Blender Object Default Face Orentation Question

[animats]

Blender can equalize textures along a path

.

The diamond pattern is equally spaced despite the turns in the railing. The diamond pattern on rubber is texture animated and synchronized with the step movement.

Here's that model in Blender 3.3 LTS. I'm changing the diamond spacing. Note that the quads are of different sizes.

• Edit mode.
• Select all faces of the relevant surface. Here, one face was selected, then all faces with the same material. So that gets me the railings.
• Clear UVs for those faces.
• Set UVs using "Follow quads -> Length". This makes them all equal. (Only if they are contiguous. I have to do the left and right railings separately.)
• Resize all the UVs at once, with Sx or Sy, a in the UV window as needed.

Result:

Smaller diamonds, closer together, but still equally spaced around the curves.

This is for when you want to follow the curvature. This would get you curved brickwork around an arch.

[Paulsian]

6 hours ago, animats said:

Blender can equalize textures along a path

.

The diamond pattern is equally spaced despite the turns in the railing. The diamond pattern on rubber is texture animated and synchronized with the step movement.

Here's that model in Blender 3.3 LTS. I'm changing the diamond spacing. Note that the quads are of different sizes.

• Edit mode.
• Select all faces of the relevant surface. Here, one face was selected, then all faces with the same material. So that gets me the railings.
• Clear UVs for those faces.
• Set UVs using "Follow quads -> Length". This makes them all equal. (Only if they are contiguous. I have to do the left and right railings separately.)
• Resize all the UVs at once, with Sx or Sy, a in the UV window as needed.

Result:

Smaller diamonds, closer together, but still equally spaced around the curves.

This is for when you want to follow the curvature. This would get you curved brickwork around an arch.

Wicked tips ty so neat. Nice model looks legit. 

[Paulsian]

Strange question about the uv map space. Is it bad to have parts extend beyond the uv space? I was watching some follow quad videos and one person used pack islands a lot, not sure if sl behaves differently with uv maps that are beyond the area with the texture preview or is that entire area considered the uv map and it does not matter? 

[Paulsian]

7 hours ago, animats said:

Blender can equalize textures along a path

.

The diamond pattern is equally spaced despite the turns in the railing. The diamond pattern on rubber is texture animated and synchronized with the step movement.

Here's that model in Blender 3.3 LTS. I'm changing the diamond spacing. Note that the quads are of different sizes.

• Edit mode.
• Select all faces of the relevant surface. Here, one face was selected, then all faces with the same material. So that gets me the railings.
• Clear UVs for those faces.
• Set UVs using "Follow quads -> Length". This makes them all equal. (Only if they are contiguous. I have to do the left and right railings separately.)
• Resize all the UVs at once, with Sx or Sy, a in the UV window as needed.

Result:

Smaller diamonds, closer together, but still equally spaced around the curves.

This is for when you want to follow the curvature. This would get you curved brickwork around an arch.

I was wondering if it's possible to follow the active quads multiple times on the same model.

I went around the exterior of the arch and did follow the active quads by length and it popped up on the uv space but then I attempted to follow the active quads around the front and it would not generate a map, I remembered in a video that the active quad might need to be rectangle and the front of mine has no rectangles but the inside of it has a few so I attempted to do it on the inside of the model and it also would not do a second unwrap. 

Edit: I reread your instructions and cleared the uv map from the faces and wala it worked. This making sense i'm assuming that when it's exported the multiple maps on one object merge and was earlier warned about. 

Edit: When I thought I cleared the uvmaps' selected secondary group of faces I deleted the uv map from the properties w entire map. hmm

Edit: I was able to unwrap the secondary area of model using just unwrap but would not let me peform the follow active quads method second time. using U and selecting follow active. hmm Unsure if the first instance auto marks a seam? I put a seam inside the arch and clicked the follow active nothing happened then clicked unwrap and it seemed to have put the array on the uv space and behaved like follow active quad and also scaled it to uv space automatically. Pretty cool. Very useful. 

Edited September 12, 2022 by Paulsian

[Paulsian]

I never thought I would ever say uv mapping was cool. ever. but it is!

[Paulsian]

I'm actually placing seams without guessing lol it's miracle. I'm working on the the front of the model I want it to split at the front top so placed 1 edge worth of seam there and then unwrapped it and because I know that the follow the active quad only works on rectangle objects I made the bottom front rectangle by selecting one of the vertices pressing G to move the vertice and Y or X to tell blender which direction to perfectly go and snapped to nearest vertice within that face with the snap enabled. 

and then after I make the bottom a rectangle I can right click that rectangles' face and select follow active quads and it will straighten out and then I pack island it to scale it to the uv area and then I enable the uv sync selection to make the other uv arrays show in the uv space

 

[Aquila Kytori]

1 hour ago, Paulsian said:

Strange question about the uv map space. Is it bad to have parts extend beyond the uv space?

Answer :

20 hours ago, Aquila Kytori said:

Note that for models that will use seamless textures it is not a problem to upload the model with the uv's scaled up and extending beyond the 0 to 1 UV space.

 

That only applies for models (or parts of models) that are intended, like your arch, to use seamless textures.  When laying out uv's for seamless textures the uv islands of "material_1" can overlap one another. Again like in parts of your arch uv layout. They can also extend beyond the UV space.

 

 

For models that use baked materials then they have to be laid out differently.  Uv islands of "material_1" cannot overlap other islands of "material_1" unless they are going to use the exact same part of the texture.

For models using baked textures the uv islands of the different materials can overlap one another. Think of it as 1 uv map but up to 8 layers of uv islands, 1 layer per material. For this type of layout then uv's of a  material should not extend beyond the UV space. If it helps you can layout the uv's of each material to a different uv space see this earlier post :

but usually people just stack/layer the uv's of each material in the same uv space. And of course for seamless uv layouts each material can be layered as well.

 

[Aquila Kytori]

11 minutes ago, Paulsian said:

I'm actually placing seams without guessing lol it's miracle.

The more you experiment the more you are going to learn

Generally marking seams yourself is the way to go.

 

[Paulsian]

and then i snapped it to one of the edges of the others and turned of sync selection and selected the edges of one side and the from the layout area did ctrl a to show all the areas on the uv space (because can't select edges with the uv sync enabled) so that way all the parts show by doing the ctrl A and then snapped those to the edge of the array it was already snapped to and wala. 

[Paulsian]

4 minutes ago, Aquila Kytori said:

The more you experiment the more you are going to learn

Generally marking seams yourself is the way to go.

 

This was one of the last things I wanted to learn, it's not so horrible. 

[Paulsian]

I thought I had to mark every seam at once, my brain don't work that way, my brain only allows me to mark 1 seam at a time. I can handle this. 

[Wulfie Reanimator]

22 minutes ago, Paulsian said:

I thought I had to mark every seam at once, my brain don't work that way, my brain only allows me to mark 1 seam at a time. I can handle this.

Seams are a good way to get repeatable results, like "I know I want there to be an edge here" and you'll get that edge every time.

But seams are an optional tool, you could just as well select the face(s) you want, then press U and select "Unwrap." This will unwrap only what you've selected, as if there were invisible seams going around your selection.

Sometimes the easiest thing to do could be a mix of both, for example manually unwrapping faces to try out different UV layouts, then add seams to make those decisions a little more permanent. Or you can mark the seams first and then clean up the result with manual unwrapping.

Edited September 12, 2022 by Wulfie Reanimator

[Paulsian]

I marked a seam with more than one edge all in one go and used the follow active quad. Magical. 

[Paulsian]

22 minutes ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

But seams are an optional tool, you could just as well select the face(s) you want, then press U and select "Unwrap." This will unwrap only what you've selected, as if there were invisible seams going around your selection.

I like that alot. animats mentioned assigning materials to those selections to make it easier to select those parts later by material is handy idea. I've assigned materials before never selected by material before. Have to research and practice that too. 

[arton Rotaru]

Just ignore me.🙃 I just wanted to chime in to say, that it looks like that this will be the most sophisticated Arch mesh ever build in the entire universe.

[Paulsian]

7 hours ago, arton Rotaru said:

Just ignore me.🙃 I just wanted to chime in to say, that it looks like that this will be the most sophisticated Arch mesh ever build in the entire universe.

 Would not think something so simple would be so complicated, pretty cool having this sorta quality help. Lets all go forth and create happy arches.