texturing with Wings3d

[Zieman]

I'll add my way of doing this:

1. Define areas you want as contiguous in the UV map with hard edges (select border edges of the area, right-click, select Hardness from the menu and then Hard). Repeat until all areas are defined. I usually select the areas so that projecting them to flat surface distorts them (or the texture applied to them) as little as possible. .

2. Use Wings3D's own unwrapping - select all faces (tip: select the object in body selection mode and switch to faces selection mode), right-click, select .UV Mapping., right-click, select Continue and then Projection Normal.
In the pic below you see an example at this stage, Asp Explorer from my Z-ships OXP. Hard edges are orange, and the default helper texture is applied (the UV map is a mess at this stage).


Click on the pic to see it bigger

3. Rotate, scale, move & optionally combine the different parts of the UV map to utilize available space well and to get a coherent view of the model's surfaces. This part can be quite tedious if the model is complex and you have lots of areas surrounded by hard edges. In the pic below is again the same ship showing how I have rearranged the original UV map mess (seems to be the Police/Navy -variant).


Click on the pic to see it bigger

4. Save the UV map to disk, to serve as a base for texturing - deselect all faces/objects in the UV Editor Window, right-click and select Create Texture, select the newly created *ship*_auv (*ship* = name of the object you're UV mapping) in Outliner and Export. I usually make two of these, one with only border edges drawn and one with all edges drawn, and make these images with doubled dimensions compared to final texture size (2048x2048 for 1024x1024 texture). At least in earlier versions of Wings 3D (Windows XP), maybe even the latest stable-feeling (1.2), .png would result in a corrupt file, so other formats have to be used (.bmp seems to work fine, and because it is uncompressed, it doesn't introduce any artifacts). For some unknown reason these images tend to have holes in some edges (flood fill reveals these ), so plugging them helps a lot when you use these images in making the texture.

5. Proceed to make a great texture .

To check your texture on the model, import it to Wings3D and apply it on the mesh: File -> Import Image... -> select the imported image in Outliner -> right-click -> Pick up Image -> select *ship*_auv in Outliner -> right-click -> Drop picked object -> Diffuse.

When you're satisfied, export the mesh as .obj and convert it to .dat. You can change all edges to Soft before exporting, but you can also define (up to 10? or 8? or 9?) Smooth Groups with hard edges, so your ship can have the Smooth attribute as true in Oolite and retain sharp bends where needed. For complex structures, you should use subentities along with hard edges/smooth groups.

Hope some of this helps someone .

[Killer Wolf]

to slightly derail this, can someone tell me how to find coordinates in Wings? Milkshape shows the coordinates of your cursor so to find gun/view positions etc you just select a view, place your cursor and note the coords ~ what's the trick in Wings?

TIA

[Zieman]

to slightly derail this, can someone tell me how to find coordinates in Wings? Milkshape shows the coordinates of your cursor so to find gun/view positions etc you just select a view, place your cursor and note the coords ~ what's the trick in Wings?

Select a vertex to see its coordinates, select an edge to see its center point coordinates and select a face to see its center point coordinates.

[Killer Wolf]

ta, but that's not really much use unless the feature happens to sit at a particular midpoint. and what about features that are separate? i'm fiddling w/ external missiles and need a position to gen them up from, suspended below the ship's belly.

[Zieman]

You can of course save a copy of the model, and create such points to the copy (keeping the actual model intact), mid- or not, to get the coordinates. Then you decide how much below (or to any direction) you want to place your entity. I'm afraid that you need to do some calculations and/or make some estimates to get your stuff positioned the way you want.

[Selezen]

You can export the model as an OBJ file to get all the co-ordinates (OBJ is just a text file). Otherwise if you want to know the location of a certain point along an edge you might need to estimate it.

My usual shortcut is to cut the edge in question into say 10 sections then deselect the vertices near the point I want and delete the rest. Then I can cut that remaining edge until I get a vertex where I want it. It saves all that mucking about with trying to move a vertex along an edge that isn't planar to the X, Y or Z axes.

[Zieman]

You can export the model as an OBJ file to get all the co-ordinates (OBJ is just a text file). Otherwise if you want to know the location of a certain point along an edge you might need to estimate it.

My usual shortcut is to cut the edge in question into say 10 sections then deselect the vertices near the point I want and delete the rest. Then I can cut that remaining edge until I get a vertex where I want it. It saves all that mucking about with trying to move a vertex along an edge that isn't planar to the X, Y or Z axes.

I connect the edge with another one, and slide the connecting edge so that one end sits on the place I want coordinates of. Then I read that vertice's coordinates.

[maaarcooose]

I'm going to add my own tips here as I'm using a method mostly like Griffs recommendations but with some differences. I'm loving how easy Wings is to use.

1. First off I'm tending to work with only half the model and using a virtual mirror in Wings as that makes it easier and less surfaces to deal with. (Not sure if you can create a mirror after texturing though)
2. Select whole model and do 'UV Mapping'.
3. Line up so you've looking down the Z Axis and all the model is visible.
4. Right click, 'Segment by' -> 'Feature detection' or 'Projection'. Both do different things, but will require modification afterwards. I am tending to use 'Projection' and modifying.
5. All areas of the ship will now be coloured. These areas are how the various surfaces will be grouped and split apart. I tend to redo most of them so each section of coloured the same.
6. Select edges in the coloured areas as required and 'mark edges for cut'. If you section cleverly, you probably won't need to do this much, but I tend to do it for cylinder objects and group them together.
7. Select various faces that you want to regroup and right click and select a colour 'AuvChart#'
8. Once happy with the grouping and the cuts, hit 'Continue' -> 'Projection Normal'
9. You now have your map.

*** At this point, I'd really like to know how to be able to go back to the section selection and splitting as if I get it wrong, I always end up having to undo and redo all my selections. Gets a bit tedious on large models.

10. Create the texture, make external and edit as described earlier in the thread.

I've also found when selecting areas to mark, especially round things, it saves time to use the +/- selections. Select a whole section of model, mark with one colour. Hit - and mark as another, hit - again and mark another, etc...

I hope this makes sense.

!m!

[maaarcooose]

I've solved the going back to sectioning issue.

If you use different textures for all the areas you wish to section in the main modelling window these willbe used as the basic sections when you go to UV Mapping.
You can then skip the sectioning step, add in your cuts where required in the various sections and then Continue.

This means you save your sections in the main file.

!m!

[maaarcooose]

So what does it mean when you get:

Internal Error: badarith

When you hit Continue -> Unrapping.

!m!

[Storm]

So what does it mean when you get:

Internal Error: badarith

When you hit Continue -> Unrapping.

I think that is usually that is due to there being a consecutive series of faces that form a loop that cannot be 'flattened' without some of the faces overlapping others. The unwrapper may leave out a face to enable the rest to successfully unwrap. Remove all the UV map coordinates from the model and try again after hopefully spotting the edge(s) that you should have marked for cut.

I tend to mark the edges I want the UV mapping to cut about as 'hard' rather than UV map the object according to the projection, then scale the various cut pieces and flatten points along x or y on the UV map for easier texturing.

At this stage you can overlap the cut pieces if you wish of course, so for ships which are usually symmetrical you can flip some pieces horizontally/vertically as necessary, centre them all on the UV map, then drag them all to wherever, trying to fill as much of the square space of the texture as possible with your various sections.

[maaarcooose]

Okay.

That makes sense. I've actually adjusted my methodology now.
I'm setting different sections to different materials so that adjacent faces that would require a cut, don't. Then I'm defining the cuts on the circular bits that I have to and unwrapping.

It's all a learning process for me. The last time I did anything like this in anger was about 14 years ago and the package I had was somewhat basic. I remember trying out wings3d not long after that and it was a little more basic back then and I never got on with it.

!m!

[maaarcooose]

Turns out the problems with my mesh were a couple of very small, strangely formed faces that were hidden in a crease that I couldn't see into.

No unwrapping correctly.

Is it possible to use the Virtual mirror, just texture half the model and then mirror it to the other side of the model, or do I have to have the complete model and unwrap that?

!m!

[maaarcooose]

This might be a dumb question, but can you overlap pieces in the UV map that need to look the same?

!m!

[cim]

This might be a dumb question, but can you overlap pieces in the UV map that need to look the same?

Yes, you can.