Aligning pattern textures in mesh

[Spinell]

Hi everyone,

I was wondering if anyone had a nice trick to figure out how to align a pattern texture on the difference faces of a mesh. Here is a picture of the mesh inside blender, with the uv texture guide:

 

Right at the middle there is a cut on the UV:

 

So when I'm texturing my mesh in SL, I need to adjust the front and back faces so that the seamless pattern aligns. Sometimes this is easy, sometimes it isn't... For the pattern I'm working on, I've been trying to align it for almost an hour now and every time I manage to get one side of the skirt right, the other isn't working. It's a teasious job of finding the correct size and horizontal/vertical shift for each face.

 

 

 

Any help is greatly apreciated! Thank you.

Edited July 29, 2017 by Spinell

[Chic Aeon]

No great trick as I do this manually when needed. One tip might be to make your skirt textures ALIGNED so that you only have one seam (or a semblance of that effect). I will say that practice makes it faster (I do a lot of bricks which need to be aligned.  It is possible on the texture shown that you need to change the X sizing so that it is smaller or larger than your current UV layout so that you CAN get the pattern to match. 

So I guess two "hints" that might help some.  Of course the other answer is to pick a pattern that is easier to align  but you knew that already. 

 

[arton Rotaru]

Yeah, I doubt you will have much luck adjusting that in-world. If you want to use tileable textures, you would have to keep it as one strip, as Chic mentioned, stretching from side to side.
Stretching the UVs beyond the the 0 to 1 UV space will increase the texel density. But baking maps like AO, Normals etc. won't work then.

If you want to keep your current UV map as is, I would create a 2nd UV map as a single strip, so that the pattern does match perfectly, and then the Diffuse texture will be baked to the 1st UV map. The result is indeed not a tileable texture anymore, but a perfectly matching pattern on your current UVs.

[Chic Aeon]

Actually if you want a perfectly matched skirt and can fit the UV map into a 1024 x 512 which looks possible in this case, you can THEN stretch the texture to fill the whole area and still match. You can either align the single rectangle EXACTLY to the edges (this assuming it is a tiling texture of course) or if needed you can use a UV map node (fairly complex to explain but I can look up a video  -- not mine -- should this seem like a good plan. 

The bottom line is that it CAN be done and actually fairly easily but you really need to get the skirt with just one seam or line up the UV map perfectly on the UV mapping plane. 

[Spinell]

Hi everyone, thank you for your replies.

Chic, can you elaborate a bit more on your last suggestion? I didn't quite understand the step-by-step. Sorry for the trouble.

And yes, the texture I'm using is seamless and tillable.

[Chic Aeon]

Hi there.  This video might be helpful. 

On rereading your post though it looks like you aren't looking at your actual pattern WHILE IN BLENDER?   If that is true then I can certainly see that you would have issues. I haven't made a video on this yet but hopefully this one will help. It certainly helped me a LOT way back when.  This is in Blender Render as I recall but works the same in cycles should you be using that.  

This is stepping up into advanced territory -- at least it certainly seemed that way to me when I was learning it.  

EVEN IF YOU DON'T USE THIS METHOD ---  just looking at your actual texture rather than the grid will help a lot. Maybe you already are doing that though :D.

Good luck. Alignment is a great skill to have for sure. Takes some time though and a steady hand! 

 

Edited July 31, 2017 by Chic Aeon

[Macrocosm Draegonne]

I saw a free script recently somewhere, maybe it came with some textures I bought or was looking at, it would align tile-able textures across multiple faces & objects (including the diffuse/normal/specular), it was more for walls and such, but regardless, it seems there's a scripting remedy; you just drop the script in and run, then remove the script as its not needed any longer.   That said, their suggestions above seem far more prudent for your situation, but I wanted to add this in since I saw it recently and it may prove useful.