Now that Little Oto's body is ready we must "dress it"?! UV TEXTURE MAPPING is the common name gived to this task. I'ts here that you will must proove that you deserve to be a "one-man-game-maker", because most of the times it's a long, precise and quite painful job.
Let's start with a cool exercise.
In Front view, Add a
Cube, and extrude
the top
four vertices to obtain more or less a cross shape like the one in the image above.
When
extruding
press Ctrl key to snap
the vertices to the
grid.
Here's the method: the
lighter gray square
is the
"visible area of object". Every texture pixel that appears
here inside a face selection lines, will appear in the object too! So
we must organize the object faces selections in order to use the most
available space possible.
Split your
3D window, if already done
set one of the windows an
UV/Image Editor; click in the Current Window Type button and choose the one with
a face ( red square). A grey dark window with a lighter grey square area will appear.
In the
3D window
select the cross object and press
F to enter
Face Select
mode. With the
right mouse button
click over the
seven front faces of the object (press Ctrl key to add faces to
the selection)! Now in
front view, with the cursor in the
3D window
press
U key
and choose
the From window item
in the pop-up menu, the selected faces will appear in the UV/Image Editor window (image above right).
Once again, the techniques I'll explain here are more or less
"universal"
ones. The
UV Texture Editor
of BLENDER
is very nice, but lacks at least one important feature:
Groups! We can't save groups of selected faces. To other game engines
(like 3DGameStudio, Half-Life or Quake3) you can use the great Lyth Unwrapp,
but it's a bit complicated for
BLENDER
users (file format exchanges). Anyway we'll try to achieve
the same result with
BLENDER.
In the
Image window
place the faces allready selected in a corner. Do face selections
for the
side
and
top view too. The problem with different group selections is that
they'll overlap and became useless. So, each time you do a selection group
move it to a corner or far away in the darker area. Once you have selected
all the faces, you must rearrange them in the light gray area. It's very
important that all the faces keep their relative size!!
Now open the
GIMP
(you don't have it? Is it possible? A FREE
Photoshop-like software available even for Windows? Check
the Tools section, please), and make a
screenshot
of the
Image window. With the
GIMP
(or other), cut the light gray square (must be a real square area)
and save it at a
512x512
size.
Now, in a different layer, using the screenshot image as a guide, start
to
"paint"
your texture!
You don't really need to paint or drawing. If you allready have an image
(ex:photo) just adapt it(cut rotate, scale, etc.) to fit the faces disposition.
Or use another method: load your "ready" image and select and
adapt the faces to the desired areas in the image.
When your texture work is finnished, save the image in
TGA
or
JPG
format and
256x256
pixels size, and
load
it in the Image window. In the
3D window, do
Alt-Z and the texture will appear. Normally, the texture in one
of the sides of the object it's inverted, because we've textured both
sides at the same time. To solve the problem, select the wrong faces in
the
3D window, and in the Image window
(normally the same selection appears too) select the faces
and mirror them with
S
and X keys.
Here's the finnished object. Notice how the
green
and
red lines appears seamless across different faces.
Now, that you've finnished the little exercise above, you're euh...prepared
to the next task: texturise Little OTO. Well, let's start.
Add
a shinny
material
to the Little OTO mesh, with the basic colour of the future texture.
Add three
or
four lamps (at least one spot with shadows) and place them like
in the image at above. Do a
render with at least a
1024 size, and save the image in
TGA
format.
Rotate
the
mesh 90º
in the Z axis (to keep the same lighting) and do a
render again and save. Repeat the procedure for the others views
of the mesh.
Now we must choose how and whos faces will "cover" the texture
image.
With the two windows interface setup (red arrows), in the 3D window, select
the Little OTO mesh and press F key (to have more details on how to work
with the Face Select mode, please, read the Pinball Tutorial).
In front view select carefully the torso front faces that are almost planar.
With the faces still selected, press U key in the 3D window, and choose
From Window in the UV Calculation menu. The faces selection will appear
in the Image window. In this window select all the faces, scale down,
and place them in the darker area near the corner.
To save your selection work, press Tab key to enter Edit mode, in the
Edit window create a new Group and assign the selection to it ( give it
a meaningfull name).
To help your selecting work, you can hide the allready selected faces.
Press H key ( with faces selected) and the selection will be hided, Image
window included. That's why is important that you place each new selection
in a "safety" area. If different sellections overlap they became
uselles and you must restart your work.
I must warn you: BE VERY CAREFUL AND PRECISE when selecting and hiding
faces.
It's a painful task, it will be very difficult to rearrange the selections,
and can easily became discouraging.
You can use the trackball view to select faces, but to use the
UV Calculation
menu you must be in an orthogonal view to do a precise work.
When you encounter a more or less cylindrical shape you can try the "Cylinder"
item from the UV Calculation menu. Select the faces of an arm and apply
"Cylinder" calculation. The image at right shows you, where
the "cut" zone appears. Keep this in mind when "painting"
the texture.
Try the same method for the legs, or select and mirror in
front,
side
and
back
views,
1,
3
and
Ctrl-1
keys and use the
UV Calculation menu.
When
ALL
the faces are hidden (selected), the organising work starts.
Select and dispose groups that share edges in the same area (ex: front
torse and top arm, side top arm, back torse, shoulders). It's very IMPORTANT
that, faces who share edges and vertices are alligned and have the same
size ( never scale in only one axis.
Here's the final disposition (to me) of the different group faces.
Your's can be completely different, there's no problem on it. Now use
the same methode we've employed in the exercise. Do a screenshot, open
it in an image manipulation program, and save it in TGA or JPG or PNG
format in 256x256 or 512x512 or even 1024x1024 size ( it's your decision).
Notice ( in the image above) the many little faces outside the groups!
They're forgoten ones, that we must align by hand later.
Now's the big moment! Load your "fresh" texture in the Image
window, do Alt-Z keys in the 3D window, and...WOW, Little OTO is just...beautiful?
I hope, for your mental health.