Texturing and materials (again)

[Tinuviel]

It's good to see from the other post that I am not the only one having problems with materials and texturing:-) To day when I exported what I have made so far to my shell, I discovered a funny thing. Some of my objects was a bit trancparent. I was actually able to look straight through two objects. When I looked at my blender file the only difference I could find between the trancparent object and those who where not, was that I had made a material colour and put down the col slider of the texture a bit. I also had some objects with shaddow buffer activated and some not.

So my first questions is: Can only textures be used to color the objects, and not material color?

Seconed question: I obviously can use col and stenci in the material buttons window. But can I use the other alternatives like nor, emit and Ray mir?

[Jojon]

The "col" in the texture map-to tab refers to the (pixel) colour of the *texture*. The mixing ratio of the first layer, is between the layer and whatever is behind in the scene, in effect making the object transparent. The colour that you can set in the same tab, is what is mixed in, if there is nothing behind the mapped mesh.

To tint your texture, you will want to change the diffuse colour (again "col", but in the "Material" tab), ratio is simply how saturated your colour is. You can also use vertext painting, but (for Uru and as far as I can see) only if the material is shadeless.

I find it's most of the time best to use a simple small texture to add tint, since a uniform tint tends to make the object look to "new". :7


I suppose a shadeless material with full Ambient lighting is pretty much emitting... :7

[Tinuviel]

Thanks for the reply, Jojon. That is what I have done. Well, that is what I have done, if I understud you correct. I have set a colour in the material. (the diffuse one) and then added an image as texture. To make the diffuse colour show, I put down the col-slider in the map-input for the image. Besides adding an other image, this is the only way I know to make the two mix.

[Jojon]

*looking at own stuff*

Hmm, try increasing "Amb" the tiniest bit; maybe 0.1 (the colour may be multiplied by Ambient lighting and thus not show up if it's null - another reason to use a texture layer for the tint. :P)

For your opaque material, the texture "col" slider (for layer 1) should be 1.0 and shouldn't affect how much tint you get from the diffuse colour - just how transparent the material is.

The tint will not show up in Blender's realtime view - only in renders and Uru.


What's this, a pipe unseen? *tries a few notes*

[Tinuviel]

That did the trick. Thanks again, Jojon, for taking the time! It seem like I have to have the amb = 1 to make sure the object is non transparent. If I have amb = 0,5 it's half trancparent and 0 = invsibol:-)
The only problem now is to adjust how much color to show, it really insist on on being more in the front than what I want:-) But I will get there.

I hope there is someone who could help me with my seconed question too:-)

[Jojon]

Hope you'll forgive, but I persist:

"Amb" (in the Shaders tab), should have nothing to do with the transpiracy of the object -- it is the "ambient light", that comes from all directions - the light that affects your object also where no other light sources shines on it. If there is ambient light, the object will never be in complete shadow. Unless the material is shadeless; where there is strong light coming in from a lamp, the texture colour will "take over", as will your specular colour, if you use specular lighting for the material, so you may want to give it a similar hue as the diffuse one, only much darker (since the spec col is ADDED).

"Col" (in the MapTo tab) DOES affect transpiracy - if any layer is plain mixed 100%, the object will be opaque - if you have only one layer and mix it 0.5, the material will be 50% transparent. Other than "mix", you can use "add" and "multiply" (..and supposedly "subtract", but that didn't work, back when I tried.)

To adjust the strength of the tint from your diffuse colour (or vertex paint), vary the saturation of the colour -- the more you stray from grayscale to a rich colour, the stronger the tone: [ R=0.333, G=0.333, B=0.333 ] is a darkish gray, and will not give any tint at all, while the very red [ R=1, G=0, B=0 ] will give you much tint. (note that you can toggle between RGB and HSV colour models)


As far as I know, we can currently not map textures to anything other than colour (and alpha, for stencils), but since Plasma does support bump mapping, for one thing, that may change in the future.

[Tinuviel]

You are offcourse right, and it is good that you persist:-) It is sometimes a bit hard for me to understand what exactly the different buttons do, one reason is my lack of knowledge about the english language. And thanks for taking the time to explain it to me. I did not see the differense between col slider and amb when I tested it out. I could just see that putting amb up seemed to help, I probably also put up the col slider and forgott I did it in my hurry to test it before I went to job.