Hey guys, I’ve got a topic I would like to cover. Feel free to comment with any ideas, or past experiences you have had.
So I just began modeling in Blender (First time modeling ever). I am making a arena and a tank right now. I’ve got used to the modeling aspect of the whole program with ease, not too many hitches along the way.
Then I got myself into the apparently the dooming texturing phase and I just feel like I can’t do anything right. I knew when I began making the models that I would have to texture them, but its far more complicating to me then I thought it would be. I have textured my whole arena a good two or three times over just trying to get it right. I’m kinda surprised at how much different a texture in the wrong place can make the whole model look like a rats turd. lol
Anyways, I am also struggling to learn all the ins and outs of texturing, things like, how do I paint over a texture in the blender game mode, and how do I make a seamless texture in Photoshop? Keep me searching for answers on YouTube that I feel like are just for rendering purposes and not for game models.
The main reason I made this thread was to ask you guys if texturing was this hard for you when you began modeling, or am I just a hopeless tadpole in a endless pond of hopelessness? Also if you have any links to tutorial videos (That work on game models, not rendering models) or good blender texturing books that have helped you out in the past and will hopefully help me along my agonizing path to epic game models. Always, reach for the stars, right?
Only thing I can make that’s half decent are terrains and that’s cause I use heightmaps and it’s easy to select the different shades of gray and replace with textures in photoshop and clean it up with the pattern tool. Make the heightmap big and cut it into sections.
Like:
Texturing is, from my experience, one of the most difficult thing to master when you begin 3d. Even for people who have great skills in 2d painting. So don’t worry it’s not hopeless
You can read this, even if it’s for dota, they give great general advice :
If you want to choose a color palette for painted textures, i really like kuler.adobe.com
For photo, cgtexture.com is great and part free.
And for your seamless texture in toshop, the translate effect is what you are looking for. Let say you are painting a 512x512 tex, just translate the tex 256 in x and y and you will have the seams in the the center of the image. Repair the seams and translate 256 again.
For my painted texture I personnaly prefer paint tool saï over photoshop. The color blending is way better even if simplier.
If you don’t know saï, here is a video of an illustration made with it by a guy from ankama (dofus, wakfu): YouTube
I am doing all the texturing in Blender, is much easier for me, than using any 2D software. A great resource to learn Blender is http://cgcookie.com/blender/
So now I have a problem with exporting textures from Blender to Unity.
Here is how I texture things:
I go into edit mode and select a part of the model that I would like to have a material on. Then I press U and click on smart UV unwrap. Then I create a new material on the panel to the right, then change it to the basic color I want it to be. I then go to the texture section on the same panel, create a new texture and change it to image or movie. Then I click open and grab a image I have stored on my computer, then go down and change Generated to UV. I then change the size of the texture (how many times I want it to repeat). And there ya go, that’s how I texture.
So am I doing it wrong or something? Is there a better way that you know of? If so, can you please send me a tutorial link, or just explain? Because when I export everything to Unity, the model will show up and the material on it will also show up with the basic colors that I put on it and all, but just not the textures that I previously had on the material in Blender.
I find texturing in Blender is cumbersome and outdated.
My suggestion is, to use a dedicated texture painting app like 3dcoat, Mari or Mudbox. These cost some money (3dcoat is quite cheap tho) but it hugely speeds up your workflow and saves you a lot hassle.
Not sure how much money you want spend and how serious you are. But there are also some great DVD’s from eat3d, Gnomon workshop etc. about texturing.
By doing so you’ll end up with poor quality uvs. But that’s another problem
To have a texture in unity, you don’t really need to create a material in blender. In fact I usually don’t. All you have to do is to link a texture in the uv editor. Select all your vertex, go over uv panel, select all uv points then go to image>open image and choose your texture. By doing so, the material created in unity on import will have the name of the texture with default diffuse, tiling and the texture will be automatically linked. Then you can tweak the material directly in unity. I find this way much faster.
If you create another object with the same texture applied in blender, unity will use the existent material.
Hmmm, alright, thanks for the great info pixoloco! It just REALLY sucks because I already textured my whole tank just the way I wanted it to be lol. Is there any way that I can still export all the work I did without having to re-texture the whole dang thing?
If it’s possible, i don’t know how. You’ll probably just have to reselect the texture in the material created by unity and copy the size x,y (you don’t need the z) from blender to tiling x,y in the unity material. If you don’t have 50 materials it may be the solution.
I’ve worked with Blender, 3dCoat, and now ZBrush.
Honestly…U/V mapping and texturing to me is THE hardest part of all of them, especially when it comes to optimizing your textures and working with low poly models. It’s like black magic or something. It’s probably been my biggest source of frustration when it comes to modelling.
I don’t know of any single package that provides an efficient way to create low poly models, with optimized uvs/textures. Sure, you can crank something out in ZBrush. But it may not be optimized for repeating textures/uvs. Meaning a texture that could only take 256x256 will take up much more.
And don’t forget visible seams in your textures. That’s a whole other ball of wax.
I’ve tried baking multiple materials into one atlas, in Blender. I honestly still don’t know if I’m doing it right. But I got it to work (sometimes).
What’s funny is…it’s not an optimized atlas. Heck, half of it might be blank. So instead of my total texture usage being 256x256 for a single model, I get an atlas that is twice that size because blender doesn’t realize the atlas is wasting space. But again…maybe it’s something I’m doing wrong.
I just don’t understand how to efficiently create low poly models, with optimized texture usage, for any of those packages.
Oh…and pretty much all of the blender tutorials…assume you have ALREADY baked the finished texture somehow, and you just need to apply the uvs. Whoopdedoo! Crap getting the finished texture from various materials is one of the trickiest parts in my experience, with blender.
If you’re already texturing it, but then decided to want to change your uvs, you can bake the OLD texture onto the new uv model using a piece of software called xNormal.
It’s quite simpe, simply import the texture and the 2 models as high and low poly (they don’t actually need to be high or low, it just calls them this way).
This will then give you a brand new texture map that fits your new UVS for the new model, you can then simply import this into Unity from there.
I can provide pictures is nessesary, there is a video tutorial on this from Zbrush, but the same concept will apply.
I just figured out how to make models in Blender and all I need to do now is figure out how to paint models. But this stuff doesn’t make any sense to me!
I have a few courses that cover this topic on my YT channel
Basic Game Development has a couple of videos on texturing
Adventures in texturing has a lot of videos on texturing, some about painting textures
If you sign up to my mailing list (website) you get access to a series on texturing a game asset (a small house). It uses Photoshop but could be done in GIMP.
