[PS-Youtube id=”MQuvIMEfLPU” w=”320″ h=”206″] Hello and welcome again. Today i will show you how to add cloth layers to Avastar.
We are going to add materials and create multiple texture layers.

But first i will show you how to apply already existing textures
for testing on the Avastar mesh, right in blender,
and right before you import to OpenSim or any compatible online world.

 

Transcription

Hello and welcome again. Today i will show you how to add cloth layers to Avastar.
We are going to add materials and create multiple texture layers.

But first i will show you how to apply already existing textures
for testing on the Avastar mesh, right in blender,
and right before you import to your online world.

I do some reorganisation of the Blender windows,
and i open the UV image editor. Here we can import
our existing textures.

I will also hide the armature, as we do not need it for now.

I first select the head part, enter edit mode, and ensure
that i have selected all vertices.

From the UV image editor,
i open my head texture, and then i switch to view type: texture.

Now we already see that the texture gets displayed on our character.
But it looks very dark, because we have not yet setup our light system.

So, lets get back to the view type: solid.
And from the properties sidebar, and in the display tab,
we enable the texture display for this view type.

The face is done by now.
We proceed with the eyes in exactly the same way as before.

When we do the secnd eye, then we can reuse the just imported texture.

The face is finished by now.
Lets now proceed with the upper body and finaly make the lower body,
again in exactly the same way as before.

By now i have shown you how you will add ready-made textures to your character for inspection.
But how do we prepare our mesh
for making our own textures?
And finally how can we add more clothing layers ?

Up till now we only have maped the final
image textures to the character. But now,
we switch to GLSL mode,
where Blender directly uses the output of
its material subsystem for display in the 3D viewport.

Thus we can use many of the material features instantly,
without creating final textures first.
Note that the GLSL mode uses much more CPU resources.
We also have to switch the display type to: textured.

As soon as we enter this view type, we again see that the lights get dimmed.
Lets take care of this first,
and change the only lightsource of the scene, to a Hemi-light.
And Now we have enough light for our purpose.

Then we add a bunch of image-based  materials. And here you see how it works.

I start again by selecting the head.
But instead of directly applying the image to the mesh, as i did before,
i now create a new image based material.
I will name this material: Head.

And since the material will contain an image-texture,
i now create a new texture, set its name also to: head,
and finally set the texture-type to: image and video.

Now i only need to assign the head image and then i am done.

The head image has already been imported previously, when we used the UV image editor.
So we can now pick it up from the image list, and we are done.

Well almost. A first inspection shows
that the texture is not mapped correctly to the character. What happens here ?
It turns out that only the mapping type needs to be changed to UV.

And now the face looks right.

We have to apply the exact same procedure to the eyes,
the upper body, and to the lower body.
So let us go ahead and do that now.

first create the eye-material,
secnd create the eye-texture,
do not forget to set the texture type to: image and video,
then assign the eye-image,
and finaly fix the mapping type to UV.

For the secnd eye, we can reuse the just created material.
Simply pick it up from the Material list as shown here.

We proceed with the upper body.
Create the material,
Create the texture,
Assign the image,
Fix the mapping.
You see, the procedure is always the same.

And of course we do it again for the lower body, as we just have done for all the other parts of the character.

Up to here we have not gained much, compared to
our first try, where we only applied the final
textures to the mesh.

But now we can go one step further,
and create our layered cloth textures.
I will first add a leotard texture to the character.
I have already prepared the necessary images
and will apply them now.

I select the upper body,
scroll upwards to the texture stack,
and finally i add a new image texture.
This texture will contain the top of the body suit.

Just like i proceeded with the skin texture before, i again have to assign an image
and take care of the mapping.

I select the lower body, and add yet another texture layer
to it for the bottom of the body suit.

And now my character can go out and perform in public.

But we do not need to stop here.
We can add as many textzre layers as we want.
I will demonstrate this by adding a jeans on top
of the already existing layers.

But we do not need to stop here.
We can add as many texture layers as we want.
I will demonstrate this by adding a jeans texture on top
of the already existing layers.

And as the very last task of today,
let us do some fine adjustments.
Lets first reduce the body specularity a bit.
We have to do this for all body parts separately.

You find the specularity slider in the material properties section.

Now we also can add very simple materials.
Here i just enable the characters hair, add a new material to it,
and set its base color to almost black.

And to give it a tiny bit of spice, i change the specularity color to red.

So, as final task lets lighten up the scene a bit.
You have learned by now how you can quickly check your textures before uploading them
to your online world.
And you know how you can stack multiple textures on top of
each other as layered clothes.

From here you can proceed by learning more about blender’s material system
and the texture stack. Or you can create your cloth textures in a separate program,
and come back here only for testing.

I will not cover texturing in more detail, but proceed with creating a simple animation.
Please proceed to the next chapter to see how that is done.