UV map isn't working when I upload my .dae file

[Vulpinus]

I'm starting to learn Blender... (a.k.a. newbie alert)

I've made a few small things and sucessfully uploaded them to SL, with a UV map. This one simply won't work though, and I can't figure out why because I'm pretty sure I've done everything right. (but obviously haven't, somewhere...). The mesh is a simple building front (to replace my prim one) with a couple of windows and a door hole to fit an existing frame.

The mesh seems fine, I've created eight materials with image textures and applied them to various places on the mesh, and unwrapped. I did have the UV maps all nicely scaled and aligned, but when I exported to .dae and uploaded to SL, all I got was a solid colour on all faces. All eight faces can be selected as they should, but I can't get a texture on them, just the solid colour.

I've since done a 'select all' and 'Unwrap' again, and left it at that with no extra tidying up of the UV maps. You can see in the pictures below that blender shows the textured faces, but I still only get solid colours in SL. I've repeated this over and over and got nowhere.

Suggestions welcome, please...



 

P.s. I should probably add, just in case it makes a difference, that I exported my prim build from SL to start this model. Then I removed all the excess stuff to basically leave just a load of planes where they were needed without any superfluous vertices.

[Mylie Foxclaw]

Hi Vulpinus, whenever you make changes to your build in blender make sure you save it.  even the tiny little things, even with the UV map. 

 

Now concerning your export, when you click export, this is the menu you would get and you need to save as a dae file. when you click that, 

 

when you click that,you should be getting something like this:



 

click operator presets. you will see 2 options for SL.  you need the static option. make sure you click those settings before you export because it ensures your uv map will work in sl. 



 

Also, export to your desktop.  Someone said so when i was just starting to use blender and had issues when uploading. and i found that it helped everything stay in place. I dunno why. but since i do that i never had problems with my mesh.

 

Keep reading forums to learn more and keep researching. thats the best way to learn.  Good Luck.

hope this helped.

Mylie.

[Vulpinus]

[ I've just editied a previous reply here that said the above didn't work. Something must have borked because I tried it twice and it didn't. However...]

 

Thank you Mylie, this seems to have done the trick (on my third try - don't know what happend to the first two).

I suddenly have textures... yay! Now to get them all fixed up again...

Thank you :smileyvery-happy:

[Aquila Kytori]

Hi

In future if you are having problems with the textures looking fine in Blender but very different when rezzed inworld: (untill you are more familiar with mesh modelling for SL) in Blender check to make sure you only have one UV map in the list of UV maps for that mesh. 



 

In general, when UV mapping, each material should be using as much of the UV square as possible. Also the faces making up your outside_wall material are all scaled differently and UV unwrapped so that seams will appear at the edges of each face when evetually you apply a texture to them inworld.

To Correct that try the following:

First to make sure you are starting from fresh, delete any existing UV maps from that list in the Object Data tab.

1: In front view, looking straight on to the front of your wall, select only the faces that will receive the "outside_wall" (brick) texture.

2: Open the UV mapping menu and select Project from view (bounds). This will UV map those faces so that they completely fill the available UV square.

 





If you now apply your test grid texture you will see that the resolution is much better than before but because the wall is not square the texture is stretched in the X axis. This can be fixed by editing the UVs so that they extend beyond the UV square. ( Selecting All and scaling along the X axis by 2, for example (Shortcut keys  A,   S  X  2 ))

But keeping things simple for now leave it as it is. When you have the wall rezzed in world and a brick texture applied to those faces you can change the scaling (repeats) as needed from the Texture tab of the Edit panel.

Repeat the above for the faces (material) that make up the Inside_wall.

For the windows (material) select the outside and inside faces of one window and again UV Unwrap to completely fill the UV square.

Repeat for second window.

The other parts like Lintels and window frames will need to have seams and then UV unwrapped with the first Option in the UV menu, Unwrap (or no seams and the second option Smart UV Project ) Then you will need to edit the resulting UV islands by scaling them up so that they too use up as much of the UV space as possible.

 

 

[Vulpinus]

Thank you Aquila, that's really helpful.

Since my last post, I've figured out using seams on the window frames before unwrapping. In the process I discovered correcting/equalising the scale with Ctrl-A/Scale. (must have been needed due to the build I imported from SL to start with). I found a nice script that adds a vertex at the intersection of two lines; that came in handy for making a few corrections to the original.

I also spent about thirty minutes with a calculator working out the x,y coordinates of every corner of every face for the building's front wall for placement on the UV map, then typing them all in. In the end I had a UV map that looks just like yours in the pictures.

I'm so glad there's a quicker method I can use next time :smileyvery-happy: (I guessed there must be, but a quick google didn't help and I thought by the time I've found the answer, I can have it done manually).

For a final laugh, the last thing I did was make a physics model. Easy, surely? Nope. I spent fifteen minutes redoing it in different ways, trying to analyse the model in the upload, or not, and any other changes I could think of, and still not being able to walk through the door.

Then I changed the physics type in the SL edit window from Convex Hull to Prim, and kicked myself several times.

 

Anyway, the front of my hallway is now 3LI, a great improvement over the 9LI (convex hull) of the original prim build. I didn't expect it to be that much better; this was in part an experiment to see if converting to mesh was worth the effort. My whole build is around 1000LI, so I'm looking forward to regaining a lot of space! (I can finally afford to have furniture, lol).

 

Thanks again for the help folks! (I'm sure I'll be back for more - I've a lot to learn!)

[Mylie Foxclaw]

you're welcomed, glad it helped!