aeilkema opened this issue on Feb 17, 2013 · 35 posts
aeilkema posted Wed, 20 February 2013 at 4:35 AM
The next step will be getting the castle uvmapped. That is basically telling each texture where and how it needs to go on a model. You can do this in Hexagon, but I really don't like doing it there, I prefer a uv mapping application for that for various reasons, for one it allows you to keep colors, instead of using textures. But for this tutorial, we'll do it in Hexagon.
But before we're going to uvmap, we need to do one more thing. If you will export this model as a wavefron obj for use in poser, Hexagon will most likely crash. We need prepare the model for export, by triangulating it. What that does in short is it divides the whole model in triangle shaped pieces, remove all hexagon special feature that other applications cannot use and converting them into triangles that all other applications can use. The model will still be what you've modeled, but you will see all kinds of lines on your mesh. Don't worry, when you render your model none of these traingles and lines show up. Not all items need to be triangulated. Hexagon will tell you if the object needs to be triangulated or not if you try to triangulate it, if it doesn't have need to, you will get a message. In this scene, the roofs and windows don't need to be triangulated. The buildings and the window frames need to be triangulated. Select all of those items and with all of them selected go to the Utilities Tab. Right under the word utilities is the icon we need, the one with the shape with 5 sides, dotted lines and blue points, the triangulate non planar facets option. Select it and a menu will appear and from the menu select the section icon, triangulate n-gons. If you need the first one or the second one depends on the modeling technique you used, but I will not go into details, for now it's enough to know that you need n-gons for this model. If all goes well, you will see all kinds of lines on your shapes. Now is a good time to use save as...... You may be one of the unlucky ones and have Hexagon crash when you try to triangulate n-gons, don't worry, just try again, not selecting all the window frames and buildings, but buildings only, triangulate and then try the window frames. At times when modeling you even need to do each part individually. At any rate, your model is ready for export, but still needs to be mapped.
Mapping is basically folding the model so it can be textured. We have a few options here. We can do the whole castle as one, or every object on it's own or use groups of objects. What ever you choose, the process will be the same, you just need to repeat the steps more times. for this tutorial we're going to do the whole model at once. Make sure you remove every object that's not supposed to be there, like I have the figures for measuring. Then press ctrl & a. Everything will be selected now. Go to the UV & Paint tab (see image). You will see a lot of options there. If you want to know what they all do you need to enroll the advanced class :biggrin: Just kidding, youtube may have some tutorials on that. For now we keep it simple. Since our whole model is made of cubes, it's logic we map our model as you would do with a cube. We're going to make 6 views of our model: top, bottom, front, back, left and right. Hexagon will do this for us..... now press the cube.... (see image) something odd will happen, suddenly there are tiles on out model, don't worry about that, it's supposed to be so. We now have a number of options in the property panel (see image) and this depends on how you're going to texture you model. If you press what I've called 1, then you will get what image 1 shows, all of the views will be on top of each other. Press 2 and the top/bottom, the left/right and front/back will be on top of each other, but each getting their own space. Choose 3 and you will get a orderly layout of the model, clearly showing where to top, bottom, left and so on are. For now just choose 1 and press validate. Your model is now officially uvmapped.
When you're intending to do serious texturing work, you will use various options and most likely create groups of object which are uwmapped together. As stated before I don't use Hexagon's uvmapping options, I just save my model as is, without uvmap and do all of the mapping in an external application, called Ulitimate Unwrap 3D. It gives me much more control over my mapping. There are other applications you can uvmap in, it's up to you, some people do it all in Hexagon. Ultimate Unwrap 3D is just a left over from my game creation days, so I'm very familiar with it.
The model is ready to be exported for use in poser. Save the scene and select export choosing wavefront obj. Save it, but remember how what you named it and where you saved it. As soon as you've saved the model, a new window will pop up with many options. For Poser you only use Export Scale Factor and make sure only Export UVs and Export normals are selected, the rest I leave untouched, but make sure the Unit of the file is set to none. The export scale factor depends on how small or large you've modeled. Mine is set at 0.060 normally and 0.020 when using the toon generation. But, I can't look at your model and see how small or large you've modeled it. You have to figure this out by yourself and may need to export a couple of times to get it right in Poser. What you cannot do is scale the exported object in Poser to get the right size..... if you use morphs for opening doors and such, you will get into serious problems. You have to figure out what scale to use in Hexagon so it imports into poser at the correct size.
Once exported, we're done for now. Next time we'll going to import the figure into poser and add texture maps to it.
Artwork and 3DToons items, create the perfect place for you toon and other figures!
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/index.php?vendor=23722
Due to the childish TOS changes, I'm not allowed to link to my other products outside of Rendo anymore :(
Food for thought.....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYZw0dfLmLk