Ok lately ive been gathering thoughts about making a new Water treatment Model i got a good idea what itil look like ide generally like some tips oh texturing and a good modeling program I have one allredy but i dont think it has enough power to handle the detail and size that i am planing it to be. This should be fairly easy i plan on making a model of a Water Treatment Facility which my dad works at because he can let me on the entire Facility. If aneyone would like to do the texturing for me that would be great also.
post the tips here or at my email adress Ke5Cue@gmail.com
also is there a texturing program that allows you to load a model and paint the texture onto the 3d model directly
Update: i deleted the old topic that was under general and posted a new one here (althou its not that new jsut copy an pasted the old ones contents) aneyway ive made quite some progress so far and decided to just use Wings 3d however since im going as far into detail to add in sairway's and railing i need to know if when texture is added will a texture be put on the non exposed faces such as the stairway's wich overlap at some spaces if yes how can i connect them so its just 1 object instead of many retangular prisims
Modeling / Texturing tips
Haven't the faintest idea how Wings3d works, but I imagine you'll be needing some kind of weld tool to weld the coincident vertices together.
Your question about texturing kind of indicates that you need to learn what texture mapping is (or skinning, or uvmapping - all the same thing). You don't just "put a texture" on something (although there are programs, such as Deep Paint, that do allow you to paint directly onto a model). Usually you would "unwrap" the model to create a template image with all of the faces you want to texture shown in outline, and then paint 'em in with a 2d art tool.
Deciding how to unwrap a model is at least as important as the actual model building process. For example, you might want to include railings all over the place in your treatment plant. For game models there's usually no point texturing each railing separately - so you'd build one, map it onto the template, then repeat it wherever you want a railing. (Actually for the most part, railings can be done as simple planes that use transparencies in the texture to do the gaps.)
Again, I've no idea what the relative terms would be for these things in Wings, but these are the basic principals most people go by. There's a huge stickied post with loads of tutorials and other stuff right at the top of this very section of the forum, by the way. And an even greater selection with a bit of Googling :)
Good luck, anyway. The only other thing I'd say is that, if you're not too experienced, it's probably best to start with something extremely simple, like a basic house. And that, for the most part, making good-looking buildings is more about the texturing side than the modelling side. After all, they're just big boxes really :)
f
Your question about texturing kind of indicates that you need to learn what texture mapping is (or skinning, or uvmapping - all the same thing). You don't just "put a texture" on something (although there are programs, such as Deep Paint, that do allow you to paint directly onto a model). Usually you would "unwrap" the model to create a template image with all of the faces you want to texture shown in outline, and then paint 'em in with a 2d art tool.
Deciding how to unwrap a model is at least as important as the actual model building process. For example, you might want to include railings all over the place in your treatment plant. For game models there's usually no point texturing each railing separately - so you'd build one, map it onto the template, then repeat it wherever you want a railing. (Actually for the most part, railings can be done as simple planes that use transparencies in the texture to do the gaps.)
Again, I've no idea what the relative terms would be for these things in Wings, but these are the basic principals most people go by. There's a huge stickied post with loads of tutorials and other stuff right at the top of this very section of the forum, by the way. And an even greater selection with a bit of Googling :)
Good luck, anyway. The only other thing I'd say is that, if you're not too experienced, it's probably best to start with something extremely simple, like a basic house. And that, for the most part, making good-looking buildings is more about the texturing side than the modelling side. After all, they're just big boxes really :)
f
Althou i didnt quote it all (would be a waste of space) i do thank you u answered many questions I did quote one part however because i Would make a transparant spaces BUT i im not sure if aneyone else but I can see clearely what place is transparent and i want this to be as realistic and high detail as i posibly can i litterly am going to get my dad's permission and go on site to take photo's and numbers down to how many step's (up and over) how many rail's door's window's and even the pump station's (wich may have some boxes inside them with transparent walls around since it is mostly a building with plenty of windows and with pump meter's. My next question is this Other than this oviously gona be a large file is there aney limitations as to texturing?Fooli wrote:(Actually for the most part, railings can be done as simple planes that use transparencies in the texture to do the gaps.)
one agin thank you for answering my questions althou i keep on saying ive made great progress its just work done during my lunch break at school wich is jsut gona be the trial and error stage
Ok. Firstly the transparent spaces... I think there are three approaches you could use depending on the effect you want to achieve and the target detail level and complexity of the model.
Firstly, simply building the model "as it should be". For instance, building a railing model that has proper solid top and bottom rails and proper solid vertical joining struts, kinda thing. That's always going to look the most realistic - people will be able to see that "it's definitely a railing". The downside is that it'll increase the polycount dramatically and, if you're planning to make a large installation, with railings everywhere, that'll probably mean the model becomes unusable for most people.
Let's assume you used the most simple three-sided cylinders to make the top and bottom struts, and the vertical struts, and that you had one top, one bottom and, say, 6 vertical struts in every railing section. Ignoring all the cylinder ends that'd be 48 polys per railing section. You might have, I dunno, 20 repeats of the railing model over the whole thing - giving you 960 polys just in railings alone. That's about three times the polygon complexity of most of the buildings in the game at the moment, just for railings.
Secondly, using texture transparencies. In this instance you might build the top and bottom of a railing using solid cylinders - let's say 3-sided again, for the sake of argument - and join them up with a single 4-sided plane. Straight away you've reduced the polycount per railing to 14 polys. On the texture you'd do the top and bottom struts normally, but paint the plane with pure blue (0,0,255) and then paint little vertical struts on top of the blue. In-game, the blue parts will look transparent. From most angles and from any distance except really close up, players won't be able to tell the difference between this and the "proper" railing above. Only when you get close enough to see that the vertical struts aren't actually solid will you notice anything, and even then it's hardly a big deal. The payoff in reduced polycount almost always makes this worthwhile. Actually, the payoff in reduced modelling time definitely makes this worthwhile :)
Note that to achieve the transparency effect you cannot use jpgs for the texture - the compression used by the jpg format will screw up the colour indexing. You have to use bmp, indexed bmp or tga formats, which result in a much larger texture file size - several hundred instead of several tens of kb. That's the downside.
Thirdly - and this doesn't really apply to railings, but would apply to a big glass window, say - you can "cheat" a little by using the game's model format (.atm) to add one transparent model to another that isn't transparent. I use this quite a lot and it can look quite nice. Basically you build your whole model then save out the non-transparent bits and the transparent bits (the windows, usually) as separate files; then use the game model converter's materials properties dialogue to set the transparency of the window bits; then add the windows to the main model as a turret. This is the only way to combine transparent and non-transparent materials in a single model in our game at the moment.
Fourthly - the game supports three levels of detail, which means it's perfectly possible to combine any of the above approaches in a single building. For example, using the first approach for the highest level of detail, and the second approach for the medium and lowest levels. Of course that means you have to build three models, not one :)
General texture notes - we can only have one texture per model at the moment. The only limit to texture size is that imposed by a player's graphics card (well, I guess there is a top-end limit but I don't think we've ever needed to explore what it is). Most modern graphics cards will resample a texture anyway if they can't cope with the full one. Most of our textures are either 512x512 or 1024x512 or 1024x1024 jpgs, and tend to be 60kb/120kb/200kb kinda sizes. The same size textures as indexed bitmaps would be a bit larger. Anything bigger might become unusable as far as downloading the texture in game goes, although with the new web-based downloads, it might be interesting to see just how nice a massive 2048x2048 bitmap would look on a nice big shiny model :)
Hope that helps,
f
Firstly, simply building the model "as it should be". For instance, building a railing model that has proper solid top and bottom rails and proper solid vertical joining struts, kinda thing. That's always going to look the most realistic - people will be able to see that "it's definitely a railing". The downside is that it'll increase the polycount dramatically and, if you're planning to make a large installation, with railings everywhere, that'll probably mean the model becomes unusable for most people.
Let's assume you used the most simple three-sided cylinders to make the top and bottom struts, and the vertical struts, and that you had one top, one bottom and, say, 6 vertical struts in every railing section. Ignoring all the cylinder ends that'd be 48 polys per railing section. You might have, I dunno, 20 repeats of the railing model over the whole thing - giving you 960 polys just in railings alone. That's about three times the polygon complexity of most of the buildings in the game at the moment, just for railings.
Secondly, using texture transparencies. In this instance you might build the top and bottom of a railing using solid cylinders - let's say 3-sided again, for the sake of argument - and join them up with a single 4-sided plane. Straight away you've reduced the polycount per railing to 14 polys. On the texture you'd do the top and bottom struts normally, but paint the plane with pure blue (0,0,255) and then paint little vertical struts on top of the blue. In-game, the blue parts will look transparent. From most angles and from any distance except really close up, players won't be able to tell the difference between this and the "proper" railing above. Only when you get close enough to see that the vertical struts aren't actually solid will you notice anything, and even then it's hardly a big deal. The payoff in reduced polycount almost always makes this worthwhile. Actually, the payoff in reduced modelling time definitely makes this worthwhile :)
Note that to achieve the transparency effect you cannot use jpgs for the texture - the compression used by the jpg format will screw up the colour indexing. You have to use bmp, indexed bmp or tga formats, which result in a much larger texture file size - several hundred instead of several tens of kb. That's the downside.
Thirdly - and this doesn't really apply to railings, but would apply to a big glass window, say - you can "cheat" a little by using the game's model format (.atm) to add one transparent model to another that isn't transparent. I use this quite a lot and it can look quite nice. Basically you build your whole model then save out the non-transparent bits and the transparent bits (the windows, usually) as separate files; then use the game model converter's materials properties dialogue to set the transparency of the window bits; then add the windows to the main model as a turret. This is the only way to combine transparent and non-transparent materials in a single model in our game at the moment.
Fourthly - the game supports three levels of detail, which means it's perfectly possible to combine any of the above approaches in a single building. For example, using the first approach for the highest level of detail, and the second approach for the medium and lowest levels. Of course that means you have to build three models, not one :)
General texture notes - we can only have one texture per model at the moment. The only limit to texture size is that imposed by a player's graphics card (well, I guess there is a top-end limit but I don't think we've ever needed to explore what it is). Most modern graphics cards will resample a texture anyway if they can't cope with the full one. Most of our textures are either 512x512 or 1024x512 or 1024x1024 jpgs, and tend to be 60kb/120kb/200kb kinda sizes. The same size textures as indexed bitmaps would be a bit larger. Anything bigger might become unusable as far as downloading the texture in game goes, although with the new web-based downloads, it might be interesting to see just how nice a massive 2048x2048 bitmap would look on a nice big shiny model :)
Hope that helps,
f
hmmm about the non trans and then trans model part wings 3d has a feature that "expores selected" that would be useful for that. also i REALLY dont wana put true blue on my model im not sure if aneyone else can but i can eaisly make out the transparency's hmm how bout instead of railing how bout i use a flat or semi flat fence???
u asked sbout psinting textures on directly in 3d, a prog cal 3d canvas by Amabilis Software,can.
I would personally just makes lotz of groups and unwrap the model mornally,
there is a shareware version of the prog,on there site i think
should be www.amabilis.com
I would personally just makes lotz of groups and unwrap the model mornally,
there is a shareware version of the prog,on there site i think
should be www.amabilis.com
fooli could u give me a basic run throu on what unwraping generally means actually ill type out what i think and u say if its correct or not
ok generally u select a single plane on an object and it unwraps it onto a preset flat plane and u do this for all the planes that are to be textured? is that right?
ok generally u select a single plane on an object and it unwraps it onto a preset flat plane and u do this for all the planes that are to be textured? is that right?
Correct.
What you've described is planar mapping/unwrapping, and yes, in the end that's what all unwrapping is - it's a representation of a 3d model in 2d form by breaking it down into its constituent planar parts. If you did that manually for each poly you'd be at it for ages, though, and - this is the important bit - it's essential to try and make sure your unwrapped polys are joined together wherever possible (without introducing too much tearing or squishing) so as to make the texturing process easier.
For example, this is a dumbass way to map a cube:
This is a much better way, because you can make sure the edge of one face transitions smoothly to the edge of another:
Often you can use built-in tools or plugins to a 3d modelling program to make this easier, or even separate specialist programs.
In 3ds Max, for example, you can select entire primitives or other collections of polygons (say, an entire strut of a fence, or an entire wheel of a car) and unwrap them using predefined shapes - box, cylinder, sphere etc. Most heads on humanoid characters are unwrapped as spheres, for example - basically you choose to unwrap using parameters for the shape closest to the one you're trying to represent.
Most tools try to do that stuff for you in some way, but you'll always end up having to manually tweak bits and pieces afterwards. Some shapes just can't be unwrapped successfully unless you do it manually.
Finally, remember that you don't have to have unique texture bits for every part of a model. When you're building stuff try to bear the unwrapping process in mind. For example, the cube above might only need one square of texture because it looks the same on every face - so the map for that would just be a single square that's repeated on each side of the cube (in Max this is called face mapping). On a car, you probably don't need to do each wheel separately, so you'd build one wheel, unwrap it using a cylindrical map, and then copy it to the other three positions.
f
What you've described is planar mapping/unwrapping, and yes, in the end that's what all unwrapping is - it's a representation of a 3d model in 2d form by breaking it down into its constituent planar parts. If you did that manually for each poly you'd be at it for ages, though, and - this is the important bit - it's essential to try and make sure your unwrapped polys are joined together wherever possible (without introducing too much tearing or squishing) so as to make the texturing process easier.
For example, this is a dumbass way to map a cube:
This is a much better way, because you can make sure the edge of one face transitions smoothly to the edge of another:
Often you can use built-in tools or plugins to a 3d modelling program to make this easier, or even separate specialist programs.
In 3ds Max, for example, you can select entire primitives or other collections of polygons (say, an entire strut of a fence, or an entire wheel of a car) and unwrap them using predefined shapes - box, cylinder, sphere etc. Most heads on humanoid characters are unwrapped as spheres, for example - basically you choose to unwrap using parameters for the shape closest to the one you're trying to represent.
Most tools try to do that stuff for you in some way, but you'll always end up having to manually tweak bits and pieces afterwards. Some shapes just can't be unwrapped successfully unless you do it manually.
Finally, remember that you don't have to have unique texture bits for every part of a model. When you're building stuff try to bear the unwrapping process in mind. For example, the cube above might only need one square of texture because it looks the same on every face - so the map for that would just be a single square that's repeated on each side of the cube (in Max this is called face mapping). On a car, you probably don't need to do each wheel separately, so you'd build one wheel, unwrap it using a cylindrical map, and then copy it to the other three positions.
f
Last edited by Fooli on Wed Apr 27, 2005 3:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.