Looking for someone to teach me how to texture realistically on a comp

[RedRyette]

The title should read: Looking for someone to teach me how to texture realistically on a completely unique mesh. I didn't realize I ran out of space before I made the thread - Sorry...

 

I've made a staff as my first mod, which I can share a link to if necessary, and I got it from Blender into Oblivion, but it has no texture (dull grey). Using Gimp 2.8, I absolutely cannot figure out how to texture something like this staff. I want to put a realistic shiny gold on most of it, and then there are bits with blue marble and a small cylindrical silver part. All of which should look real.

 

I've seen a few tutorials on texturing with gimp, but those few for Oblivion weapons are just quick videos to show the basics. I haven't seen anyone put a real image on a weapon, except for in a couple Blender tutorials, where they duplicate a weapon from a picture and then place the image over it at the end. But I can't do that with this.

 

This is the last step I need before I publish the mod, so help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks for your time.

Edited March 28, 2013 by RedRyette

[RedRyette]

I'd just like to know: Is texturing something really simple? And that's why nobody goes into huge detail for Oblivion texturing?

 

I think the part I'm most confused on is the making a Normal Map to go over the base color pattern, to add an actual texture to it. Is that part necessary?

I did skip it when I attempted to color part of my staff for the first time, and the color I created in Gimp didn't show up on it, even though I'm sure I follow all steps I've seen for the basics. If that's all I need to learn (making normal maps), I'll understand why I'm having so much trouble figuring this out.

 

Edit: I made a tiny bit of progress, I think. I was able to get the marble texture to show in NifSkope, but instead of it being on just the parts I sectioned off in the UV map before making the color in Gimp, the pattern I made is on the entire staff... I'm guessing my problem here is in Blender. Could anyone help with how to put different textures on specific parts of the staff? That's something I haven't seen done in any tutorial, bad or good.

Edited March 29, 2013 by RedRyette

[Nephenee13]

Edit: I made a tiny bit of progress, I think. I was able to get the marble texture to show in NifSkope, but instead of it being on just the parts I sectioned off in the UV map before making the color in Gimp, the pattern I made is on the entire staff... I'm guessing my problem here is in Blender. Could anyone help with how to put different textures on specific parts of the staff? That's something I haven't seen done in any tutorial, bad or good.

There are two ways to do this, either make your texture image have different parts for different parts of the staff, or divide the staff into several separate meshes.

[KenJackson]

I don't know which tutorials you've gone through but BlenderCookies has some fairly good ones

ttp://cgcookie.com/blender/category/tutorials/texturing-uvs/

 

One thing to bear in mind about the Blender tutorials, though, they're written for rendering in Blender. They're not written for creating meshes to be used in Oblivion. YouTube has some "Creating a <whatever> for Oblivion using Blender" tutorials, some good, most bad. While they may not go into the nitty-gritty how-to details of the Blender tutorials, these will be where you find out the differences between what the Blender tutorials teach you, and what actually works with the Oblivion game engine.

 

Once you know the basic "how-to"s of creating, assigning and editing UV maps, the difference between texturing a butter knife and texturing Times Square on New Years Eve is only a matter of scale.

 

Addressing the edit: Now, while I've seen it done, I've never been successful in applying multiple textures to a single (as they are refered to in Bllender) object and other modelers (not that I've done enough to really qualify as one) tend to break their meshes into separate objects for each texture, as well. Done in this manner, you're mesh would consist of an object for all of the marble sections, an object for the gold portions, and ones for each of the other materials that make up your staff. Otherwise, I've always gotten the same results you describe. It'll be easiest just to break-up your model into multiple objects (use "separate" not "split") and texture each one individually.

 

Or you could use one texture that combines several images for different part of the object. The one weakness with this method, though, is that, while this works fine for materials with similar properties such as most types of cloth, highly dissimilar substances, such as weathered wood and polished brass, reflect light in highly different ways. Splitting the mesh into separate objects allows you to adjust these properties for each object.

 

I honestly couldn't tell you if the normal map is necessary. I've read that it is, but since they make objects look so much more detailed and realistic, I've always used them, anyway. And Gimp does have a plug-in for making ones based off of textures,

https://code.google.com/p/gimp-normalmap/

 

or you can bake one in blender at least two ways. One that requires actually building a model that truly does have all of the fine detail that you want the normal map to portray (while it requires more [sometimes a lot more] work the end result is fantastic). The other is again texture based, but it's never worked very well for me, the Gimp plug-in has always worked better.

Edited March 29, 2013 by KenJackson

[Nephenee13]

You absolutely have to have a Normal Map, your object won't render properly in Oblivion without one.

[RedRyette]

Damn. Alright, thank you, both of you.

See, I was really hoping I could do what Ken mentioned: make the detail myself. I'm a decently talented artistic, and I am more than willing to spend the time necessary in Blender to get that small detail that looks so gorgeous in-game.

It seems like making the detail myself would make a normal map unnecessary, but I can figure it out if I must. I'm going back to the beginning of the UV mapping and texturing process, and I'll start off slow.

[Striker879]

Ran across a link to this recently but haven't tried it myself: The Normal Tools Ver 01_1.

[KenJackson]

High detail == high polygon count == low FPS.

 

That's why normals are used. You get the look of high detail, without the FPS lag.

Edited March 30, 2013 by KenJackson

[RedRyette]

well, it's just a fairly simple staff :p

I'm not worried about FPS lag.

 

But that makes sense. My current computer is low performance anyway, so I'll keep that in mind. I think I would sooner make an awesome mod for everyone (when I get around to publishing my work) before I made something with my crappy laptop in mind, though. I think most mod users should be running better computers at this point - the game being 8 years old.