So I am finally at the stage of working out my texture issues, and I am faced with an odd delema here. See I have to large and long circular railings that have a wooden texture applied and, well they look like this.
As you can see the closer railing has a sort of mixed and distorted look while the second is just plain ugly. Now I don't no much about refining textures so any help you guys could give would be very much aprecaited.
Thanks Much
"Ty"
Help Refining Textures
Re: Help Refining Textures
UV-mapping can be icky. :7
Have you done any manual UV-map tampering with Blender yet? If you haven't: make one panel a "UV/image editor" Any faces selected in a 3D view will also show up superimposed over the texture shown in the UV/image editor and can be manipulated freely by selecting and moving (and scaling and rotating and aligning and welding...) corners, in a familiar way. I'm sure it's pretty much the same in Maya?
Note that you can copy uv coordinates from one polygon to many (select a bunch of polys that you want to copy to and last the copy-from one, then hit ctrl-C and pick "UV coordinates". There is however no guarantee that the vertex order of the destination polys are the same as the source, so you may need to do a bit of mirroring/rotating of UVs (select a poly and press ctrl-F for the "face specials" menu.
For this application, I am assuming you'll want to map the railing in the way that you unroll it's cross-section as a tube, slit lengthwise and strech it out into a long straight grid..(?) Inevitably there will be distortion with this approach, but that is negible as long as the radius of the railing is great enough.
EDIT: Two reasons for that distortion: 1) The difference in length between the inner and outer peripheral side (ie. "keystone effect") and worse: 2) at the end of the day we are dealing with triangles, whose downsides compounds onto reason 1. Your "keystoned" rectangle is split diagonally - the triangles share one side and they can't match up nice and proportional in an non-perfect rectangle. Play around and check out the results -- make sure to select "View->update automatically" in the UV/image editor menues. This makes changes to the mapping show up right away in any 3D views.
Have you done any manual UV-map tampering with Blender yet? If you haven't: make one panel a "UV/image editor" Any faces selected in a 3D view will also show up superimposed over the texture shown in the UV/image editor and can be manipulated freely by selecting and moving (and scaling and rotating and aligning and welding...) corners, in a familiar way. I'm sure it's pretty much the same in Maya?
Note that you can copy uv coordinates from one polygon to many (select a bunch of polys that you want to copy to and last the copy-from one, then hit ctrl-C and pick "UV coordinates". There is however no guarantee that the vertex order of the destination polys are the same as the source, so you may need to do a bit of mirroring/rotating of UVs (select a poly and press ctrl-F for the "face specials" menu.
For this application, I am assuming you'll want to map the railing in the way that you unroll it's cross-section as a tube, slit lengthwise and strech it out into a long straight grid..(?) Inevitably there will be distortion with this approach, but that is negible as long as the radius of the railing is great enough.
EDIT: Two reasons for that distortion: 1) The difference in length between the inner and outer peripheral side (ie. "keystone effect") and worse: 2) at the end of the day we are dealing with triangles, whose downsides compounds onto reason 1. Your "keystoned" rectangle is split diagonally - the triangles share one side and they can't match up nice and proportional in an non-perfect rectangle. Play around and check out the results -- make sure to select "View->update automatically" in the UV/image editor menues. This makes changes to the mapping show up right away in any 3D views.
Re: Help Refining Textures
Thanks for the info Jojon I shall apply this and letcha know how it went. . 