Butler Offcourse

Well @Aquila Kytori , you are a genius!! it was it, apply automap! I will call you Blender Genius 😅 Having said that, I applied one material with the automap checked to see the image node as you have requested, if it changes, but no, they all remain flat, and anyways earlier there was nothing as I was not using the same material, so it replaces the nodes with the nodes of the new applied material. On the right you can see the automap in the UV Maps menu and on the left bottom corner, you see what a messed up uv unwrap it makes. So first of all I am sharing a screenshot with the automap on where I also show the image nodes: As you see, it immediatly creates a new map called automap and switches to it on it's own.The texture nodes of this shader are all on flat and on the left bottom corner, there is the messed up new UV map. Now following your advice, I went to " Import Settings > Automap " and unchecked it. So it is not a search filter but it is a setting on how to import the materials, so, it works like a charm now! Here's an experiment with a different texture with the Automap unchecked before importing: Now that I resolved the issue, I have realised that I have been working on an earlier version of the shoe as the unwrapping is not straight like you showed me two days ago!! LOL Thank you very much again Blender Genius! 🙃

Hello @Aquila Kytori , as usual you are very kind and helpful, thank you very much really 😊 I never used the UV Node and after your advice tried doing it. I unlinked the Texture Coordinate and linked the UV Map instead but strangely, even tho from the drop down menu I changed the UV Map, it was always showing the same. And those materials I did not create, those are some pre-made materials coming with the free BlenderKit add on. So even tho I did not manage to fix the problem with the node technique, it pointed me towards the problem tho. From the right side panel, I went to check the UV Maps of my model, and it had 2 UV Maps normally, one for the single object that I had in the begining, and an other with all included which I used for baking. But both of them are unwrapped in the same way, so it should not cause a problem, but then I realised something. When I am applying the ready-made materials from the Blender-Kit, it is adding a thrid UV Map and it is called “Automap” , I have no idea what is it, how it is created and all, but it was actually the source of the problem. So when I click the camera icon next to the previous maps, it goes back to the old unwrap. I do not know if the material has a node that is forcing the Blender to autounwrap, no idea, but deleting that automap is solving my issue. Thank you very much, as usual, you have been very helpful and solved my issue! 😊🙏🏻

Hello @Aquila Kytori , thank you very much for your reply, I appreciate it! As usual, you are a genius and solved my problem! It was definitely that the problem, I knew about disabling for render but to be honest, I completely forgot about that when I was baking, so I made a test baking and uploaded to SL and the baking works definitely very well, thank you! And this way I realised that I am using 6 times less Vram, so it should be better for the performance of the game I suppose! Here's a screenshot from inside the game: So now I am able to add text, stitches..etc in Photoshop. Obviously it sucks as I did it in one minute just to try.

Hello Everyone, I have a problem in Blender, I hope you can help me. Since I can not attach video files here, I am attaching a link for Reddit post (I hope it isn't against the rules) where I asked the same question in a Blender subredit, unfortunately there is no reply. In the link there is the video where I replicated the problem to show: https://www.reddit.com/r/blenderhelp/comments/ls4lxx/new_materials_messing_my_uv_unwrap_more_in_the/ I have modelled this shoe, then I unwrapped it as seen in the screen. Then I added a material and it works ok. Then I decided to try an other material, modified the Texture Coordinate scales in the nodes and I saw a weird seem forming on the nose part when there was none when I had used the grid for the UV Unwrap. Even tho in the video I didn’t have the uv grid on, but you can see that the pattern of the previous texture is woking nicely. So out of curiosity I checked my UV Unwrap and I saw that it is messed up. Why is it happening? How can I prevent this from happening? Yes I can always re unwrap it to fix, but as you may see, i pinned the vertexes, aligned all the side vertexes edge by edge to have a better unwrap, so I'd love it if i can prevent this from happening to avoid having to redo and fix the unwrap after each material change. Thank you!

WOW? I should be the one who says wow to your shoe!!! it looks fantastic!! and only 1400 triangles!! 😱 Ok but I will go in order to write my reply! 🙂 First of all, again, thank you very much, sincerely for taking your time to walk me thru this process, your help is very precious and much appreciated and I am learning new stuff from your each post, you are very kind, thank you! And I hope that this thread would help other people who had similar confusions as some of the answers you have given me is not easy to find on the web, so thank you! 🙂 Also thank you for your compliments and encouraging words! ☺️ Yes, I did the UV unwrapping in Blender, then exported an .obj file to the Substance Painter with their UVs, done all the painting, stitching things..etc in SP and then baked all the textures there. The result you see in SL is from the baked textures of SP directly, only with the color base/diffuse texture. I did not add normals as the bump was already visible, so I did not want to create unnecessary texture "toll" to the servers. Even tho it looks quite nice, I should admit that it is not like some of the shoes I see in SL which are crisp and sharp when I zoom in, so that's one point that I will have to learn to fix in the future but for now it is a detail, or let's say, second step in my learning. As info, I used 1024 pixel for the textures on this shoe. IN SP , it looks wonderful with 2048 pixel and when I lower it to 1024 knowing that SL does not support higher res, I watch the result with a sad face lol. Now, I am again, trying to do everything in Blender, for a simple reason. In SP, the environments that I have put, does not light the object as I would really like, even tho I tried different rotations for the environment and it kept one side of the shoe much darker. So I will do it in Blender with my lights, but now I am also looking how to do the texture painting in Blender even though I can put the last details on Photoshop if I can not achieve it in Blender. Let's see. Lovely, that is exactly what I want to achieve and I don't know. Today a friend of mine showed me her uv map of a necklace she did, all the islands were in the same texture even the ones with different materials. I did not know how to do it, I was going to try it with the texture baking method that you had showed me that's why I was trying to prepare the textures in Blender now. Obviously Blender crashing on me sometimes did not really help lol. She told me to put all the baked textures on top of each other and then position them in photoshop so they don't overlap but this thing did not really convince me as they would not work with the uv mapping anymore, so I did not try it. But she is using 3ds Max so her way of doing stuff can be different, I don't know, but the video that you had sent me is very useful, I had seen it in the past but now that I am more focused on UV unwrapping and baking, I will watch it more carefully now. Thank you! 🙂 Perfect, once I finish the texture in Blender, I will try the method you told me, it should work! Now now now... the shoe that you have modelled! IT is unbelleivable! 1400 tris and it looks fantastic!! Did you delete the interio faces that wont be visible? from the UV unwrap it does not seem so, but well, now that you told me this, it gives me a good number that I know that I should achieve! Well, When I added the piping on the opening, that pipeping is almost as complex as the rest of the shoe with 2k tris. So yes, I still have some refinements to do or to learn to do. One other problem I have is the solidify, when I applied it, all the "thickness" surface is not straight like yours but they are like stretched arcs in Z. Weird, tried to hide that mess with the pipeing but wait, I did not try to mark those edges sharp , may be it could be the solution to my problem? Am I able to explain the problem correctly? lol. Like the shape is going towards up ( obviously in Z ) even tho there is no edge or vertex there. Here's a screenshot of the problem: Your UV islands, they looks so organized, so straight! Mines looks like a map of an undiscovered continent whereas yours are very well organized and so understandable looking at the maps. When I look at mine, to understand which vertex corresponds on which part of the shoe, I have to use the sync viewport to UV editor viewport mode. I did not know anything about pining the vertexes, and two step unwrap processes. I definitely had zero idea, so it is interesting and I will try to do it as well! You are talking about stretching but other than a veeeeeery slight stretching that you have on the nose part, I do not see any issues and it definitely looks MUCH better than mine. Now I am jealous LOL!! So now, my model looks like this in Blender, work in progress, and before applying any of the new techniques that you advised me on your post now! ☺️ The materials are not mine, I find them from an add-on called BlenderKit then I scale and modify them slightly with the node editor. Still need to learn it better but I want to pass to it after I learn better the UV unwrapping and modelling. EDIT 1 : At first, from the advices you gave, I tried to learn how to put all in a single texture and I found out that it is called Texture Atlas, so searching it that way brought me to some other tutorials. The Youtube video that you linked did not help me to figure out how to do, but I found an other video and I will share the link here for other who can need the help of it, here it is: So far, with the method explained in the video, I was able to create a bake with all the uv unwraps together. I still did not correct the UV Unwrap that you showed me on your previous post, I still have to do it but at first I was curious how to do all the UVs together. And I came up to an other problem now, I see the shoe quite nice in the Render, but while I am baking the result looks pretty bad, especially on the red part, it is too dark whereas it has nice lights and shadows in the render viewport window. While baking I chose diffuse as Bake Type and checked the direct and indirect lights. I also tried without the direct and indirect lights but then it becomes flat. I also tried the combined Bake Type, always with a bad result. Here's an example, now I am searching on google, reddit, forums and youtube to find out what could be the cause of the problem. The more I am trying to do, the more I am sinking deeper I guess.. lol. EDIT 2 : Hello again @Aquila Kytori , this morning I watched some baking videos and then left it a bit for now and tried the unwrapping process that you explained yesterday. Pinning is an amazing stuff, I had no idea I could do such things, obviously some experience is needed to understand where the pining should be in the future but well, here's the result that I obtained with your advice. Exterior is pretty good! Interior needs some work but I am sure that I can fix it as this way, UV Unwrap is much more understandable! Thank you! Here's the result of the unwrap: When I look at your example, I realise that you have applied the Subdivision modifier before unwrapping, is it always better to do in such way? Or it does not change much? may be applying it helps later for textureing to serve as a guide if you want to add some details on photoshop like for stitches..etc? Also I saw that you have certain triangles (I guess that they are called ngons right?) rather than quads, did you do it for a particular reason such as reducing tris number? I thought that I should never have triangles and all should be quads, am I missing something here?

Hello again @Aquila Kytori So I followed the tutorial that you have advised me to watch and i still have soo long to go but anyways, here's the result both in Substance Painter and SL. I also made a screenshot of the object inspection. I added the textures one by one to the faces as it is the way substance is baking. But I am able to import them to blender with a node with texture as colour input, so I will may be try to rerender or bake in Cycles later. I unwrapped it in this way as adding the cuts to the sides and to the front was making me problems with tileing. And here it is in secondlife: Now I have to fix the small issue/interferance that I had with the foot and then I have to proceed on rigging. May be at one or two more details and then create LoD models. I have a question again, lol, for the second shoe, should I retexture it all, or should I just mirror the textures? would that work? I will also try to bake all those textures in Blender with the textures I imported from Substance and I will try to bake it all together, If I manage, but I fear that the uv islands may overlap as I have created them all seperately. Thank you!

Hello again @Aquila Kytori , I love your replies, they are helping me a lot, thank you! I understand the reason to unwrap after solidify but what I don’t understand is, you said that SP lost too much space in UV Unwrapping. If we unwrap with the cuts that it did (I’m not talking about your cutting suggestion yet) , what I see or suppose from the UV Unwrap of the SP from the 2D image is that it has only one full cut, so, if i had cut the way it did, i could not make the UV island much bigger as there is only one UV island, right? The most I could do would be rotating it a bit more and fill more diagonal space, am I correct? On the other hand, if I cut the way you advice, I will have more UV islands so that I can position them side by side..etc and fill in more space, am I correct? I also love the idea of making small cuts like the nose area to release the tension, that I never thought of doing, I have always done complete cuts, so now i will be trying it. Thank you! I also think that the reason my SP textures did not work, it is what came to my mind yesterday when I went to sleep, was this. I had uploaded the model in secondlife without UV unwrapping just because my friend wanted to try it on to see if it fits. Then when I had the SP textures, I just uploaded them and applied to the model that I had uploaded earlier. So obviously they had no clue on where to attach things. Also this makes me understand why SP can not be used for Unwrapping as it is not saving the unwrapping info, so the unwrapping should always be done in Blender first. That tutorial..... I am so stupid for not watching that earlier, it is the best tutorial for SP for SL! So from watching the video, I realised some of my mistakes: - The lightning I was using is a fake one that will never ever be visible in SL. So I had to use the base colour mode as she shows but this brings it closer to a normal Rendering software, but what I love in SP is that the viewport is very fast, faster than Evee for my old but gold grapics card ( GTX 980M on my 4.5 years old laptop ) , so in SP, I am able to see the modifications I make “more realtime” and it helps a lot in my opinion when you are a noob and you have no idea when you change certain settings and do not have to wait 2-3 minutes between each small change. - I realised that I never used enviornment lighting, I actually tried but it did not really give good effects. - I also learned a lot about the UI of the Substance and loved how she added that final flower like effects on the metal with alpha brushes, I was doing them manually. I will give it a try again and share my “achievements” with you once I can do something. Why don’t you try the SP? it is free to try to see if you will like it or not, I’m sure that you would love it! Thank you thank you thank you!! Now I learned so much new stuff from your post of today, going to try them now!

Hello again @Aquila Kytori and thank you again for your helpful advices and detailed reply. 😊 Yes little stretching is fine for normal textures and again, i can paint on Substance painter and add some noise, grains..etc where there is stretching to fix it. But what if i want to use a tileable texture such as the red one that I had in my first post? then it is impossible? The idea of looking at where the seams are on a real object is very interesting idea, I had never thought about it, thank you for the heads up! 😉 For the seams when I tried to unwrap in Blender, I had put a vertical seam in the midle part of the rear and i had put seams on the top parts where the surface turns towards inside. So in theory, it is correct judging with your reply. Also the idea to unwrap in blender and then try to use substance painter is a good idea, i will try that, i have more ease with it for now as with the nodes I am not feeling very very comfortable yet but it is definitely something i am trying to learn but i get intimidated with it's complexity when i get lost with them lol. I still didn't find out where to see the substance painter's unwrapping but now i will search google and find it as I am curious about it too. Here's a link to a sneaker that I did in Blender. It was my second model in blender, unwrapped, textured and rendered in blender/cycles but this was extremely high poly and here with such texture, stretching was not a huge problem even tho the unwrap result was slightly better than the ballerina flats that I am trying to do right now. Here's the link: https://postimg.cc/Rqg5MqfF And here are the wireframe views as requested. 🙂 One of them is with smoothing on and the other one is swith smoothing off to show both of them. I see that the edge where the reflection is bad is kind of "broken" when the smoothing is used (smoothing value:1) instead of beeing straight but I feel a bit confused there as there is no vertex in the middle of them, so I dont know how to fix it other than adding an edge loop there 😕 EDIT: Found it how to check the UV unwrap in Substance Painter, it is unwrapped like this, so yes, I see many cuts, and a rather unusual one on the front, here it is: With this red texture, I think that substance is doing some black magic as there is no stretching, it is insane!! lol Well, no matter how much I loved using the Substance Painter, I guess that I came to a dead end as I am not able to properly export the textures, even by following the tutorials, it gives me weird results. I tried createing a new export preset with RGB's with 2D view, only with diffuse, normal and specular texture..etc but well, no luck. So now, going back to blender and force myself to fix the UV Wrapping. A question, even if i want to make both the interior and the exterior colour the same, I should still, always, apply solidify before unwrapping, am I correct?

Hello @Aquila Kytori and thank you very much for your encouraging words and help, I appreciate it! Having said that, I thought/hoped that with substance painter i could export uv mapping or bake it right there..etc, I feel like I had seen such video fast forward but I am not sure. So obviously, If i can not export it that way, then it will definitely be useless. But I don't understand, no matter that I put the correct seams in Blender, I always get stretching which i am not able to fix. Some people say that either you get stretching or you don't have good tileing if you use tileable texture, so that put me off a bit to be honest. I even have textools in Blender for UV mapping adjustments but I am not able to fix the stretching. I will check the video that you have sent, thank you very much!! Also I appreciate for teaching me how to insert a photo, let me try it to show you how the shoe looks on the feet of a friend with the ebody body. It seems to fit quite well (it is still unrigged) so I was excited like a child to see my first mesh object fit on the feet of a friend! The other two images are from blender to show how I tried to fit them, I wanted to have round front so i could not bring it more backwards but I am alwyas open to critics or advices! I guess that it worked! Thank you! Actually I think that it is enough to drag the image exactly where you want it (where you have the typing cursor) without clicking on the + sign and it automatically adds there, let's see if it works. I have no idea why I have that strange reflecting next to the pinky toe. It happens when I shade smooth, the vertexes there doesn't seem to be in a weird position as you may see/judge from the image of my previous post. 😕

Looking at my posts now, I could decrease one of the horizontal edge loops going all the side and on the toe part as well I can decrease one of the edge loops. Update: I got crazy while tying to UV unwrap and trying to fix stretches, just to try, I downloaded Substance Painter, I will be honest, without looking at much tutorial, I briefly looked at 2, I did this to see how it works and actually it works nice without UV unwrapping in blender but I have to still check how the baking..etc here works, but it is fun to be able to draw on the shoe. I know that I can do it in blender too, but I don't have the brushes in it, here it is all inclusive. Here's an example of what I did without playing with the lightings yet. As you can see, stitches..etc are not aligned well or straight enough because I just wanted to see what I could do. So, if I use the substance painter, can I get away with the UV Unwrapping and use it's unwrap?

Hello @Aquila Kytori, First of all thank you very much for your long detailed answer, I appreciate it a lot. I agree that I had a little bit too many questions lol but it is like the accumulation of questions that I could not find answer after my 2-3 weeks of "intense" experience in Blender. While I was reading your answer, I was thinking the same thing, modelling is not hard, right uv unwrapping and textureing is hard. Even though I have a much better knowledge with graphic apps such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Affinity Suit, Procreate and so on, still, adapting them this way to 3d renders is something new to me and something confusing that I am still trying to figure out. The UV baking process is clear now, thank you very much. Just a quick question, I see that your viewport is split in two for the node editor for each shader, how is it possible? did you put it there in photoshop just to show? as for me, the shader is always shows the only selected object, I see that you have all the object selected and the node editor automatically adjusts it for each window? Or can I select one material/object, in node editor select the texture and then select the other material/object and copy paste and select on node editor in the texture and they will remain selected? Yesterday @MiliMigli has been very kind to explain the techniques of UV baking, inworld, in two different methods, so your explanation together with hers has become very clear, thank you! 500 tris for a shoe? I hope that you were kidding as if it is not the case, I should stop right away as I do not know how I could achieve such result! LOL Here's an example of what I am experimenting on right now. I am adding them to the attachments as I could not figure out how you post the images under the paragraph. So I have the statics turned on in overlay options, and when I hide the feet (Ebody Flat Feet), it is telling me that I have 3.048 triangles. This is the number I should look at, right? I still did not even add all the details, I am still trying to figure out on the final shape with nice proportions and I am still not pleased, for now. Then I will be adding some pipeing on the opening in a different colour and seperate the nose part in two horizontally to make in two colours. The UV Unwrapping is still a mess, I have some stretching that I am trying to fix and the textures wont be the ones on the photos, it was just to try but anyways, UV unwrapping I have to do when I finish it, I was just trying to see how bad it was for now.. lol. I have difficulty in UV unwrapping, I find it hard to avoid stretching, but well, an other point where I have to improve myself, and I should If I want to use textures such as the one I showed on the photo as the stretching is much more evident/obvious on those one rather than some noise added to a color to imitate leather..etc. So for now my tris number is far from 500 and it will grow lol. But then obviously, I will be deleting some inner faces of the shoes on the toe part as they wont be visible, to improve the tris count and if i do not intend to rez it in a shop ..etc , i can delete all the interior faces just after the surface turns towards inside. But then again, even if i intend it, in the future, for the future i can save one for rezzing, and one for wearing. Because I want to make the inner part in a different colour. I guess I am trying to do more than my capacity lol For the shading part, @MiliMigli explained me the steps you showed me, and I experimented with it, it is wonderful, actually I discovered that with smooth shading I even have less vertex number as vertexes are shared (or something like that lol). The last two weeks, each time that I tries to log in to Secondlife Beta Grid, it never let me log in, it never worked for me, so it is most probably for the issue that you have been talking about. I was thinking may be opening a new thread where I show my progress on the shoe, and take advices from more experienced people like you on my actual state. Like I show what I am doing and may be people would be so kind enough to tell me "there are too many vertices/edges/faces, try to decrease" and I would show again. You know, like school work and teachers. 😊 Thank you very much again for your advices and the time you dedicated to show and type it all, much appreciated. 😊

Hello everyone! I would love to start creating shoes for sl, but I was a bit confused, so I wanted to ask some questions to people with more experience. Just a little bit of background about me. I am not new to modelling as I am a yacht designer in RL and I am modelling bunch of stuff for my work and rendering them. But we use nurbs modelling, so preferably Rhinocersor3D or Alias Autostudio which is complete different way of modelling, so that's why, I had never cared to try to learn a different modelling technique and may be mess my existing knowledge but getting confused at the end, nor I had the time for it. Also I should admit that I hated it's old UI, LOL. With lockdown and working with 50% rhytm, I was getting bored in my free time and I decided to check some blender videos and wanted to give it a try again. Polygonal modelling has always been very intimidating to me, but also, it was very interesting as the "sculpting" way of modelling was very cool and I thought that I could use it for my work in the future to make some "fast" ideation models/concepts. So I dedicated myself to some tutorials and started to learn blender. I have already made a watch completely in blender and a shoe for a RL friend's shoe company with some photorealistic renders. I'm adding a quick render of the watch as well. Well the watch was the first three model I did, so please be kind with your critiques! Having said that, then I wanted to dive deeper in Blender, checked many tutorials about the topology of polygon models, how to make them correct, uv unwrapping, baking textures with cycles..etc, trying to understand about the vertex numbers, trying to make non-destructive modelling...etc etc. And the more I dived deep, the more I realized how unbeleivable Blender is as a free app and with it's add-ons, it becomes even more powerful and I start to have fun modelling with it spending all my free time trying to learn it lately and as you may imagine, I am faaaaaaaaar from being good at it. So, after playing around with it, I was thinking that I would enjoy making shoes for SL. Not only shoes, may be furnitures, buildings..etc too in the future but would enjoy starting with shoes even though I know that it is not the easiest. So here's my confusions, thoughts and questions: - Since I never had a shop, I will never ever have chance to get my hands on the dev kits of big companies such as Maitreya, Legacy (TMP), Slink...etc so I have to start with a more "newbie friendly" company such as Ebody. Ok, took the dev kit from them. When you make an open toe shoe, do you model the shoes as well? or do you use the toes from the dev kit and just make new toe nail colors/nail polish..etc ? How does it work? - I know how to bake texture for an object with a single material, like let's say, if I make a table, I am able to bake it thru cycles in all wood. But if I want to make metal legs for it, I don't know how to do it. Should I bake them separately and then link them in sl? Obviously same applies for the shoes, if I make shoes with two three different materials/colors, how can I bake it? I could not really find helpful resources on it. If you could point me to some of them, I would appreciate it. - Faces/triangles count is important and I have to keep it as low as possible and SL is allowing for around 75k faces if i am not wrong, to upload. More face / more lags? When I ask my friends like how many faces would normally be a nicely modelled converse shoe (more or less) they always tell me as low as i can. But the problem is this, I would love to have a guideline in front of me, If I am too far off from the ideal number or not. For example, if I model it with 20k faces, then I may say "that's it, it is very low poly, it is fantastic..etc" whereas may be the ideal number would be 5k. That is why, I would love to know if you could give me some approximative numbers. Obviously it depends on the number of details, such as modelled stitches against stitches on texture..etc, but I was curious if i could find out some numbers. - Modifiers, is an other confusion. Obviously since I am working on yachts and sometimes on cars and nurbs modelling there is no such thing as smoothing..etc, I am used to see things smooth and I use smoothing a lot (subdivision modifer) while modelling and it is a big "no-no" for secondlife If I understand right as it increases the amount of vertexes/faces..etc. So I am trying to get used to use it less, instead using bevels..etc etc, but, in blender, when I make "shade smooth" , it makes the things look nicer with less subdivision, when I export it in collada format for SL, will it upload with shade smooth or shade flat? Will the modifiers be applied during the export process? I suppose yes, but still wanted to ask. Sorry I asked many questions and it is a long post, I hope that someone could point me to more resources or give me some advices. I have already watched a lot of youtube tutorials both SL and non SL oriented for Blender as in the beginning I wanted to learn more about the modelling in blender rather than "modelling for SL".