Blender Texturing/Materials Question

[BenjilaBonj]

Hello! I'm relatively new to Blender and using it within Second Life but have decided to use this lockdown as an opportunity  to learn. I've come into an issue which i'm sure is just me doing something stupid. When assigning different materials to different 'walls' on my Blender models, when importing them into Second Life, I find that the textures on one wall will be correct and on another wall at a 90 degree angle. Is there something i'm doing wrong? Or is it a case of having to use materials wisely to combat this issue.

Here's a photo for an example of what I mean...

 

Any help would be much appreciated! Stay safe out there, everyone! 

[ChinRey]

This is a well known flaw in Blender, it tends to rotate the various island in all kinds of weird ways. There is this strange myth among SL builders that Blender is good at UV mapping. It isn't it's horrendously bad at it. The solution to this and all the other problems it creates, is to check the UV map before you export and, of course, correct all the mistakes manually.

Edited May 6, 2020 by ChinRey

[BenjilaBonj]

Thank you so much for the quick reply. That's frustrating, what are the indications of this on the UV map?

[Extrude Ragu]

To preview texture on model in Blender

Assuming Blender 2.8+

1. Select your object, assign it a material.

2. Click the dot next to base color. Select 'Image Texture' from the menu this opens. Then browse for an image texture to use

3. Set viewport shading to Material Preview

You can fix UV issues in the UV Editor.

UV Editing

Blender Guru recently made a nice video on UV Mapping.

 

[ChinRey]

43 minutes ago, BenjilaBonj said:

Thank you so much for the quick reply. That's frustrating, what are the indications of this on the UV map?

If like me you don't fancy messing around with textures in Blender, you can simply subdivide one of the edges of a square to mark it with an extra vertice in the middle:

That makes it easy to sww which way the quad is rotated and then just type R 90 until it's the right way around.

Of course, don't forget to delete the marker vertice once you're done.

[ChinRey]

28 minutes ago, Extrude Ragu said:

Blender Guru recently made a nice video on UV Mapping.

 

Hmmmm.... quite a lot of wasted polys and vertices there. Really poor use of the UV area too. Are you sure this is the kind of videos people should watch to learn how to make game/virtual world assets in Blender?

Edited May 6, 2020 by ChinRey

[Extrude Ragu]

If you can find a better video of someone who explains the concepts about UV unwrapping, seams etc and also simultaneously explains optimization for games be my guest.

I would suggest that, if you felt that I neglected to explain about UV map optimization, why don't you explain it to Benjila?

Edited May 6, 2020 by Extrude Ragu
rm rant

[ChinRey]

47 minutes ago, Extrude Ragu said:

I would suggest that, if you felt that I neglected to explain about UV map optimization, why don't you explain it to Benjila?

I'll tell you why.

I mentioned this old thread in very different context a week or two ago: https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/392780-mesh-tricks-for-low-li/ Start at post no. 12 or something like. Unfortunately the illustrations were lost when the forum was migrated to a different provider so it's not very helpful anymore. People have asked me to repost it and maybe one day I'll do it since I already have all the materials but we'll see.

But in any case, I used to spend a lot of time and effort on posts like these, if you can be bothered to check through the threads here, you'll find lots of them. It seriously hurt my own bulding and my own stores partly because it stole so much of my time, partly because competitors took advantage of it without as much as a thank you.

It all culiminated when that arrogant little s**t Patch Linden who can't make a decent mesh himself if his life depended on it and has never lifted a finger to help, had the nerve to accuse me and some of the other volunteers to not have done anything. That was the last straw.

I still try to help when people ask nicely as the OP did here. But I don't owe LL or SL anything, they owe me big time. If you want more, find some other sucker to exploit - or do it yourself.

 

Edited May 6, 2020 by ChinRey

[Chic Aeon]

19 hours ago, BenjilaBonj said:

Hello! I'm relatively new to Blender and using it within Second Life but have decided to use this lockdown as an opportunity  to learn. I've come into an issue which i'm sure is just me doing something stupid. When assigning different materials to different 'walls' on my Blender models, when importing them into Second Life, I find that the textures on one wall will be correct and on another wall at a 90 degree angle. Is there something i'm doing wrong? Or is it a case of having to use materials wisely to combat this issue.

Here's a photo for an example of what I mean...

 

Any help would be much appreciated! Stay safe out there, everyone! 

These were made specifically for Second Life and are "game asset" mesh. They are however made in 2.79 so the interface isn't the same.   The first projects cover UV mapping, unwrapping, materials etc.  So they might be helpful explaining the PROCESS.

 

 

[ChinRey]

4 hours ago, Chic Aeon said:

These were made specifically for Second Life and are "game asset" mesh.

That's the important point in my posts.

Please do not post generic Blender tutorial videos here, not unless you also describe what in them is and what isn't useful for Second Life. It doesn't matter if those videos are good or bad as such. In either case they do not take into account the performance requirements of dynamic real time rendering, making them not only irrelevant but also far too often downright misleading. The lavish waste of resources we see in that first video is perfectly ok for the static models most Blender users make and for the pre-rendered movies the program was originally was made for but if you want to make game assets, you have to be far more careful and for a virtual world with far more assets than any game and no railroading, even "game assets" may not be performant enough. SL creators' and Linden Lab's failure to understand this is the ultimate cause of so much of the performance issues people complain about in SL. It's bad enough as it is, so don't teach new creators bad habits.

[Extrude Ragu]

Texture Optimization

When designing models, it's important to keep in mind that your viewer can only keep in memory so much texture data at a time. This constraint depends largely on the memory inside your graphics card and the viewers 'Viewer Texture Memory Buffer' setting. Keep in mind that a 1024px texture is 4x larger in size at 4MB than a 512px texture. Most people only have 512 - 1024mb Texture Memory Buffer, so when you can, try to keep texture sizes as small as you reasonably can, use the UV area efficiently avoiding large unused spaces.

When there are too many large textures around, people will experience reduced framerates, increased loading times (things appearing as grey blobs) and blurry textures, which may lead them to believe your creation is broken or the viewer is broken etc.

This page shows how the pixel dimensions of a texture can affect the amount of memory used. This article contains tips and tricks regarding texture optimization.

Chinrey, I have sent you a private message.

 

 

[BenjilaBonj]

Just wanted to thank everyone for their help on this one! After looking over it all, practising and whatnot. It's all sorted out now! Hooray!