Difference between revisions of "Blender/Custom Cuirass (part 2)"
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Blender/Custom Cuirass (part 2) (edit)
Revision as of 17:17, 16 November 2006
, 17:17, 16 November 2006no edit summary
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imported>Sickleyield |
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And of course (sing it with me, now) don’t forget to save the UV map! | And of course (sing it with me, now) don’t forget to save the UV map! | ||
=Bonus Section: Editing the Default Game UV Maps= | |||
Bethesda’s default UV maps for their body meshes look nice in the UV screen, but once you get them out and start trying to texture them, you realize that they are absolutely insane. The femaleupperupperbody.nif in particular has considerable distortion in the chest areas. It is very difficult to texture over UV maps with no straight lines in them. This gives us much respect for the talents of Bethesda’s texturers, but it doesn’t do a thing for us as modders. Besides, we don’t have to work with the filesize constraints that the original game makers did, because we’re making a mod rather than a whole game. | |||
Before I get into what I’m about to propose, you need to be familiar with this method for UV mapping: | |||
[[http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/Custom_Sword_in_Blender#The_UV_Map:_Slightly_Harder_But_Actually_Working_Method Relevant Section of Sword Tutorial]] | |||
…Or at least with the UV window and where it is. | |||
Here is a dress whose upper bodice I made using a method similar to the one for the cuirass above: | |||
[<a href="http://img81.imageshack.us/my.php?image=gown3lg3.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://img81.imageshack.us/img81/190/gown3lg3.th.jpg" border="0" /></a>] | |||
I then discovered that I wanted to paint folds on the bodice, but it was impossible with the UV map as it was and my limited drawing talents. After much flailing, swearing and muttering, this is what I did. | |||
I went into UV Face Select mode in Blender. Then I used the bounding circle (b,b) to select the front half and ONLY the front half of the bodice. Then I went to the UV screen, which I had in a small window (per the sword mapping tutorial above). It was showing the section I had selected with its overly-curvy original UV map. | |||
Then I went to the UV dropdown and selected “LSCM unwrap.” Suddenly my UV map was beautifully flat. I repeated this with the back half and laid them one above the other in the UV screen, so that they could still be used on the same texture. | |||
Now, what you get by doing this is still rather curvy for us to use a flat phototexture over it. So then I used the weld commands (w,2 and w,3) to straighten the lines where possible. On female chest sections, you’ll sometimes just have to learn how to draw lines curved to make them look straight. If you straighten too much, you’ll get a bizarrely stretched texture that won’t look right. You can check this by selecting all your vertices in the UV screen, then going to the UV dropdown and choosing “minimize stretch.” If your straightened lines suddenly become curved again, this is Blender’s way of telling you to leave them alone or you’ll get weird texture stretching. Now aren’t you glad we’re using Blender? | |||
Be sure and export this UV map so you can use it for texturing. A tutorial for texturing from the UV map is upcoming. | |||
=Export: Putting It All Together= | =Export: Putting It All Together= | ||