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Prepping mesh for texturing


Spinell
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Hello everyone,

I'm starting this post hoping to find some professional guidence in a topic I've never been good on: texturing. I'm a mesh creator and I enjoy the 3D modeling, but I'm honestly quite bad at texturing and Photoshop. Since texturing is always the part that delays my creations to put them on the market, I'm considering outsourcing the texturing of my meshes to someone else. However, I realize before I can do that, I might need to prep the mesh in a certain way to give the texturer an easy time creating his part.

So I don't know how this process really works. When I'm doing the texturing myself, I know the UV map of the mesh and modify it freely. So I'm wondering how should I prep my mesh in terms of UV, materials, etc, so when I give a model to the texturer for texting, he will know how to work with it.

Is there a standard on how the mesh should be organized or how the UV should be displayed? Is it very flexible and should be decided with the texturer? I'm organizing my UV in squares/rectangles so that applying a flat "D texture is easier.

Hope you can give me some pointers on working with texturers work and what I can do, as mesh creator, to help them on their part of mesh texturing.

Thank you very much!

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There is no standard that I know of. Arranging your UV "neatly" with a bit of space between things is a good plan. If you are outsourcing then grouping the materials in a quadrant (or area) would likely be helpful.

Certainly, straighten your edges so that your areas are either rectangular or actually portray the shap of the object (rather than just letting the UVmap defaults do things for you. You "might" (this is of course a choice) have separate materials for items that would likely have shine or 'bump' (like metal or stucco etc). 

OH, for goodness sakes (hopefully you already do this) make SURE your islands are turned in the correct direction to accept woodgrain and not have it 'against the grain' which would never happen in real life and really jars me LOL.   

I WOULD SUGGEST HOWEVER that you look into Blender Cycles Engine where you can make your own textures WITHIN Blender. I am not a great texture person either and with Cycles you can do quite gorgeous things. It takes awhile to get the hang of it of course.

Tutorials (starting from the beginning so you would likely know a lot being said until you get to the Cycles part) are here.   https://www.slartist.com/browse-the-tutorial-chic-videos-1-date.html  They are in reverse order like blog posts.

 

Good luck and happy modeling.

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I can't say outsourcing is a good idea, especially given the fact you don't know where to even start regarding texturing itself.

Perhaps back up on that idea of giving up and do some research. At the start of this year, I was fairly weak in texturing, now I'm creating every texture map in the book for myself - the idea you wanted to realise likely won't ever come close to "reality"  if you attempt to outsource texture creation.

As Chic mentioned, go learn Cycles, it's a brilliant render environment and its foundations are easy to use once you get the general gist of it. Of course there's more to textures than just pretty colours, but there's a thousand and one material studies out there using cycles too. 

Google 'Blender Guru Cycles' will have you going in no time, it's a pretty tried and tested tutorial.

 

TL;DR: 

Do not outsource, patience is king, go learn cycles render engine.

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12 hours ago, Spinell said:

Is it very flexible and should be decided with the texturer?

If you're going to be working with one person, then by all means take that person's preferences and workflow into account. You'll likely have a better working relationship, get better results and pick up some things which will help you in your own texture work too.

Creating mesh for SL is all about balancing multiple compromises and reasonable solutions/balances for certain approaches may prove problematic for other ways of doing things. I see that often in trying to use patterned fabrics/textiles on FP mesh.

So I could tell you what I'd like from mesh creators but that might not be what your texturers want themselves. Listen to them. :)

 

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I think Zoxin had the best advice here, but a couple of points I wanted to share regardless of how you move forward:

  • You want to use as little texture memory as possible, lots of textures means lots of lag.
  • When creating the UV for your mesh, set it up so there is as little unused space as possible. All that unused space is still eating up texture memory!
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