SNAP! I accidentally posted this tutorial I'm writing at the moment. Just nevermind it and come back in a few hours when its hopefully done.
SNAP! I accidentally posted this tutorial I'm writing at the moment. Just nevermind it and come back in a few hours when its hopefully done.
SNAP! I accidentally posted this tutorial I'm writing at the moment. Just nevermind it and come back in a few hours when its hopefully done.
This took forever, continuing tomorrow!
Texturing is one of the basics a modeler has to know.
A model require a texture before it's ready to be used in a game.
However, many new modelers don't know how to texture, I know I didn't in the beginning.
Therefore we're going to go through it step by step with lots of pictures.
I remember I always wanted lots of pictures when I read tutorials.
In this tutorial I'm using Wings 3D and Photoshop.
But stop reading just because you don't have Photoshop. I can recommend GIMP, which is a free powerfull picture editing tool.
You should be able to find the same basic functions I use in Photoshop.
This tutorial shows the way I texture my own models and therefore might not be one hundred percent according to the book.
Some might think this is a retarded way of doing it, but this is how I do it and it's the way I find the easiest and most effective.
Enough talking - Lets get to the action.
A texture is an image you paste on your model.
This is a model without a texture:
*PICTURE*
This is a model with a texture:
*PICTURE*
To UV-map a model means that you give pieces of your model a place on the texture, the image.
This is normally done by cutting your models faces into pieces and then placing them on the texture.
Still unclear? Just continue and you'll understand.
UV-mapping your model is what you do first.
Before you can UV-map anything, you will, of course, need a model.
I'm going to use this one, which is the same one from the Hard Edges-Tutorial
First of all, you want to make sure you're in Face Mode.
Then we'll start with the blade of the sword. Select the whole blade, but only on one side like this:
Now, with those faces selected, right click and choose UV-mapping.
This will pop up a new window which should look something like this.
In this new window, only the faces you selected earlier will show.
Now you want to make sure you're in Edge Mode in the new window.
Do this by pressing this icon:
Select all edges you can select in the new window now.
Right click and choose Unmark Edges
(If you're unsure about the different windows, it should look like this now.)
What you just did was to unmark all the edges of your blade. For some reason Wings want to cut all hard edges by default.
Cutting the edges means that the blade will be cut into pieces in the marked lines.
We don't want that, since we want one fluid texture on the whole blade. More on that later.
The important thing at this point is to have all edges unmarked.
Now, right click and press Continue.
Click Projection Normal
This will close the previous window and open this one:
The blue shape is your blade.
(It might be red in your Wings, but I've changed the color for selected faces. You can do it in options)
Now, the numbers in the background is what will become your texture later on.
The goal of UV-mapping is to fill up as much as possible of the screen with faces of your model.
At this point we only have one face placed on the texture sheet, but in order to fill up as much of the numbers as possible I rotated it and made it a little bigger.
Right click to get a menu with options like Rotate, Scale and so on.
It is important that you scale your face in it's right proportions. Therefore I suggest that you only use Scale Uniform.
Scale uniform will keep it in the same shape, only change it's size.
You don't want to use Scale Horizontal and Scale Vertical as your texture will be stretched if you scale your model out of it's original shape.
So, Rotate and Scale Uniform until it covers as much of the screen as possible.
I ended up with this:
Remember to make sure you're completely inside the image with no corners or anything pointing out.
Good.
You now want to repeat this step with all parts of your model. But only on one side. Or mostly.
Why you want to only do it on one side is because the other side of it is exactly the same.
For example, our blade we just UV-mapped, the other side of it looks exactly the same and therefore we'll use the same part of the image for them both.
Of course there are parts which you don't want to duplicate like that. This one for example:
And it ended up like this on our future texture:
I put it in the top right corner, because the blade is in the middle, remember.
It's not super important to remember to place all parts in different locations of the texture yet, we'll correct that later.
Just try to spread them out over the image.
Go ahead and UV-mapp all parts of your model you need.
When it comes to the handle of the sword however, I like to do it this way:
First, select the whole handle when in Face Mode as you've done before.
Do exactly as before, with the exception here:
First unmark all edges if you have any hard edges on the handle, then select all the edges in a line along the handle and Mark to Cut.
Then, instead of selecting Projection Normal, you want to select Unfolding.
Imagine the handle as if it was made of paper. The selected edges is were you will cut with a pair of scissors.
After that when you're selecting Unfolding, you are basically folding your paper out to a plane rectangle.
This is the result:
Why are we doing this?
The reason I do this on the handle is because it will only give us one seam instead of four, which we'd get if we took each face if the handle individually.
Place it somewhere on the sheet.
You should now have all faces you need UV-mapped, except for the ones you can use twice of course.
Select all the faces on your model that are covered with pink numbers, the ones you've mapped.
Like this:
It's hard to see from this angle obviously, but most of the back side of the sword is not mapped yet, and therefore not selected.
Notice how the left side of that handguard part isn't mapped also. That face will use the same place on the texture as the identical to the right, later.
Then you want to right click and left click UV-mapping (if you right click again, all the faces you've placed will reset. If you do this, you can press Alt+Z to fix it).
This should bring you directly to the texture sheet. If it doesn't, you've either right clicked again, or selected a face you haven't mapped yet.
If that happens, just unselect all faces again (with Spacebar) and make sure you only select faces that you've mapped earlier.
Mine looked like this:
As you can see, this isn't very good. Some of the different pieces are over each other and there's still plenty of room on the texture sheet.
Try to correct this as much as possible.
You don't have to cover the entire image with your pieces, but try not to leave like half the texture unused.
Press space to deselect all faces and left click on the pink numbers.
Choose Create Texture at the top and click OK.
(The size box will determine how big you're texture is. It's set to 1024*1024 by default, which is a bit large for this kind of weapon, but that can be changed later aswell)
This should turn the pink letters into a white texture.
Now, close that window and go to the top menus in Wings.
Press Window - Outliner.
This should bring up a little box looking like this:
Right click on cube1_auv and press Make External
Choose a location were you want to save your texture and name it to whatever you like.
The default saving place is in the Wings folder, which is completely useless. I suggest you place it on your desktop, were you can find it.
(or GIMP)
Open up Photoshop and open your texture.
It should look like this:
Make a new layer on top of the one called Background.
Mine was automatically called Layer 1.
Go to CG Textures.com and pick a nice plain metal texture.
I chose this one
Open it with Photoshop and select the whole image. Then copy (Ctrl+C) it, go to your texture and paste it (Ctrl + V).
Drag the metal out to cover the whole blade.
Also make sure to move it down under Layer 1
Now click on the little eye by your metal layer.
With layer one selected, paint with a 3-5 pixel brush a thin while line along these lines:
Draw with a whine pen along the orange stripes and with a black on the blue.
Click on the little eye again and it should look like this:
(To draw straight lines in PS, click were you want to start while holding shift and then click were you want the line to end)
Now, select the metal layer (Layer 2) and use Burn Tool and Dodge Tool on the blade until you are happy.
Use Dodge Tool close to the while markers and Burn Tool between the white markers and on the dark marker.
I did a quick sweep and now it looks like this:
Lets say I'm happy with the result so far and want to see how it looks in Wings.
Click File - Save as - Select bmp (or whatever format your texture is) and overwrite our old texture file.
It will ask you if you really want to overwrite - Press Yes.
Go back to Wings and look in the Outliner.
Right click on your texture and press Refresh.
Rendered, my sword looks like this now:
You can now continue to work on the texture in Photoshop and when you want to see how it looks, just save it and refresh in Wings.
Easy.
Texturing the handle.
I personally like to hand paint most of my texture. I'll show you an example and a few tips and tricks of things to think of.
Here I've erased some of the metal that wasn't on the blade it self, but only covering my other parts.
I've also painted a brown square over my handle part of the texture.
I'm starting with Burn Tool and I just painted a few lines straight over.
Then I picked up Dodge Tool and drew light lines at one side of all the dark ones.
On the third picture I added some darkness to the ends of the handle and some more shadow between the lines.
Here I'm just continue working with the Dodge Tool with a brush size of I think 3.
Then I added some darkness to the sides and finally added some saturation.
Handle done!
SNAP! I accidentally posted this tutorial I'm writing at the moment. Just nevermind it and come back in a few hours when its hopefully done.
SNAP! I accidentally posted this tutorial I'm writing at the moment. Just nevermind it and come back in a few hours when its hopefully done.
This took forever, continuing tomorrow!
Texturing is one of the basics a modeler has to know.
A model require a texture before it's ready to be used in a game.
However, many new modelers don't know how to texture, I know I didn't in the beginning.
Therefore we're going to go through it step by step with lots of pictures.
I remember I always wanted lots of pictures when I read tutorials.
In this tutorial I'm using Wings 3D and Photoshop.
But stop reading just because you don't have Photoshop. I can recommend GIMP, which is a free powerfull picture editing tool.
You should be able to find the same basic functions I use in Photoshop.
This tutorial shows the way I texture my own models and therefore might not be one hundred percent according to the book.
Some might think this is a retarded way of doing it, but this is how I do it and it's the way I find the easiest and most effective.
Enough talking - Lets get to the action.
A texture is an image you paste on your model.
This is a model without a texture:
*PICTURE*
This is a model with a texture:
*PICTURE*
To UV-map a model means that you give pieces of your model a place on the texture, the image.
This is normally done by cutting your models faces into pieces and then placing them on the texture.
Still unclear? Just continue and you'll understand.
UV-mapping your model is what you do first.
Before you can UV-map anything, you will, of course, need a model.
I'm going to use this one, which is the same one from the Hard Edges-Tutorial
First of all, you want to make sure you're in Face Mode.
Then we'll start with the blade of the sword. Select the whole blade, but only on one side like this:
Now, with those faces selected, right click and choose UV-mapping.
This will pop up a new window which should look something like this.
In this new window, only the faces you selected earlier will show.
Now you want to make sure you're in Edge Mode in the new window.
Do this by pressing this icon:
Select all edges you can select in the new window now.
Right click and choose Unmark Edges
(If you're unsure about the different windows, it should look like this now.)
What you just did was to unmark all the edges of your blade. For some reason Wings want to cut all hard edges by default.
Cutting the edges means that the blade will be cut into pieces in the marked lines.
We don't want that, since we want one fluid texture on the whole blade. More on that later.
The important thing at this point is to have all edges unmarked.
Now, right click and press Continue.
Click Projection Normal
This will close the previous window and open this one:
The blue shape is your blade.
(It might be red in your Wings, but I've changed the color for selected faces. You can do it in options)
Now, the numbers in the background is what will become your texture later on.
The goal of UV-mapping is to fill up as much as possible of the screen with faces of your model.
At this point we only have one face placed on the texture sheet, but in order to fill up as much of the numbers as possible I rotated it and made it a little bigger.
Right click to get a menu with options like Rotate, Scale and so on.
It is important that you scale your face in it's right proportions. Therefore I suggest that you only use Scale Uniform.
Scale uniform will keep it in the same shape, only change it's size.
You don't want to use Scale Horizontal and Scale Vertical as your texture will be stretched if you scale your model out of it's original shape.
So, Rotate and Scale Uniform until it covers as much of the screen as possible.
I ended up with this:
Remember to make sure you're completely inside the image with no corners or anything pointing out.
Good.
You now want to repeat this step with all parts of your model. But only on one side. Or mostly.
Why you want to only do it on one side is because the other side of it is exactly the same.
For example, our blade we just UV-mapped, the other side of it looks exactly the same and therefore we'll use the same part of the image for them both.
Of course there are parts which you don't want to duplicate like that. This one for example:
And it ended up like this on our future texture:
I put it in the top right corner, because the blade is in the middle, remember.
It's not super important to remember to place all parts in different locations of the texture yet, we'll correct that later.
Just try to spread them out over the image.
Go ahead and UV-mapp all parts of your model you need.
When it comes to the handle of the sword however, I like to do it this way:
First, select the whole handle when in Face Mode as you've done before.
Do exactly as before, with the exception here:
First unmark all edges if you have any hard edges on the handle, then select all the edges in a line along the handle and Mark to Cut.
Then, instead of selecting Projection Normal, you want to select Unfolding.
Imagine the handle as if it was made of paper. The selected edges is were you will cut with a pair of scissors.
After that when you're selecting Unfolding, you are basically folding your paper out to a plane rectangle.
This is the result:
Why are we doing this?
The reason I do this on the handle is because it will only give us one seam instead of four, which we'd get if we took each face if the handle individually.
Place it somewhere on the sheet.
You should now have all faces you need UV-mapped, except for the ones you can use twice of course.
Select all the faces on your model that are covered with pink numbers, the ones you've mapped.
Like this:
It's hard to see from this angle obviously, but most of the back side of the sword is not mapped yet, and therefore not selected.
Notice how the left side of that handguard part isn't mapped also. That face will use the same place on the texture as the identical to the right, later.
Then you want to right click and left click UV-mapping (if you right click again, all the faces you've placed will reset. If you do this, you can press Alt+Z to fix it).
This should bring you directly to the texture sheet. If it doesn't, you've either right clicked again, or selected a face you haven't mapped yet.
If that happens, just unselect all faces again (with Spacebar) and make sure you only select faces that you've mapped earlier.
Mine looked like this:
As you can see, this isn't very good. Some of the different pieces are over each other and there's still plenty of room on the texture sheet.
Try to correct this as much as possible.
You don't have to cover the entire image with your pieces, but try not to leave like half the texture unused.
Press space to deselect all faces and left click on the pink numbers.
Choose Create Texture at the top and click OK.
(The size box will determine how big you're texture is. It's set to 1024*1024 by default, which is a bit large for this kind of weapon, but that can be changed later aswell)
This should turn the pink letters into a white texture.
Now, close that window and go to the top menus in Wings.
Press Window - Outliner.
This should bring up a little box looking like this:
Right click on cube1_auv and press Make External
Choose a location were you want to save your texture and name it to whatever you like.
The default saving place is in the Wings folder, which is completely useless. I suggest you place it on your desktop, were you can find it.
(or GIMP)
Open up Photoshop and open your texture.
It should look like this:
Make a new layer on top of the one called Background.
Mine was automatically called Layer 1.
Go to CG Textures.com and pick a nice plain metal texture.
I chose this one
Open it with Photoshop and select the whole image. Then copy (Ctrl+C) it, go to your texture and paste it (Ctrl + V).
Drag the metal out to cover the whole blade.
Also make sure to move it down under Layer 1
Now click on the little eye by your metal layer.
With layer one selected, paint with a 3-5 pixel brush a thin while line along these lines:
Draw with a whine pen along the orange stripes and with a black on the blue.
Click on the little eye again and it should look like this:
(To draw straight lines in PS, click were you want to start while holding shift and then click were you want the line to end)
Now, select the metal layer (Layer 2) and use Burn Tool and Dodge Tool on the blade until you are happy.
Use Dodge Tool close to the while markers and Burn Tool between the white markers and on the dark marker.
I did a quick sweep and now it looks like this:
Lets say I'm happy with the result so far and want to see how it looks in Wings.
Click File - Save as - Select bmp (or whatever format your texture is) and overwrite our old texture file.
It will ask you if you really want to overwrite - Press Yes.
Go back to Wings and look in the Outliner.
Right click on your texture and press Refresh.
Rendered, my sword looks like this now:
You can now continue to work on the texture in Photoshop and when you want to see how it looks, just save it and refresh in Wings.
Easy.
Texturing the handle.
I personally like to hand paint most of my texture. I'll show you an example and a few tips and tricks of things to think of.
Here I've erased some of the metal that wasn't on the blade it self, but only covering my other parts.
I've also painted a brown square over my handle part of the texture.
I'm starting with Burn Tool and I just painted a few lines straight over.
Then I picked up Dodge Tool and drew light lines at one side of all the dark ones.
On the third picture I added some darkness to the ends of the handle and some more shadow between the lines.
Here I'm just continue working with the Dodge Tool with a brush size of I think 3.
Then I added some darkness to the sides and finally added some saturation.
Handle done!
