Which part do you find the haredest

[SickleYield]

I just still don't know how people make these amazing textures for their object. (I guess I need to learn photoshop as well as my 3D modeling program)

 

Practice makes better. Those with more natural art skills or training may develop faster, of course. The amazing results you see from artists like AlienSlof are the result of many years' experience in both traditional and digital art; I don't know about Gizmodian and Sinblood, but I'd guess they probably both have some training.

 

For me the biggest things I've learned are:

 

1. Lots of layers and masks. This lets you do non-destructive editing and create more different parts of a texture, so it can be more detailed without anything being irrevocable. I save as an .xcf and export to .dds or .jpeg (depending on what the texture is for, Oblivion or Poser/DAZ).

2. Tiling is a good tool, but on its own it sucks. Use sparingly. Do not ever download a tiling procedurally generated stone or wood or leather texture, slap it on an item, and call it a day.

3. Photosourcing is good. Learn to cut, paste, edit and scale parts of photographs to add details to your texture (especially things like buckles, gems, fabric details). Imageafter, CGTextures and MorgueFile are gold mines for this. Usually it's easier to make a photo bit look more cartoony than to draw something photorealistic.

4. ...But photosourcing is not enough. Learn to draw folds and wrinkles, scratches in metal, etc. so you can produce your own textures for a given item. There are tutorials all over the place online. Just look up "how to create ____ in GIMP" or in Photoshop. Most often this boils down to drawing a plain line and then lightening, darkening or blurring parts of it. It can take time, but it's not hard.

 

It's hard to make a texture look too detailed, easy to make it look not detailed enough.

[RGMage2]

Modeling is what I enjoy most. It takes me back to when I was a child, like 4 or 5 years old, I used to love to make things with Plasticine or clay. It's all I wanted to do back then. Moving vertices around in Blender is very much like hands on modeling; it is pure pleasure.

 

Now rigging, that's what I find difficult. I've got a lot of projects that I put on the shelf because I couldn't rig them in any way that was satisfying to me.

 

UV mapping I think goes hand in hand with modeling. The idea of completing your model and then mapping it, this might be why so many people express a dislike for mapping - too difficult or too boring. I map as I go. I think it's important to know what you want to do with the texture, and how you want the map to lay out, while you are actually doing your modeling. If you are thinking about what you want to do with the texture, then that should give you an idea of how you want the map to be. There are times when I will totally redo part of a model for the sole purpose of getting that map that I want.

 

There is also the question of am I going to create a new texture, or am I going to map to an existing texture? If I pull a picture off the net and do a face by face map to that picture, this is something that I find enjoyable, but the resulting map will be unusable for most retextures. Whatever way I want to do it, I always have Photoshop open when I'm working in Blender. If I'm doing a conventional map, then I'll rough out a texture as I go.

 

Modeling, mapping, texturing, I think it all fits together and is part of the same process.

 

What I find interesting is that the part that I consider to be a separate process, rigging, just happens to be the thing that I find most difficult. Which suggests to me that maybe I've been looking at it wrong. I should probably be thinking about rigging while I'm doing the model, and testing out the rigging while I go. I've recently figured out a method of live weight painting which would fit nicely into this concept. Hopefully it will solve some problems. :smile:

 

Anyway, I couldn't really answer the question because it's all the same thing, even though it's not. :yes: :no:

[myrmaad]

Modeling is hard for me, and I cheat with the rigging, have never done it from scratch myself.

 

All the other stuff is easy.

[mcole254]

I'm curious about UV maping in blender, does it have any kind of auto map or relax feature in it?

[SickleYield]

In effect, no.

 

That is, you can just press the u key and "unwrap" and get a map, but no sane texturer will work with the results you get that way. You're generally going to have to do some manual editing with seams, pinning, and the live unwrap/proportional edit features. I sometimes use project from view for gems, spheres or symmetrical weapons, but it isn't appropriate for clothing or other stuff. Nobody seems to bother with the weld command (w,2) which is a shame given that it can be used to make nice straight lines on the UV, which makes seamless texturing a LOT easier if it doesn't cause too much stretching.

 

RGMage2: Rigging can be quite easy. And if you don't want to use the Bone Weight Copy script to copy weights from the body, Blender now has a bone heat weighting feature.

 

If you load the armature you want to weight to, you can select the item, then the armature, and press ctrl+p. Then choose "armature" and "create from bone heat." This will at least give you a base to work from. No copy method works great on skirts, those just take some tweaking. I usually copy from an existing skirt that I know works well.

 

You'll probably want to delete the armature and reimport one for export use if you do this. The NIF scripts are picky about anything that looks like a change while a skeleton is parented, I don't know why.

 

I totally agree with you about the importance of mapping while you work! I've seen too many meshes posted around that were completely unusable because some genius sculpted them with a million polys and no UV, realized he couldn't map them, and posted them in hopes of someone else spending the twelve hours it would take to do that adequately. And it's very hard to "share" UV bits among repeated elements in an item (chain links, buttons, etc.) without mapping as you go.

[myrmaad]

In effect, no.

 

That is, you can just press the u key and "unwrap" and get a map, but no sane texturer will work with the results you get that way. You're generally going to have to do some manual editing with seams, pinning, and the live unwrap/proportional edit features. I sometimes use project from view for gems, spheres or symmetrical weapons, but it isn't appropriate for clothing or other stuff. Nobody seems to bother with the weld command (w,2) which is a shame given that it can be used to make nice straight lines on the UV, which makes seamless texturing a LOT easier if it doesn't cause too much stretching.

 

RGMage2: Rigging can be quite easy. And if you don't want to use the Bone Weight Copy script to copy weights from the body, Blender now has a bone heat weighting feature.

 

If you load the armature you want to weight to, you can select the item, then the armature, and press ctrl+p. Then choose "armature" and "create from bone heat." This will at least give you a base to work from. No copy method works great on skirts, those just take some tweaking. I usually copy from an existing skirt that I know works well.

 

You'll probably want to delete the armature and reimport one for export use if you do this. The NIF scripts are picky about anything that looks like a change while a skeleton is parented, I don't know why.

 

I totally agree with you about the importance of mapping while you work! I've seen too many meshes posted around that were completely unusable because some genius sculpted them with a million polys and no UV, realized he couldn't map them, and posted them in hopes of someone else spending the twelve hours it would take to do that adequately. And it's very hard to "share" UV bits among repeated elements in an item (chain links, buttons, etc.) without mapping as you go.

 

 

You just answered like ten questions I had in my head!

[SickleYield]

:) Yay!

[RGMage2]

Thanks for the advice SickleYield, :thanks: I'll look into that bone heat weighting feature, it sounds interesting. I do use the bone weight copy scripts, but as you say they don't work on everything, and It is really just the skirts and kilts that are giving me trouble.

 

What I'm doing now to fix some of the weighting issues is using the Pose mode. I use bone weight copy as a starting point, then I have the complete outfit and full body parented to a full skeleton, shift to pose mode and pose the body to see where it will clip. Then I select the clothing that is clipping or stretching wrong, which will bring it back to object mode, but it will still be posed and the clipping still visible. Then shift to weight paint mod, (still posed and clipping still visible) at this point you can paint it and see the effect live. I just figured this out a couple of days ago, but maybe everyone else already knew how to do this. Anyway, it's new for me, and it has made rigging much easier. :smile:

[SickleYield]

Thanks for the advice SickleYield, :thanks: I'll look into that bone heat weighting feature, it sounds interesting. I do use the bone weight copy scripts, but as you say they don't work on everything, and It is really just the skirts and kilts that are giving me trouble.

 

What I'm doing now to fix some of the weighting issues is using the Pose mode. I use bone weight copy as a starting point, then I have the complete outfit and full body parented to a full skeleton, shift to pose mode and pose the body to see where it will clip. Then I select the clothing that is clipping or stretching wrong, which will bring it back to object mode, but it will still be posed and the clipping still visible. Then shift to weight paint mod, (still posed and clipping still visible) at this point you can paint it and see the effect live. I just figured this out a couple of days ago, but maybe everyone else already knew how to do this. Anyway, it's new for me, and it has made rigging much easier. :smile:

 

That's a great idea! I hadn't even thought of it. I guess I've been copying the excellent rigging off Jclyde's UFF BAB conversion for too long. :D

 

Occasionally, though, it will happen that clipping will be fixable by nothing but increasing poly count in the relevant area. This is especially true in the shoulders and in the area right above the kneecaps, because those are the areas of greatest stretch/bend.