DeleD Community Edition

[chronozphere]

Hey guys

Before I release my plugin, I'll make a small tutorial about how to use it. I'll explain to you how to texture a car by using the planar mapping function of my plugin. However, I wont explain everything step by step from begin to end. I also assume that you have some basic DeleD skills.

You need NashaUV 0.72 for this tutorial. It will be released soon!

Here is the texture I used:

http://iam.colum.edu/students/andrew.hass/ewt/flexsandywowtutorial/car.jpg

Here is the model I made:

Download model

1. Create a car model (or use the one I made).

2. Add a material with the car texture and apply it to the model. It will probably look like this:



3. Open NashaUV and double click "NO TEXTURE" in the statusbar. This changes the way the texture is displayed. It can have the values"NO TEXTURE", "TEXTURE" or "TILES".



4. We will now start texturing the car by using planar mapping. Go to planar mapping mode by clicking the vertex icon in the topleft and selecting it in the menu.

5. Select all polygons of the car's roof and hood (all faces pointing up). This is my selection:



In the UV-view you see a preview of the planar mapping of our current selection. It is not how it should be now. We need to rotate our mapping plane to make sure that the mapped polys match the texture. Also we need to adjust the "target gizmo" (rectangle in UV view) so that it lies on the right part of the texture.

NOTE: You can use the U and V axises (yellow and purple, in both views) to align the mapping plane. These axises show how the polygons will be mapped to UV space.

6. Use the rotate tool in the 3d view to rotate the gizmo about the Y axis. Click somewhere on the green ring and drag the mouse to rotate.
It's recommended to use "angular snapping" here, to get a perfect 90 degree rotation (enable/disable it in the statusbar).
You should get something like this:



As you see, the polygons are now aligned with the car roof visible on the texture.

7. Now we will adjust the target gizmo. Click the bottom-right handle and drag until the target gizmo is nicely in place.



Use the handles to move the target gizmo so that the polygons nicely fit on the texture.

8. Click "UV map" in the toolbar to get to the UV mapping tool. Here you can click "Map" to apply the planar mapping.



As you see, the roof is now texture mapped. Note that the orientation of the mapping plane is important to get good looking results.
It's time for you to do some fine tuning now. Go to vertex mode and move vertices around until it looks good. I'll skip that step here.

9: We repeat the same steps for the bottom of the car.

- Select the right polygons
- Make sure the mapping plane is in place (otherwise, rotate it)
- Make sure the target gizmo is in place
- Map it!



10: Now we will take a look at the front of the car.
After you have selected the front polygons and moved the target gizmo into place, you'll see that the preview looks quite weird.



The mapping gizmo is not in the right position here. You can start rotating the thing until it looks good, but there is a quicker way.

Select the "align tool" (3 blue dots icon). This tool is used to quickly align the mapping gizmo. As you see "selection" is selected by default. This means that the mapping gizmo will be aligned to the selection. We only have to click "apply" to get the plane into place.



Our preview looks good now. Let's map it.

11: You have now learned all the basics of planar mapping. You can repeat the steps for the back and the sides of the car.

When mapping the sides of the car, you might run into the problem that they will be mirrored. In this case, mirroring the mapping plane might not work (need to take a closer look at this). You can solve this by just mapping the poly's and mirror them in polygon mode.

Keep your eyes open and finetune the UV coordinates as you go. Eventually, you will get the following result:



Hope you find this tutorial usefull. Feel free to ask questions.

[Jeroen]

Excellent! People can really tutorials like this.

I recommend using NashaUV instead of DeleD's own UV tools.
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[harper]

Absolutely a great step forward. I want it.

[AWM Mars]

This tool will elevate DeleD into another level. Is it going to become part of DeleD or stay as a pluggin?
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[chronozphere]

Thanks for all the kind words!

It will remain a plugin because integrating it will require alot of work while it does not really "add" something.