Texuring Tutorial Request

[Marcello]

Trylon that's vey usefull stuff. You should add it as a seperate tutorial. No need to rewrite this piece entirely for that. Just a tad and it will make a great tutorial.

[andylegate]

Sorry if I confused anyone!

There is something that I've noticed with things like the tutorials, and explinations that are given here. It's something that an instructor or teacher will notice too, and having been an instructor while in the Navy, it jumps out at me. Let me give you an example:

Now Jojon, I'm not picking on you, just using you as an example....:

You said:

This way, you can have lots of detail showing when up close and you get automagic anti-aliasing when you recede, avoiding the "moire-effect" that was so apparent in early realtime texture-mapping implementations - this because the less detailed "mipmaps" are simply interpolated scaled down versions of the detail texture ("pre-antialiased", if you like) -- this approach also requires no extra sub-pixel processing at runtime, making it cheap in terms of CPU and GPU resources, at the expense of some extra memory usage.

Now.......when you start using terms like "moire-effect' and "interpolated scaled down version of the detail texture", etc, etc.
You have to stop and think: Are you reaching the average noobie here on the forums? How many people that are having difficulty with something have a detailed background in 3D modeling and texturing? Will they understand those terms? Should you include a "layman" version of what you're talking about?

Some people here talk WAY about the average Joe's head here, and what happens is, you (and others, again, not picking on you) give the correct answer to the problem that they are having, but they unfortunately have NO idea what you're talking about either. So they are still stumped, or still don't know how to fix the problem.

That's why when I try to answer a question, I do so on a lower level. Oh, and I would have answered your question but was on the road to pick up my son from Charlotte, North Carolina airport when you posted yesterday,

Anyway, I was trying to explain simply: "Dude! You have to tell Uru to use smaller and smaller scaled down versions of your texture so it looks good from far away and up close!" but without going into techincal detail about it, as Trylon (thank god) did.

I believe that we should all be on the "same page" so to speak and using the correct terms, etc, etc. But real life is, we have a LOT of people here trying to learn Age Creation that have never touched anything like this in their lives. And this place is not exactly a structured classroom (all though Jennifer's Classroom is helping people a LOT!).

[Jojon]

Will they understand those terms? Should you include a "layman" version of what you're talking about?

Too true!

On the flip side of the coin, I find it is also very easy, when trying to explain something (however fleeting a grap one has on it oneself), to get stuck in a longwinded loop of: "You need to....but then you should first know about....and a prerequisite to that is....which in turn requires knowledge about the-very-thing-it-all-began-with" :P

Brief and to the point, versus fully informative: a difficult balance to achieve, at times. :7


Anyway; thanks for floating this issue and the mapping one, both - valueable stuff. :)

[Trylon]

Added it as a tutorial.
Detail texturing: Taking advantage of MipMaps

I also sorted out the existing tutorials into categories, so it's easier to find the tutorial you want.

[Chacal]

I'm so glad to read about other people having trouble with texturing. I can do pretty much what I want in Blender as far as modeling goes, but I hit a roadblock when it came to texturing. The "First Age" tutorial didn't help, because it explains what to do (click here, type this) but does not explain why. It is more a recipe than a tutorial.

In my case, not understanding the underlying concepts prevents me from learning anything. After sucessfully doing the tutorial, I had a good-looking Age, but was unable to do it again.

So I put it aside, deciding I'd have to go to the Blender site and understand the concepts (materials, textures, alpha layers, mip maps, vertex painting, etc) and how they relate to each other). Basically, I need a data model (an object can have N materials which in turn can be made of N textures, etc). Or an entity-relationship diagram. If i can get to understand that, then I won't need a tutorial.

This never happened because I never had time, and there you have the reason why I'm not making Ages today.

So I'd appreciate if someone had a link (or a book reference) to a clear explanation on the concepts behind texturing. I need to know WHY you create materials, WHY you create textures and layers, HOW they relate to materials, WHY sometimes you use vertex painting and sometimes you don't.

Also, from using game editors in the old times, I was under the incorrect perception that materials related to real-life materials. For instance, you would use Photoshop and, using several layers of textures, create a "marble" material. Then in the game editor you would select a wall and apply the "marble" material to it and voilà, a marble wall. This sounded logical, but it seems it's not the same in Blender.

[Jojon]

Oh, but it is!

The thing is, though that a "material" has several properties more than just the texture. How glossy (specularity) is it? How reflective is it? How transparent? Is that clear or matt glass? What is its refraction index (how much does it bend light)?

The usefulness of many of the properties depends on what you use to render. If you raytrace the scene, all the "real world" type properties will be used in the calculations, while a simpler form of rendering might wrap an environment map onto a supposedly shiny sphere, where the raytracer would instead have calculated what shows up on its surface, based on its properties, light sources and everything else in the surrounding scene. As a matter of fact, we can let Blender's renderer create an environment map for us, for use with URU - or within Blender - environment mapping is a good bit less calculation heavy than "proper" raytracing, for things where accuracy is less important.

As for the texture layers, this could be seen as simply a sequence of basic image processing steps that are perfomed every frame. You input a number of textures, which are mixed together one by one, using various mixing modes, scales and offsets - out comes *one* resulting image that is mapped into the mesh. (although this is done for every pixel, not a complete image "prerendered" before drawing the 3D, as I kinda made it sound).

Hope I didn't put this so bad it just made things worse...

[Chacal]

Does this mean I could have a library of pre-made materials and just apply them to objects?

[Jojon]

Yes. You will still need to (UV) map the material onto the mesh, though - Blender has no way of figuring out just how one intend put a roll of wallpaper onto a wall. (default for a newly created UV-map, is that every face covers the entire texture [as well as their edge count allows])

To import parts of one .blend into another project, there is the File->Append/Link menu item. When you have picked a source .blend file you will get to dive into it, as were it just another directory and load any material/object/whatever from it into the currently open project.
The mutually exclusive "Append" and "Link" buttons, let you decide whether the imported stuff should actually be copied to the open project, or just linked, in which case the project will be dependent on the .blend file containing that material library.