeah the tutorial is pretty good, although he messes up pretty bad and had to post a message overlay, think it had to do with the normal map and displacement, so even andrew price makes mistakes. Glad it helped, post your work in WIP if you feel so inclined.