Hey

I have an assignment due on Tuesday for my 3D subject at school. It's a three part assignment- modeling/lighting/texturing. I'm up to the texturing part... I have all my textures, but am finding it very difficult getting them on to the models properly.

In the screenshot is my theatre scene. I'm trying to have a repeating texture go around the base of the upper balcony. On my teachers advice I've used planar mapping and projected from the camera. That gives me a good start for the first section, but then I have to(?) copy and paste those UVs into the other polygons? That would take forever! Its double trouble because sometimes when I copy and paste UVs, they're flipped or something, then I have to cycle them to get them to look right. I'm not going to do that for that whole lower section, not for my whole scene!?

Is there another, better way?

Hopefully I've made myself clear enough. The texture is to go around the bottom of the balcony, which is curved.

What should I do?

Thanks in advance guys.

Haven't really used Maya but to me it seems like the problem here is caused by projectin textures from camera's direction with planar mapping. It won't work because the faces you want to texture are in different angles. For solution, I'm not familiar with options you have in Maya but see if there's an option to align texture according to face/surface direction.

I just whipped up a quick scene in 3dsmax, (not very complex, simple box that is edited to go in a /--\ shape) and for it to work I needed to use box mapping with the UVW Mapping modifier. Never used Maya, so maybe that will help.

(MAYA IS SCARY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

In Maya, can you edit the UVW map by moving/rotating/scaling faces. I mean that if you could just select all faces and apply UVW map on that. Then when you go edit it, flatten it and scale up so that only the 9x2 faces on the beginning fit on it. If you shape doesn't bend up and down this should work as well since tiling will repeat the texture on rest of the object. Basically you don't have to align every single face on UVW map, just use few in the beginning to get size right.

Kinda hard to explain, especially when I don't know the program.

Quote from dawesdust_12 :

I just whipped up a quick scene in 3dsmax, (not very complex, simple box that is edited to go in a /--\ shape) and for it to work I needed to use box mapping with the UVW Mapping modifier.

Box mapping doesn't work in this case because object is rather long with bends back and forth. In 3dsmax you would simply just use Unwrap UVW modifier and choose "Face" for mapping option. But then again, he's looking for help regarding Maya and I don't know if there is similiar way to do it.

uhh, I meant face, I was just a bit occupied then. Sorry, I'm stupid.

yes uvw mapping is the solution of the problem, but because it looks like a cylinder and not a box, try with the cylinder setting, or make your uvw map if you can, sorry i can't help more in maya because i never use it, but that thing might be the same as in 3dsmax

Thanks guys- I ended up using simple planar mapping from the most appropriate axis. It's not perfect, but it saves headaches... I'll ask my teacher about it again, anyway.

Here's a few bits and pieces I'm working on for the scene. There's going to be an octopus on stage- I've called him Barry. Next trick is to work out how to pull textured models into Maya from Zbrush..

just create a simple a displacement/bump/normal map in zbrush from the object, then you can put it in to maya there should be a render settings for it in zbrush because most of the people use that way

This might help: ZBrush To Maya Displacement Guide
I'm still practising the modeling part and totally suck at texturing, so haven't really looked much into making displacement maps

Speaking of, your stuff looks really nice apart from the texture on "Barry" that seems so low res compared to displacement map.

Thanks for the guide, seems clear and nicely detailed I'm really looking for information on how to export a colour map from Zbrush into Maya. Perhaps its the same process..

The octopus texture's pretty dodgy I know. It is a first run and hopefully I'll be able to get something a little better on the next go- I didn't want to go so detailed if the process was all wrong and I had to start again.

Considering the size of your scene compared to object, there might not even be any noticable difference with higher resolution texture.

Here's the final. Wish there was still time to work on it (the octopus isn't textured at all), but... meh- sleep and getting to school is more important now. :insane:

You should have done a squid and then offered it to Scawen as a model.