If you ever did a more complex skins, with elements that went around certain edges, you know the problem. You fiddle around for ages to get the transition from one UV-patch to the next one as seamless as possible, with more or less satisfying results. Especially with the different stretch-factors for certain UV-patches this can be a pain in the ass.

When i used the LFS-Skin Viewer i always wished there would be a feature, where you just projecting a texture onto the 3D-model of the car and get back a corresponding skin. The difficulty lies within the transformation from the frontal-mapping of the projection into the UV-Mapping of the 3D Model. With the help of Cinema 4D and Bodypaint i was able to do this transformation:






With this technique the possibilities for complex skins with logos, pictures, etc. are huge. Especially for open wheelers with all those edges at the rear. My example is just a fast and sloppy one but i think its still impressive

Here the result, i know the render isn't the best, but i wanted a fast result. If you playing CS GO the theme should be familiar

Original Src

Render:


Skin



I still work on the quality of the reversed UV-Texture. Its still a bit blocky and you need quite big pixel sizes to get a good result since there is a certain loss when transforming into the UV. But on the plus side, you dont need to mind the stretching. You just put on you texture as you would like to see it on the car and the rest goes automatically

I've been doing this a while with the old photoshop extended, but the results were never anywhere as clean as this. Good find

Quote :

With this technique the possibilities for complex skins with logos, pictures, etc. are huge

How did you do the reverse uv mapping? "By hand" setting some points on the texture and assinging it to vertices and then it interpolates the rest somehow? Or does Cinema read the uv-coordinates from the models?

I used the cmx2obj converter to get the obj-file(s) of the car. Within those files the geometry is described(vertices,tri's and normales) as well as the UV mapping, so what vertice corresponds with what coordinate on the texture. So the UV-Mapping is already in the files. I just opened the file with C4D and it also reads the UV-Mapping. So rendering a skin is possible without problems since the UV-Mapping is already done.

I then used Bodypaint 3D, a powerfull UV-Edit and Paint tool within C4D to project a image onto the 3D Model and let Bodypaint do its magic by reversing this projection back onto UV-Mapping.

Hope i described it somehow understandable

Ah ok, thanks.
This converter http://users.skynet.be/tom.demuer/software.html ?
From the screenshot C4D looks like nice program. Price is less nice.
But this 3D-texturing methode seems pretty cool. With such skins you can be star of every drift server

Something similiar is possible in Blender: there are the usual paint-program-tools like lines, circles, brushes etc to paint/texture in 3D, over UV-edges too. But interface horror.

That's brilliant, Ronald.

Sure beats stitching it together by hand. Good job.