DeleD Community Edition

[chronozphere]

NashaUV guide

I've noticed that people needed a manual for NashaUV. So I'll explain how it works. Please read this guide carefully before asking questions about the plugin.

Starting it up

To start NashaUV, select it from the "Plugins" menu.
Make sure you first select the object(s) you want to texture. Only this object will be loaded into the plugin.

The user-interface:

As you see, the user-interface of NashaUV consists of:

>Two viewports (one UV view on the left, 3d view on the right)
>A toolbar at the top
>A tool-property bar beneath the toolbar
>A statusbar containing options

I'll explain them one by one.

The UV viewport

This is the viewport on the left. It shows how the texture is mapped onto your model. All the vertices and polygons you see in the 3d view, are also available in UV view and can be manipulated there to change how the texture looks on the model.

important: Initially no texture is shown here. Double click NO TEXTURE in the statusbar to make it visible.

If you move your mouse over the viewport, you'll see a dark bleu rectangle appear around the viewport. This indicates that the viewport has focus. Focus is needed, if you want to do things in a viewport.

To move around, you can use the WASD keys or the arrow keys (this depends on what's selected in the "options"). You can also drag with your right mousebutton.
To zoom in/out, you can use Shift + right mousebutton drag or the scrollwheel.

The 3D viewport

This viewport is used to preview the model while you are working on the UV's. It's also used when you want to use a mapping gizmo (I'll cover that later).

The 3D view has the same move/zoom controls as the UV view.

The toolbar

I'll now explain all the buttons on the toolbar:



Edit mode: Clicking this toolbutton allows you to select the edit mode you want to work in. You can start editing vertices, edges, polygons just like in DeleD. There are also 3 "mapping modes". These are actually a special kind of polygon mode and are used for fast texture mapping.
The tools: The next part contains the tools. You're probably familiar with the first three, so no need to explain those in detail. Next you have the "align", "mirror" and "weld" tools (ATM welding is not added yet). Finally, there's the UV Map tool that is only used in the special mapping modes (more on that later).
Undo/Redo: That's an easy-to-understand, yet invaluable option.
Select material: This button lets you select a material that was used by any of the objects that you imported into the plugin. You can only work on polygons that have the selected material. The rest of the geometry is gray. You can use Page-up and Page-down to quickly cycle throught the list of available materials.
Select layer: Some materials have multiple layers. Layers can be added in the DeleD material editor. This button lets you select one of the 4 possible layers of the selected material. All the polygons can be textured differently for each layer.
Options: Click here to customize the colors and some other settings
Save changes to DeleD: This floppy-disk icon is very important. You must click this when you are happy with the texturing of your models and you want to send the changes to DeleD.
Exit: What would this do... hmm

The tool-property bar

The options in this bar depend on the selected tool. It offers extra features and allows you to do exact movements etc.... Use the apply button in the right to apply an operation from the toolbar.

The statusbar

Now I'll explain the stuff in the statusbar (from left to right):


Edit mode: Just shows the edit mode. You can double click it to cycle through them
Snapping: Double click this to enable/disable snapping. Snapping works with the move rotate and scale tools. If you want to change the grid size, check the options.
Angular Snapping: This is used by the rotate tool. You can snap the angle while rotating. This makes "perfect" rotations like 90 or 45 degrees a lot easier.
Texture: This tells us "how" to show the texture. Double click on it to select on of the following options: "NO TEXTURE", "TEXTURE" and "TILE".
Culling: When this is enabled, the back-sides of the polyons are not shown. The option is also usefull for selecting. If you only want to select polygons that are facing towards you, you should enable this feature.
Hint: Just a hint of the selected tool/edit mode.

Hope this get's most of you started. I'll probably add things here in the future.

[AWM Mars]

It looks very detailed and functional. I have used it before with some success. I was only limited by my own limitations, not the tool. I'm looking forward to doing more and more with this

You should add/amend to, your details on how you use grid and the plannar mode. That sets this apart
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[paul_nicholls]

Thanks for the NashaUV help here Nathan, I will have to give it a go - I haven't really had anything to texture yet in DeleD up to this point LOL

cheers,
Paul
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Hi ho...hi ho...it's off 3d modeling I go...