Can we texture Blender model in second life?

[debbyom]

Hi,

I have learnt to make blender models and I am still not a pro in texturing in blender. Can I texture the models in Second Life? 

Thanks and Regards,

debbyom

[Drongle McMahon]

Yes. However, your model will have to have a suitable UV map. If you want to use general-purpose textures, like woodgrain or bricks, or whateverm you need to make the UV map in such a way that that will work. The only way to learn that is by using a similar texture, or a grid pattern to see how your UV map works out in Blender. You can see that by selecting the faces it's going to be applied to and then loading the image in the V editor and switching to textured display mode. Then you can olay around with the mapping to learn how it works. Then you will want to learn about defining materials and assigning faces to them. Eacg material becomes an independently textured face in SL. It's difficult to say more withjout knowing what your model is.

[debbyom]

I am just making a simple house. This is my 3rd creation in blender. This also tells you that am a noob in blender.  Thank you for your advice. I guess I will have to learn UV mapping too. Concluding, I will have to do the whole thing in blender and then import it to second life.

[Dree Eames]

Using Blender doesn't equate to being a noob 3d Artist.  Many of us do intermediate and advanced work in Blender and never move on to a commercial 3D package.  (And Blender is splendidly set up for creating animations that are useful in SL - said with a tip of the hat to Gaia Clary and others who have created a fantastic plug-in for this purpose).

As mentioned, you can always apply textures in SL to your meshes which have UVs set up for them, and it's important to note that as you can only apply a single diffuse (color) texture to a face/material group, textures that you may purchase or have in inventory will look very flat, although you might find this perfectly acceptable.  

Most 3d artists here use the material/shader capabilities of their 3d program to take a basic texture, set up lighting in the scene and set desired parameters as to how shiny, translucent, etc. so they can "bake" all these features right on top of the base texture (or they take various "passes" of these effects seperately, like Ambient Occlusion, and they import them into Gimp or Photoshop to  blend them all together  into a final single texture with realistic detail.

With this baked or composited texture uploaded and applied in SL, you get a much richer 3 dimensional result.  Again you must have uvs specific to your mesh to accomplish this.

[Drongle McMahon]

I just tried a couple of meshes with no UV maps, but using the "Planar" mapping (in the Texture tab of the edit dialog). This does do some sort of texturing, although its mapping is very dtrangely distorted. So you could play with that, although I don't think you will get anything cery useful. Using "Default" mapping, which uses the UV map, is more or less random if you have no UV map. (The uploader makes up a nonsense map.)

[debbyom]

thank you  

bottom line is i ll have to learn uv mapping for better results. 

[Chic Aeon]

The good news is that while it makes almost NO sense at the beginning, it DOES after awhile and is almost (ALMOST) fun.

 

Here are some of my favorite mapping tutorials for beginners. I still had them in my bookmarks luckily.

 

http://www.katsbits.com/tutorials/blender/learning-unwrapping-uvw-maps.php

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/UV_Map_Basics

[debbyom]

ty ty ty sooo much for that help

[Sassy Romano]

Materials and Textures eluded me for a long time (as did UV maps as I always felt that I needed to "save" the fact that i'd unwrapped it, it didn't make intuitive sense to me at first).

Gaia Clary has some good tutorials too

Any time you're struggling with blender, just find a bigger wall to band your head against.

[Madeliefste Oh]

I often spend more time on making proper UV maps, then on making my models.

When I just started doing meshes, I first built the model, and then started unwrapping.First the shape, then the texture. But in the meanwhile I learned that this is not always handy. I'm developping more and more a method where I think about how I want the texture to appear on the object, while I start modelling. Depending on the outcome, it can happen that I start unwrapping in a very early stage. Because for some models it's just easier to adjust the initial unwrap to the later stage of the model. For other models (that have an easy projection) it doesn't matter, In those cases I complete the shape first and unwrap when the shape is finished.

In my opinion is making good UV maps an important piece of the art. Models stand or fall with their textures. When you can create optimal conditions for you textures, it will show off in the final texturing result.