I needed practice with UV mapping and this is my first model that i succesfully unwrapped. i made a simple aquatic animal in about 15 minutes then took time unwrapping it. i think it came out pretty well. now the part i have almost no experience in: texturing. Here are my questions: (BTW i am using Gimp)
When texturing, should you try and make the edges seamless? The only easy way i can think of doing this is by making a solid color along the edge of a group of faces.
After i have exported my UV layout and opened it in Gimp, should i just paint right over it or somehow put it on a different layer, kind of like a guidline for me? (If anyone knows how to do this help would be much appreciated.)
Here are the images of the UV map and just a quick paint job so you can see it on the model.
When texturing, should you try and make the edges seamless? The only easy way i can think of doing this is by making a solid color along the edge of a group of faces.
Yes, putting a thin bit of base color at the seams is a commonly used trick to merge discontinuous textures. Obviously this won’t work for things like stripes that have to cross the seam.
After i have exported my UV layout and opened it in Gimp, should i just paint right over it or somehow put it on a different layer, kind of like a guidline for me?
Definitely learn to use layers in your painting program. It allows you to go back and make repairs/changes easily without having to unpaint what you did before. Is also absolutely required when you graduate to doing separate bump, specular, shadow maps etc.
You are off to a good start. Try Googling Leigh van der Byl, one of the premier texturing experts. She has written some very good tutorials on texturing.
You can load that exported UV Layout in the UV Editor and use the Texture Paint to paint on guidelines for the positions and colors (I’ve even painted notes) before you take it to Gimp. Just save it with a new name so you still have a blank one for the base layer.
I’m not sure what it would be called in the GIMP, but I am sure that there is something similar to what I do in Photoshop to get started. I take the original flat file and make the background layer (with the map) into a new layer, set it to “multiply” and make sure to keep it at the top of the stack at all times. The white areas of you map will let all the colors from below show through and the red lines will mix with what is underneath keeping visible lines. Let me see if I can figure it out in the GIMP…
When you open up the tga file you will need to right-click on the layer called “Background” and select “Add Alpha Channel”, then you can move it above new layers and set it to multiply. Put all your new layers under the layer with the map.
emfrobia was kind to share his .blend with me this is what I have done
that is a refrence tex I painted with blender and tried to export as a UV image the same size as I saved the UV layout. I had no luck I had to resize by eye in Gimp. how do you do this?
