when to texture?

[supernekosan]

its better to texture befor or to make instance at least..

[adrie]

Hi there, thanks so much for the response.. just wondering.. once the object's textured all the subsequently duped objects will have the same uvs or the uvs are duplicated as well?

[bonestructure]

IF your duplicated objects are basic prinitives IE, columns, blocks etc, what I do is UV unwrap the basic object, texture map it so that all four sides or whatever are slightly different. Apply the UV map texture to your object, then when you dupe them, you can rotate the dupes so that your textures aren't repeated so obviously. However, if you're going for photo realism, you just can't get away with that. You have to make a map for each object. One thing that can make that a bit simpler is to make your original UV unwrap texture map, then in photoshop, take a texture that's of a wall or dirt or whatever, or cracks, or anything, and add it over your map in a new layer, then apply the new layer in overlay mode.

I'm probably not explaining this well at all. Maybe this will be clearer. Here's what I do. You UV unwrap the object. In Photoshop, you texture the UV map to make, say, a basic stone texture, and make it in a new layer. Make your UV map the active layer, use the magic wand to click on the black, change the active layer to the stone texture you mae, then delete the selected areas of black you selected. This should leave your texture only on the actual object map. Then you create several textures seperately, or use textures you have (for example, I have 100s of various wall textures I've made), and copy and paste one of those textures to a new layer over your UV map texture. Select free transform and stretch the texture out to cover the entire map. Now, make that new layer and your stone layer invisible and make the UV map tha active layer again. Click on the black again to select it, then make your top layer visible again, make it the active layer, and again delete the black areas to leave only the object shapes. Make your top layer invisible again, make the stone layer visible, and make it the active layer. Click on layers in the menu and select merge visible. This should merge your UV map and your stone texture. Make the top layer visible again, go to layers/layer style/blending options. Select multiply, overlay, hard light or soft light and see what looks best. You can also play with the opacity to see what happens. The yop layer applied in this fashion, changed your stone texture by blending it with the overlaid top texture. Once you have a result you like, flatten the layers, save it as say, block UV 1, convert it to black and wite and make your bump map, save that, then use edit, step backward enough times to take it back to the original colored layers. Delete the top layer, then copy and paste a different texture as a top layer and do the thing again as many times with as many different textures on top as you have objects.

I know this sounds tedious, but it can really be done quite quickly Once you've made your base texture and you're familiar with the process. The result is that all your objects have the same base texture but with just enough variations to make each one look different. This is exactly the process I followed in my recent post to the gallery 'Kyomizudera'. Which I was vastly surprised didn't get more comments.

Once you've applied each seperate texture in Max, and you're finished with those objects, just delete them from the material editor only, as you don't need them anymore. If you need to get one of them back, just open the library and select scene, and they'll still be available.

Hope I explained this okay. This is why I don't write tutorials. I just don't explain things well.

[bonestructure]

Feel free to email me or whatever if you need further explanation

[adrie]

thanks bonestructure for the instructions; I think they are quite clear, the only thing is I have now to follow the part where work's done in PS. By the way, I was applying some of my existing textures (tga files) to certain faces and in the uv editor I don't see the texture image at all.. I know it normally does get displayed when "image display" option is set to ON but I just don't see it. Any idea?

thanks again!

[adrie]

ok.. it seems that I have to turn on UV texture editor Baking in order to see the texture applied in my UV editor.. no idea why :(

[kingmango]

take a texture that's of a wall or dirt or whatever, or cracks, or anything, and add it over your map in a new layer, then apply the new layer in overlay mode.


lol nice trick ty

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