[blip.tv 11LK928A 320 200] This video tutorial shows a method to create textures out of multiple images for sculpted prims in OpenSim or any compatible online world. We use blender-2.47 for this demonstration. No further software is needed here. Although this tutorial is self contained, you may also check our first texturizing tutorial, which may help for better understanding.Important Note: Please take a minute to read the Tutorial license terms.

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Welcome to our first advanced texturizing tutorial.

Maybe, you remember our tutorial about texturizing sculpted prims ?
We have created a surface-texture for a sculpted-prim helmet.
During the described process, we created a secnd UV-layer (the projection-map).
Then we opened our favorite image-editor, and created the intermediate projection-texture by hand.

At the end, we reimported the projection-texture to blender, and baked the sculptie surface-texture. The baking tool automatically transformed the projection-map to the final UV-map. The result of this process was directly used as surface-texture for the sculpty. We strongly recommend, that you first watch the above mentioned texturizing tutorial again, and then come back, and proceed from here.

Well, today we will show you another, maybe even faster approach, which allows for more precise adjustments and can help you to texturise complex objects without using any other tools beside blender. At the end, you will know how to use the UV-unwrapper for texturizing objects with multiple input images.

We will use blender 2.47 for our demonstration.

So, lets go back to blender now. Ok! we create a new UV-layer, by clicking on

“UV-texture -> new”.

It is always good, to re-name your work-items by more suitable names. so in this case, rename the new UV-layer to: “projection-Map” and since we are going to work on this layer now, make it “the rendering UV-texture”.

Now go to your 3D-window, and ensure, that you are in front-view.

Since we are working with projections, we better enable: “occlude background geometry”,
and since we are working with faces now, we switch to: face-select mode. Now select all visible faces.

Check that you only selected faces from the outer part of the helmet, and if necessary, press the SHIFT-key, and then use the right mouse-button, to de-select all un-wanted faces.

Ensure, that at the end of this task, you switch back to front-view. If you use multi-res with your sculptie , you must disable this now. Otherwise the following steps will not work as shown here. Search for the multi-res tab and click on: “apply multires”.

Now, back in the 3D-window, click , mesh, UV unwrap, “project from view”. This is the step where you define the projection from a 2D-image , to the currently selected faces.

Now change the draw-type to textured, so that you can visually follow the next task . And then switch to the UV-image-editor.

Now open the image for the right side of the helmet. If the image does not get displayed, then use the image-pin and select the image again, from the adjacent selector box.

Maybe you want to immediately watch the effects, of your ongoing changes? Then enable window-synchronisation now. You find the corresponding button at the right side of the UV-image-editor header. You probably may also want to work in proportional-edit-mode during your adjustments.

Now, start to adjust the UV-meshpoints and ensure, that at the end, the UV-faces fully cover the helmet-shape.

ok! It is time to select the other side of the helmet.
go back to front-view, and select the entire object,.
then ro-tate the object by 180 degrees around the z-axis.
press: r, followed by, z, then type: 180.
Now, still in front-view, again select only the visible faces.
Also take care to select the top-most faces. You can see them best in top-view.

Again Check, that you have only selected faces from the outer part of the helmet,
and then de-select all unintentionally selected faces.

Now, go to front-view,
and then unwrap the mesh again,
exactly as you did it before, while you worked on the right side of the helmet.
Again, click ,

mesh, UV unwrap, project from view.

Now, open the image for the left side of the helmet,
then again, proceed in the same way,
as you already have done for the right side.

During this process, you also can try, to already adjust those areas, where you can see seams. We will take care about the seems again later, in the final step of this tutorial.

OK, the outer-part of the helmet is now texturized. Lets proceed with the inner-part. Select the entire inner-part of the helmet now and unwrap it in the same way, as you did it for the outer-part before. At the end, do not forget to switch your 3D-view to textured mode so that you can monitor what happens.

Since we do not have an image of the inner-part we will make a quick and dirty texturizing here.
Select one of the helmet-images and use this image to colorise the inner-part of the helmet in a consistent way.

Take care here: if you previously have pinned your image, then select the image now, even if you already can see it in the UV-editor. You know, that everything is correct, if you see that the texture in the 3D-view, corresponds to the texture in the UV-image-editor. Of course you also can apply any other more-appropriate image here, if you got one.

By the way: With this technique, you can apply an arbitrary number of images to your object.

Just select different parts of your object,
unwrap them individually,
assign an image to them and then adjust the UV-faces.

Now the helmet-texture is almost finished. We only need to transform this texture into a secnd life compatible form. We will first consolidate our work into one intermediate-image.
In the UV-image-editor, select, image, “consolidate into one image”!

Use high values for the image-dimensions,
so that you won’t loose your image-resolution here.
We recommend 2048 pixels for width and height.

unfortunately blender seams to have a bug here,
which prevents the creation of the consolidated image.
For some reason, we get an error here.
But fortunately we found a work-around.

Just go to the 3D-view, and switch to object mode.
Now the image consolidation works as expected.

This consolidated image-texture will now be used as starting point
for the final transformation into a sculptie-map.
So lets prepare the final step now.

For this step, we need a material,
where we can define the necessary transformation rules.
So, we first have to go to the material pannel, and create a new material there.

In the tab, “links and pipeline”, add a new material.

now go to the texture-pannel.

and then add a new texture.
Use the texture type “image” here.

Select the just created consolidated image from the combo box, left to the load button.
Now go back to the material pannel.
Then click on: “Map input”.

You Remember? this is the place where we connect the projection-map with the sculptie-map.

Also select: UV here.
This tells blender, to use the UV-coordinates,
for texture-coordinates.

And finally type in the name of the texture, which you want to use as input.
Remember, in our case this is: projection-map.

Go to the edit-pannel and switch the original “sculptie-map” back to :

active and rendering UV-texture.

Now blender knows, that the image source has first to be de-coded
according to the projection-map.,

and then re encoded according to the sculptie-map.
And this is exactly what we wanted to achieve.

Now create a new image, use 1024 pixels for width and height,
or any other convenient texture-size which works for you.
and then bake the texture.
Go to Render, “bake render meshes”, “texture only”.

If the transformation creates a set of black triangles at the top, or at the bottom of the image,
then take a closer look to the poles of your sculptie.
Go to edit mode, select the 2 poles , of your object, and click on: smooth .
This will avoid a mathematical precision problem during texture baking.

Finally select all vertices and bake the texture again.

The black triangles should be gone by now.
Now we can examine the final texture, look for possible seams,
and do some manual corrections if needed.

Now Go to texture-paint mode,.
And in the UV-image-editor, activate the paint tool.
Now set the paint mode to, smooth, or smear.
You find the corresponding tab, in the editing-pane, under: paint.

Now go ahead, and fine tune your texture.

Note, that you can also work directly in the 3D-view.
This is very convenient when you need to work on the left
and right side of the texture image,
where the elimination of seams may turn out to get very tricky.
ok! We are finished now. Save the surface-texture to your hard drive.

And now it is time, to start your viewer and see your textured sculpty in action!

In our next tutorial, we will show you, how to work with multiple layers of textures.
And finally we will show a technique for creating truly seamless textures.
Stay tuned until the next time