If anyone wishes to obtain the good old UBB smilies, they can get their URLs here, and then use the URL inside (img) tags.

Heh, I just realized how to use your for C4D. What Lightwave calls "planar" mapping, is what C4D calls "flat" mapping. But you said that in Lightwave, you can only map from a certain axis? In Cinema, you can map from any direction.

Anyway, one thing that I found restricting in your tutorial is that, your ship must be Y-axis (in your example) symmetrical. If it isn't you'll run into problems when you are painting it.

Phyvo, on Jul 2 2004, 01:55 PM, said:

Heh, Mechanisto is pretty stuck on cubic mapping, so most of this doesn't actually apply to me. If there's a face I want to hide, I have to stick another object with a different texture on top of it. The spherical stuff still applies to an extent, though. If I ever switch renderers, I'll have to find this again...

Mechanisto doesnt use cubic mapping, but uv mapping. This means that every point on an object coresponds to a point on the image map, extrapolated across the triangles. If you distort the object, the image map bends with it. This is not a property of any of the listed mappings.

Someone else with a better wok ethic than mine should perhaps write a bit on uv mapping

Flamingblade, on Nov 3 2004, 09:09 PM, said:

Heh, I just realized how to use your for C4D. What Lightwave calls "planar" mapping, is what C4D calls "flat" mapping. But you said that in Lightwave, you can only map from a certain axis? In Cinema, you can map from any direction.

Anyway, one thing that I found restricting in your tutorial is that, your ship must be Y-axis (in your example) symmetrical. If it isn't you'll run into problems when you are painting it.
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Hmm.. i don´t really know what Sparky meant by axis.
Maybe any planar axis.. or just XYZ planes. I´m unsure. It should be any axis. If not i´m surprised.

You can rotate the texture in C4D Flamingblade. No need to keep the ship in Y axis. But it keeps things tidy. And no symmetry is needed. Of course planar mapping does not work good on sharp angled surfaces. Unless you create one texture for each surface. And mapping organic models with this is aboslutely hell..

Btw.. sparky.. when will you do an UVW mapping tut. I tried to understand it from a computer arts magazine, but it is kind of weird. I get the principal, but not how to apply them to real objects.

This post has been edited by modesty_blaise_us : 04 November 2004 - 06:10 AM

Flamingblade, on Nov 3 2004, 02:09 PM, said:

Heh, I just realized how to use your for C4D. What Lightwave calls "planar" mapping, is what C4D calls "flat" mapping. But you said that in Lightwave, you can only map from a certain axis? In Cinema, you can map from any direction.

Anyway, one thing that I found restricting in your tutorial is that, your ship must be Y-axis (in your example) symmetrical. If it isn't you'll run into problems when you are painting it.
View Post

hm, yeah, that sounds like a pretty logical leap, since planar means flat. In lightwave, you have to pick an axis to map from. By that I mean that which ever way you pick for the map to come from, it will come from that direction only - ie, only one axis at a time.

For this tut, the ships definetly don't have to be symettrical. I used this technique on lots of asymmetrical ships. I really can't see what would lead you to believe that it needs to be symmetrical. Can you explain.

modesty: I'll work on it at winter break. I'm not sure if I'm really the best person to explain UVs, although I do use them. What I do will be a pretty basic tutorial on them.

This post has been edited by sparky : 03 November 2004 - 07:27 PM

Sparks, do you want me to have a bash at a UV tutorial, then? I use them extensively.

Dave @ ATMOS

yeah, go for it! it sounds like you probably know more than I do.

I pretty much only use UVs for making sure that planar maps always stay in place and for when I want to map something that will be difficult to map later (ie, make a pipe, UV it, bend it, use the UV for texturing later).

It would be nice if you would post it in this thread, I think it'd be kinda cool if we collected graphics tutorials in one thread.

pipeline, on Nov 4 2004, 01:35 AM, said:

Sparks, do you want me to have a bash at a UV tutorial, then? I use them extensively.

Dave @ ATMOS
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Then we´ll get them from the texturing master himself...nice..:)

Hey, I'm not the master. I'm still a learner.

Okay, when I get half a second, I'll pop something up.

Dave @ ATMOS

Actually, what I think almost all modellers agree on is that live UV paiting is the best BP 3D for instance.

Flamingblade, on Nov 10 2004, 12:44 AM, said:

Actually, what I think almost all modellers agree on is that live UV paiting is the best BP 3D for instance.
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???

Live body painting.

I have to disagree.. You can´t get the same results as in photoshop.

yeah, i always use photoshop.

I'm thinking about writing a lighting tutorial, as well as a composition tutorial at some point in the future. Just school is busy, so I'll wait until I can spend the time writing and rendering all the images necessary. Although considering that books upon books have been written on the two subjects, they'll just be basic tutorials.

Matrix

This post has been edited by what_is_the_matrix : 11 November 2004 - 01:47 AM

whole books have been written on almost all these (except making custom brushes, I suppose).

I've been thinking about doing a new composition thing because we just did composition in Design. It's pretty fresh in my mind. I'd love to see yours as well. The more tutorials, the merrier. I've been thinking that maybe over winter break, I'd try to get a site with the walkthroughs online. Maybe collect everyone's tutorials in one place?

sparky, on Nov 11 2004, 08:12 PM, said:

whole books have been written on almost all these (except making custom brushes, I suppose).

I've been thinking about doing a new composition thing because we just did composition in Design. It's pretty fresh in my mind. I'd love to see yours as well. The more tutorials, the merrier. I've been thinking that maybe over winter break, I'd try to get a site with the walkthroughs online. Maybe collect everyone's tutorials in one place?
View Post

That'd be cool. I've gotten composition in all of my drawing classes, as well as several of my animation classes. I have probably two pounds worth of handouts on lighting and composition. It's crazy. But yea, the more the merrier Oddly enough, a bunch of my models and scenes start out as a sketch of a scene, or a particular composition, and then I build to fit.

Matrix

I tried to write a lighting tutorial a couple years ago. I had decided to start a whole series on everything having to do with EV graphics, from concept design to the nuts n' bolts of putting stuff in-game. My lighting tutorial broke out into color theory heck of fast, and I realized I didn't know squat about either subject. Soon it became clear I didn't know much about any of it, except for the technical aspects of placing them into the game engine, and was probably just lucky in making things seem cool.

That was three or more years back, though. There is some formal art education drifting through my mind now. I wouldn't likely approach these topics all academically, but at least I know where to start. Which brings me to my point:

I have some homebrew advice-a-thons cooking up in my head. When school pauses for early winter, I'll be putting some documents up for all to see. All the better if they can stand among similar ventures by others of you fine folk. I may even host it all.