Hey everyone,
I’m afraid that this isn’t my best performance. It’s late, and the audio has a nasty popping noise that I can’t get rid of. That’s the bad news.
The good news is that this Movie’s got something for everyone! I’ll show you how to quickly mirror UVWs using a symmetry modifier to get more texture space. Who doesn’t want more UVW space? As usual, don’t hesitate to leave comments or suggestions for future Monday Movies!
Copy and paste under the "Edit" menu.
Edit: Mr. Tom of FGI Services noted that you can also layer up UVW coordinates using the Copy/Paste function of the UVW editor. You can find this under the Edit menu item (see image). To use this technique, start by selecting the parent cluster- the one you want to stay still- and use Edit>Copy. Then select the target cluster- the one you want to move to the parent cluster- and use Edit>Paste. You can use this second step (Edit>Paste) as many times as needed. 3 cheers for Mr. Tom!
By Hristo Velev August 12, 2009 - 1:49 am
Very nice of you running these movies! Some good tricks in here.
By Silverdust August 12, 2009 - 4:16 pm
Hi i just thought off a nice subject for the next ( or some MM )
How about a nice way to get some decent clouds.
You know, like the ones you would see from a plane/cockpit view.
Somethiing like these: http://lh5.ggpht.com/_X3kaawac_g4/Sd_hasGXuqI/AAAAAAAAAdI/lnEosq2crV4/clouds.jpg
By Philip August 12, 2009 - 4:23 pm
…my comment was removed? Did I offend you in any way? Sorry…
By Bluesummers August 12, 2009 - 8:11 pm
Oh noes! The only comments I remove are spam- what’d you post Philip? I don’t see your comment…
By Philip August 13, 2009 - 12:21 pm
Well here it goes again lol:
First of all, very nice tutorial! I love your movies and this one in particular brings to the spotlight a technique I am used to. I create 3d for games, so I always do a lot of texturing room optimization already. And ys it is hard sometimes 🙂
I think a series of great tutorials would be ones that explained how to create and bake physics animation in characters, so that they could be exported as standard bones and / or verex (morph) animations. And therefore they could be used in games and realtime apps.
Say you have a giant monster’s walking cycle. Imagine he features a lot of hanging chains around his body, as well as a long cloth cape. How can you use physics to animate the chains and the cape during the walking cycle, and bake it all to the mesh for export? Is this even possible?
Thanks for being such a help to the whole 3D community!!!
By Bluesummers August 15, 2009 - 8:08 pm
Hey Philip! I actually found your original comment under the Train Station post. 🙂
As far as I know, Reactor and Cloth should bake down to per-frame keyframes by default (as evidenced by it usually taking a while, giving you a warning, etc). I’m afraid that without a little more experimentation on my end, I wouldn’t be sure what to tell you.
By MrTom August 16, 2009 - 5:24 am
Greetings Mr Bluesummers,
Before diving into the question may I first add my thanks to you for producing this series of video tutorials, it’s something I do myself and appreciate the time and effort it takes to put it all together….so thanks again.
As for the question, well I’ll admit that I’m struggling to see why you choose this method instead of just flipping the UV’s. Is their an advantage to flipping the geometry instead of flipping the UV’s?
Whenever I need to have overlying UV’s I usually get one cluster correct first and then just copy and paste the others….in the editor….this automatically places them exactly on top of each other. You mentioned having ‘text’ in the image and that this could be a problem with being reversed using this method…..well why not solve that by just flipping the UV’s? Is there a reason why you didn’t point this out?
I appreciate that there is always more than one way to do things when it comes to 3D and I’m all for learning new techniques and methods….but in this case I can’t help thinking you’re using a sledge-hammer to crack a nut. There’s nothing wrong with this method, far from it, except that which you have already pointed out, but would those problems not have been solved if you’d worked more at UV level?
I may be totally wrong here, but at the moment I’m failing to see the advantage of ‘detaching’ geometry to edit UV’s….especially when the UV’s can be flipped in the editor.
By Bluesummers August 16, 2009 - 2:28 pm
Mr. Tom! You rock- thank you for the props.
You rock twice, because I learned something new. I can’t say I’ve ever used copy/paste and it does a fantastic job at perfectly overlaying UVW elements. I’ll edit the post to include that.
The reason that text would still be a problem is that unless
1) the boarders of the cluster you’re using blend asymetrically with the ones around it (because you’re creating a discontinuous surface where the text UVW cluster is) and
2) the cluster is symmetrical along the axis of the text (because otherwise you’ll get nasty stretching),
then flipping wouldn’t work. Something like text might do well as a stencil rather than being baked into the texture map. I think I know what this week’s Monday Movie topic will be. 😉
By MrTom August 16, 2009 - 3:25 pm
Good news all-round!
Glad I didn’t over-step the mark and wasn’t missing something blindingly obvious.
UVW’s are a total minefield and with so many different ways to manipulate them it can sometimes be a case of not seeing the wood for the trees.
Anyway, good to hear I’ve helped in some way…..looking forward to monday……as always!
Regards.
By Tim Scobey August 18, 2009 - 6:23 am
When I used the symmetry modifier I had different results. For anyone else who is green at max here is what you need to do.
1. Detach the face.
2. Go to the hierarchy tab
3. Select Affect Pivot Only
4. Select Center to Object
5. Apply Symmetry Modifier
That’s what I had to do in order to get Symmetry to work properly and yield the same results.
Are there any hidden dangers in this?