This post is also available in: German
| abstract: Welcome to our secnd blender tutorial. We will now create a surface texture for a sculpted prim helmet. If you want to get more basic informations about how we created this helmet, please go and fetch the video about “creating sculpted prims with blender” . Then come back here. And don’t miss the new companion video “Texturizing sculpties with multiple images” which shows a blender only solution ( our preferred method)
Important Note: Please take a minute to read the Tutorial license terms. |
High quality download: texturingSculpties.wmv
Or read the text:
Although you can create your textures entirely in blender, we have choosen to use an external paint program. In this tutorial we will use paintshop. Of course you also can use photoshop, or any other image editor, the process does not depend on this.
A little explanation of UV-textures
So lets go back to blender now. It is important to know, that the whole process is controlled by a UV-texture, which operates mostly in the background. The UV-texture is explicitly used for 2 separate tasks.
- first, it is used to create the sculptie-map itself. This task is very well supported by the scripts of Domino Marama We have explained the process in our first tutorial.
- second, the UV-texture defines the mapping between plain texture files, and the object surface. We will take care of this mapping now.
You find the UV-texture in the mesh tab. Its name is “UV-tex”
The UV-map is always a perfect square, containing 1024 smaller squares. Each of these squares is mapped to a different part of the surface texture. For second-life this mapping can not be changed. So, when you understand the mapping, you can create your surface texture by hand. But this is not a good idea, because the transformation looks a bit strange.
Take a look at the final result of this tutorial. Imagine you would have to create this texture manually ? oh! That would not be easy, don’t you think?
A practical approach
So the question is, how can we map a plain 2D image of the helmet, into a usefull sculptie texture! The solution is: We will create a second, very different
UV map. This map directly projects the 2D image on the object. Then we transform that projection map into the final second life compatible map. The good news is: blender can do this transformation for you.
- Ok! First step: Create a second UV-texture. Just click on UV-texture, new. A new UV-texture is now available. rename it to: “surface-texture”. And then click on the button, which is located directly left to the input field: “rendering, UV texture”… hey! This was easy!
- Now create a new image, and set width and height to 1024 each. Use the middle mouse button to scale the image down.
- Now we need to ensure, that multi-res is disabled. Otherwise the following steps will not work as shown here. Search for the multires tab and click on: “apply multires”.
- Please also select, “occlude background geometry”, so that you only select visible parts of the object.
- Then switch to face select mode. Believe me, in the next few steps, selecting faces works better , compared to selecting vertices.
Creating the initial texture
Now, back in the 3D window, click “mesh -> UV unwrap -> project from view”. This is the step, where you define the projection of your 2D image to the object surface. Hence, now you see a projection of the helmet on the right window. but when you look closer, you see that the vertices are now displayed on top of each other. We have to separate the left and the right side and the inner part of the helmet. We do this by selecting only subsets of the vertices time by time. Then we will rearrange the map by hand. Don’t worry, it is easy.
Separate the sides
- So, let us deselect all vertices first. hint: press, “a”, again. Go to the front view and select the now visible side of the helmet. go also to the top view. You probably have not selected all vertices of this side. Do this now.
- We have now selected one side of the helmet. Go to the UV-editor, select all vertices here, and move them down. Be sure, that you have disabled multi-res as explained before. ok! It is time to also select the other side of the helmet. You can do this from the top view.
- Now, take care! in the UV editor click on UV, then check, that “proportional editing” is disabled. If this is not the case, your mesh will suffer from heavy distortions.
- Still in the UV editor, de-select all vertices, then select the new side, and move it upwards.
- Now back to the 3D window. Here select the first inner side of the helmet.
- Go back to the UV editor and move the new mesh points out of the way.
- Finally select all mesh points in the 3D window. Do this by pressing, “a”, twice.
Now arrange the UV texture as you like. Take care that you fill as much space as possible. That will increase the quality of your final texture.
This UV-texture looks quite simple. It can be filled with content without adding too much of extra work. We will save this image now as a template. In the UV-editor, click on UV, then scripts, save UV face layout.
Now it is time to go to your image editor and create the initial texture. The following clip has been created with paint-shop. Of course you also can use any other editor of your own choice.
After creating the initial texture
Creating the texture, was easy. We did not make any further pixel adjustments. We only applied the correct scaling and moved the image to the correct position.
We have no photo material of the inner part of the helmet. For this demonstration we only colorized it reasonably, without taking care of the details.
But the texture we just created is not yet our final result. We need to get back to blender. Let’s load the just created texture now.
Preparing the transformation
- Check that we are in textured mode, Then we can see how the helmet will look alike at the end of the process.
- And now lets take the final step. We will create a material.
- Go to the material pannel. (Shading F5)
- In the tab, “links and pipeline”, add a new material.
- Now go to the texture-pannel (Texture buttons F6) . and then add a new texture. After you have added the new texture a few mor input fields and buttons open up. Locate the texture type field and change it from “none” to “image” Now even more tabs and control buttons open up
- Go To the “image” tab (at the right) and load the texture from file. Here we load the texture from the file system. Note, that we also can select it from the combo box, left to the load button.
- Now go back to the material buttons pannel . There locate the rightmost tab set, switch to “Map Input”. This is the moment where we connect the 2 UV textures. Now click on the UV button. This tells blender to use the UV coordinates as texture coordinates. And finally type in the name of the texture you want to use as input. Remember, this is the name of our surface texture.
go to the edit-pannel and switch the original UV tex back to active and rendering UV texture.
Now create a new image, use 1024 pixels for width and height.
And then bake the texture: Go to Render -> bake render meshes -> texture only.
artefacts from precision problems ?
Sometimes the transformation creates a set of black triangles at the top or at the bottom of the image. If this happens with your texture, then go to edit mode, click on smooth (once). Then, bake the texture again. Now the black triangles should be gone. We believe that this is a problem with mathematical precision at the poles of the object.
NOTE: This problem only happens, when the pole vertices have been collapsed all together. In that case the border faces are triangles, instead of rectangle. But the texturizing algorythm seems to expect rectanlges. When smoothing, the vertex collapse is partially reverted, so that now all vertices are laying on a small ring around the pole. And now, all tirangles have been replaced by rectangles at the border. Now the face calculation can be performed as expected and the black triangles are gone away.
Ok! We are finished now. Save the surface texture to your hard drive. And it is time to go to secnd-life and see your textured sculpty in action…!
In our next tutorial, we will show you, how to work with multiple textures. And finally we will explain how to use the embedded tools for texture creation.
Stay tuned until the next time!
Hi, have worked out how to do this on Blender 2.61 with one problem: The sculpted object in sl looks fine when in it’s default texture but when I add the texture from blender as I move around it some of the sides disappear and I can see inside also it overides texures on objects in front of it.
Hi, I am using blender 2.6 and there are changes made since this tutorial, have got to to (I hope)
‘go to the edit-pannel and switch the original UV tex back to active and rendering UV texture.
Now create a new image, use 1024 pixels for width and height.
And then bake the texture: Go to Render -> bake render meshes -> texture only.’
I can’t find the equivalent for the 1st and last actions here and in the video you say a new image of 512×512 but you write 1024×1024.
Can you guide me through the last part of this, I am just downloading 2.61 in case that makes a difference. Thanks anyway for your hard work.:)
I give up. I have spent the whole day trying to map the texture onto my sculpty. All I get is a projection of the flat UV Map.
Everything seems fine until I hit the render texture. Either I get a texture can not be found or the flat texture map.
Guess it’s back to z brush
hi
was in a class in sl for ambient occulision, using blender/jass, was instructed to click on draw type – textured, then under game choose blender glsl materials, everytime i do this Blender crashes, is this a known bug,?
Hi, can you please tell me how to use sculpties purchased on xstreetsl? I purchased some sculpted collars, sleeves, etc. How do I design them? Can i create a tga file and put it on the sculpt as a texture in world?
The package came with sculpt map 64×64 and color map 1024×1024. I am unsure what to do with this. I am only familiar with gimp, not sure if i need to download blender to paint on top of the sculpty. Thank you so much in advance for your help!
If you have purchased the sculpt-maps as full perm so that you can download them as image files to your computer, then you can use blender or PS or whatever you like to create textures.
- The small image in your purchase is most probably the sculptmap itself. that will be needed for blender to recreate the 3D model.
- The larger image is probably the texture map which you will need to “paint” on the sculptie when you work with a 2D editor like PS…
You also can upload the larger image to blender and let blender put it on top of the 3D model and yes, you even could hand paint in blender. But the paint tools from blender are very poor (to my knowledge) so if you want to paint by hand, better use PS.
And finally of course blender would allow you to do all sorts of image projection to your sculptmap. So although it all is very complicated to do, once you understand how to do it you have a huge number of options how to create your final texture.
So for blender you can do it as follows:
The easy way (but unfortunately somewhat broken):
“File -> Import -> Second Life sculptmap”
There is a problem with the “seams recognition” and you often get somewhat borked objects in blender. We have not yet taken care about this issue. However you can expect to see a fixed version in the next update of Jass. We will add this to the free Jass-version as soon as we found the cause of the problem.
The workaround (this approach never failed):
- Open the UV-image editor.
- With “Image -> open …” you can import the sculptmap into the image editor.
- With “Image -> Import as sculptie” you create the sculptie as 3D model in blender
My god!I could watch the other videos,but the videos i want to watch can not be loaded.it’s somthing wrong with my network?These video are vrey important to me.
Maybe you have more luck with directly going to http://machinimatrix.blip.tv There you find the videos in question directly served by blip.tv. Look into the episode archive on page 2 and 3. Please can you tell us, if that helps ? If yes, then we eventually may be able to find what causes your problem on our blog.
If it doesn’t help either, have you tried to download the high resolution versions of the videos from our blog pages ? And can you watch them ? Or do you get problems with these too ?
Good morning，Gaia.(It’s morning here，ha)I can’t open the URL you told me.and I can’t dowmload the high resolution versions of the videos from your blog pages…I think it can not connect these URL.
This is very weird. So you say, http://blip.tv is not available for you ? And http://machinimatrix.blip.tv also does not work ? Then there must be a restiction setup by your provider. Maybe they have banned blip.tv ? So you will have to wait for a while until we completely have migrated all videos to our own video host at streaming.the-machinimatrix.com. But the complete migration still may take a while and i am not sure if the videos you mention will ever be migrated at all as they get somewhat outdated by now ;-( Sorry for that.
I see！Thanks a lot！Here is China…I’ll wait for these video being migrated,and at the same time I’ll search these on web.I only want to know,if a model(called sculptie in SL) have one texture,for example：a earth,how to make its texture display properly?You don’t sleep？:-)
It might be possible that you can download the videos now. Maybe just try again.
Hi，Gaia，I am very interested in your tutorial.But I can not watch the video and image about the tutorials bellow：
Sculpted Prims with Blender ；Surface Textures for Sculpties with Blender ；Texturizing sculpties with multiple images .
Could you help me??Thank you very very much!!!(My English is not very good,forgive me.)my email:jiangbomei3@163.com
No, i can not help you at all with this. Our videos are made for a flash viewer. They are either in flash-format, or in quicktime format (.mov or .mp4) You will need to enable javascript on your computer and it may be a good idea to have the Quicktime viewer installed (or winamp) Regarding images: On this page there is only one image which in fact is embedded into the video viewer, so if yu dont see that, your main problem may indeed be that you don’t have enabled javascript. But that is just a guess.
Ok, so I follow everything just fine- until the part where I type in the UV Map Input. I type in the filename of the surface texture and the box turns red and I can’t go any further. Any idea?
You should not enter the name of the file, but the name of the image. They are not necessarily the same. Tip: enter the first few characters of the image name, then press TAB. if you are lucky, blender will autocomplete the name for you
Will you please leave instructions on how to pass an XML feed? I see by other reponses I’m not the only one who can not view these wonderful tutorials.
What exactly do you want to achieve ? Which funtionality does not work for you ? I just have tested the feeds with firefox and everything works as i expect it to work. So it may be that i am unaware of something that you expect us to provide ? Please clarify! We are eager to meet all your expectations… as long as we know about them at least.
I can not see this video – I get “error no feed” you need to pass it an xml feed…. ?
Great article, I am regular visitor of your site, keep up the good work, and I will be a regular visitor for a long time.
How do i make a video of it? Then I can just send it in and show that I’m doing the exact same steps and setup and everything shown in the video and i’m getting some funky results…
http://camstudio.org/ seems to offer a great free and open source tool for just that purpose. i haven’t used it however… But if you make a movie about what happens on your computer, that would certainly allow us to understand better what goes on.
[...] these very long and drawn out tutorials do rather than just ‘projecting from view’ like this tutorial gets you started doing. That last one is good at showing you how to get your 2d-friendly UV map back into a symmetrical [...]
[...] can be setup in an easy and reproducible way. We highly recommend to view the tutorial about surface textures for sculpties with blender, before you continue [...]
[...] Blender! Here’s a tutorial on how to do exactly that, complete with a video narrated by synthesized voices! Creating Surface textures for sculpties with blender « machinimatrix [...]