Texture Problem

[Maldrick]

@RedKetchup

Google brings up tons!  Found a couple I like for this and lots for future use.

I used your footprint brush and the tips you gave here for when I did footprints last night...All went together nicely after a bit of tweaking.  Thank you again for the info.  Helped a lot.  Would have been lost without it, really.

@Discrepancy

Awesome, thanks for the examples.  I'm taking my time with this and will give this a try.  Was kind of dreading dealing with icons but I've wound up having a lot of fun with it.  Played around with it all night last night and there are a few more things I'm going to try today.  One thing I found, too, is Paint is really simple to use and you can get some really nice basic shapes quickly and easily that work nicely for icons...export as png then do the rest in Gimp.  I'm going to try your method out too, for sure.

Also going to adjust the color I used for the toolbar and do some more tweaking of textures because I noticed some things I'm not crazy about and if I don't get too far afield with that (I did last time) I should have it all done today, if not tomorrow.

Speaking of which, going full circle to the original topic and since we're talking about image manipulation, do you guys have any tips for keeping textures consistent across multiple buildings?  It's not really an issue with this one as these are kind of hodgepodgey anyway, I was just thinking ahead to the next one.

I'm thinking doing any scaling of the UV map elements using the numbers rather than the slider and being consistent with it.  I think there's a way to do that?  I've just used the slider so far.  And doing the same with the textures.  Is my theory, at least.  You guys get a very clean consistent look across buildings in your sets and I'd like to follow suit in the future.

[Maldrick]

Is anyone aware of a way to control the scale of unwrapped elements in the UV map in Blender?  Not rescaling but locking it to a set scale when it unwraps so as to keep everything in proportion?  Everything I try always fills the map with whatever faces are being unwrapped.

[Discrepancy]

Texturing I found always tedious and a little daunting, so I would delay it most often.
Now I texture as I go, and love it, I can spend more time altering textures and seeing immediate changes.
If I start with a wood frame, I add a wood texture to a blank texture canvas and load it into blender right at the start with my first wooden post, I then add more parts and textures simultaneously to the mesh as I make it.

In my tutorial I explained all about adding/marking seams on vertices, nowadays I don't do that often, only when texturing certain curves and shapes and rooflines.

Select individual faces that I want to be in a certain part of the UV map, when I press 'U' and it gives me various options. If you've added seams to vertices and select 'Unwrap' they will be unwrapped in to proportion to each other and will split along the seams.
This can be useful for a roof to get the edges to match with the upper side, selecting the vertices and marking a seam will cut the UV along those lines when unwrapped.
If you select other options to unwrap, like: Smart UV Project you can select to either retain the aspect of the UV or stretch to boundaries.
If you are trying to line up brick walls, It all comes down to lining it up against it's counterpart and just adjusting manually.

Trying out all the options in the unwrap menu helps for unwrapping certain things.
Project from View is one I use often.

I might do things the wrong way or long way more likely, I'm not sure. Blender is a big piece of software and I am by no means an expert... I know maybe 2-3% of it's capabilities.
So I'm not completely sure if you can do what you ask.

What I'm trying to say is I haven't found an easy way to do the textures, I've just started to enjoy it. The more you use the UV image editor in blender and get use to all the controls and shortcuts the easier and better it becomes.

Ctrl-Z is still my most used shortcut in blender....

[Maldrick]

Thanks, @Discrepancy.

Yeah, I'm finding lots of interesting things about how seams work. Not finding a way to keep pieces consistent in size when unwrapping.  Considering blender does everything short of splitting an atom, assuming you can find how it's done, there's got to be a way to do it.

After a couple days stuck at this point I'm going to change gears and see if I can learn how to texture while building instead of doing it externally.  Have one of several meshes done but not going any further till I know I can keep it consistent.  Necora mentioned having success with it in that same post he gets into AO mapping. We shall see.  Might just go play some 7 days and call it a day. Lol

[Discrepancy]

I think Necora actually started using multi-materials.
Which is a bit different again to what I'm doing.

You would have your Door texture, Roof texture, Wall texture, etc,
Select face and unwarp, and select 'Assign' in materials view.
View the model using Material in 3d view to view textures. You can scale UV's larger than texture to make them repeat.

[Maldrick]

Been reading about that.  Still not sure how it helps keep things consistent across multiple projects, though.  Texturing a mesh isn't my concern. Texturing several and keeping it consistent is and I'm not finding anything in blender that helps with that.  Being able to keep UV map elements locked to scale would go a long way towards helping with that but not finding way to do it.  I'm probably missing something.

[Discrepancy]

Yeah I'm not sure either, I would just import the other .fbx if it isn't already in the same blender file and and compare with them next to each other.

[Maldrick]

Interesting. And then just resize textures there to make them match?

How do people get things like roof textures to match across an entire set?

[kid1293]

Experience, trial and error, measures, counting bricks...
You name it.

[Maldrick]

@kid1293 Is there a remotely systematic way of doing it?

I've enjoyed getting into modding so far but if the whole thing is an exercise in resizing textures in gimp over and over ad nauseum because the UV mapping has no controllable scale don't know if I'll continue.

Like if you've got one building that's, say, 4m x 4m with 8 faces to unwrap and another that's 4x4 with 15 faces and you want to have the same matching textures on both, there's no way to keep the unwrapped elements in the proper scale?  Because even with the same sized faces they are going to wind up sized differently on the UV map because it always fills it and one has more faces than the other which throws the scaling off.  No matter the size of the face or multiple faces it always fills the UV map giving no discernible reference to scale it.  Meanwhile there's a perfectly good scaling system in the software.  It makes no sense.

With as robust as Blender is, I have a hard time believing this part of it is this random.

[kid1293]

If you unwrap one face at the time you get uneven scales.

If you unwrap a complete set of selected walls you get them in proper size between themselves.

I use Smart UV Project with an angle limit of 33 (almost all is proportional) and I uncheck
Stretch to UV bounds. Then I sit and rotate (a lot) and move. It works for me. It is tedious.
To get the same result in a second model I just have to unwrap and then compare one
known surface in each model to know the scale. Often I get some hint when I place a face on texture.
I can see if it there will be a match. (same height on both and one is 13 bricks high...)

You will soon develop a method that works for you. Blender is huge and as Discrepancy said -
you have to test different unwrapping methods to know them fully.

[Maldrick]

Alright, I can see that dialing it in a bit.  Yeah, I've been experimenting with just UV mapping for a couple of days.  Getting more control of it, for sure, but still not anything reliable as a way of moving forward.  Which is why it's getting frustrating.

You touched on something I'll definitely try next...Smart UV but only select faces at a time.  The other times I used it it was all or most.  I'll try that. Thank you.

It's making me crazy. For example, I've got a roof that was created by extruding a plane, then knifed out the nonvisible part of the underside.  So it's a rooftop, the vertical lip on the side, then a small overhang on the underside, on both sides.  The roof and underside unwrap in proportion. The lip always gets scaled to half along with it no matter what I try.  Then I try manually scaling it but I don't think I'm hitting that right.  It would be nice if there was just an option to maintain a static scale for unwrapping.  It seems to just randomly do whatever.  Driving me bananas.

Thanks again. I'll keep playing with it.  And I'm going to look more into the materials and texture system Necora mentioned. Not a lot of info around about that it seems.  Everything I'm finding in tutorials is just how to get textures on things but in no particularly ordered way.

[kid1293]

Small tip
I select the faces I want to unwrap and then press p (separate)
I get a mesh with only those faces I want to manipulate. After I have done all those 'parts'
I have separate I select all those meshes and control-j (join)

When separated it is much easier to select all, inverse selection and all that.

Small manageable parts!

[kid1293]

I have a mesh divided in windows/doors, walls, roof, chimney, wood, stone...

When I unwrap a frame like an edge around a window I get problem.
Blender wants to unwrap that part as a rectangle.
I select the vertical front sides only and select Mesh/Clean Up/Limited Dissolve and
get each as one plane. Then invert selection and Limited Dissolve again on the rest of the frame.
You have to think carefully if here are more sides adjoining (like in my build stages, a criss-cross of beams)!! Think and use Control-z
Select all frame and Edges/Mark Seam - then unwrap with Smart UV. You get nicely laid out faces in the UV,
all in one direction Easy to move to your wood texture.

[Maldrick]

Awesome, great tips, thank you.  I will play around with all of that.

Yeah, I keep separate saves before doing anything experimental and use control Z a lot of course.

Blender is very powerful, it's just a matter of finding combos of things that work.  Read someplace it's estimated it takes about two years to come close to really utilizing it well. I believe it.