-------- UV Mapping - Lightwave 6.5 -------- I've been asked by a friend how I'm making the texture maps on my new Horus guard (Which you can see at my Stargate site!), so I thought I'd write up a short tutorial on it. Modeller: Well, to start with we're gonna need to make a basic object. For the sake of speed, and so that everyone has the same object I'm supplying it right Here!. Load that object into modeller. You should be looking at something like this: You'll notice that it's currently a Nurbs object. You can apply a UV Map to a Nurbs object but most of the time it's better to freeze the object first. The reason being that If you have an object like this, the 'Indent' will have straight edges in Poly mode while they are round and smooth in Nurbs mode. If you UV map an unfrozen nurbs mesh you'll get the straight forward Un-frozen mesh in UV view and therefore when it comes to painting the map you may not get accurate results. When you've created the frozen nurbs UV Map you can always go back to the Nurbs object afterwards and re-apply the UV map. That way you'll be able to reduce poly counts and still have an accurate map. But for now we're just going to freeze the mesh! Press CTRL+D or the Freeze button to freeze the Nurbs mesh. Depending on the Patch Division level, you should have a nice subdivided version of the basic mesh now. Now, set the top left Viewport to UV Texture and set the perspective view's shading level from Smooth shading to Texture. When we apply it, we'll be able to see our texture on the mesh now. One important thing to note here is the orientation of your object. UV mapping seems to work by unwrapping your object at the top part on the Z Axis. So say you have our object here rotated left 90 degrees, when making the UV Map you'd get a portion of the map on the left side and the rest opposite on the right hand side, if that makes any sense!! ;) Ok, time to make the UV Map. Press the T button down the bottom right in between the W and M buttons. This sets us to Texture mode. Now click in the drop down box next to the buttons. Select new and the Create UV Texture Map panel should appear. When making many UV maps tt's up to you what you name the UV Map but I'd put something meaningful in there so when it comes to texturing it you know which is which! For know just name it 'UV_Cylinder'. Set the map type to Cylindrical and the Axis to Y like this: Now press ok, and you should see the UV Map laid out in the Top left Viewport! It should look like this: Now if you wanted to, you could distort the UV map in that viewport by using any tool you wanted and it would still fit the Mesh when you applied it. This is very useful if the map doesn't come out quite right, or is difficult to paint over. You can just distort it into shape and away you go! :) It's a good idea to save the object at this point! Ok, hold the mouse pointer in the UV Viewport and press the 0 key. This maximises that particular viewport allowing you to take a big screencap in order to paint over it. So, take a screencap of the UV Map then paste it into your favourite paint program. In whatever program you use, you need to crop the image down so 'only' the mesh is showing. You don't want any empty areas of grid around the mesh. So the map should now look like this: Save that image quickly and go back into modeller. Open the display propertis by pressing the D key. Set the texture resolution to 512. We'll be able to see the texture clearly now. Open the surface editor and select the Default surface. You can rename that if you want. Press the T Colour button. Set Projection to UV, the UV Map to UV_Cylinder and in the Image drop down, load the image you saved a moment ago. You should see the texture mapped onto the mesh in Perspective view like this: Now you'll notice that it doesn't look quite right here. That's becuase the UV Map in UV Texture viewport doesn't stretch across to both sides of the grid. We could have done this previously but it doesn't matter too much on this object, so that's what we'll do next. Press 'h' to select the Stretch tool. Place the mouse pointer right in the center of the UV Map and while holding down the CTRL Key drag right about 147% or until the Map touches the side of the grid. While you're doing that you should see the Texture on the Mesh slowly fit into place! You should now have this: That's all for Making the UV Map in modeller. Save the object again. Now that texture isn't particularly interesting is it? ;) When making my new Horus guard I used just two layers, two colours and the Airbrush tool to create the textures... I added dirt and specular highlights in Lightwave with Procedural textures. Have fun with them UV's! ;) If I have time soon, I'll write up a short 2nd part to this tutorial covering a Basic texture in Paint shop pro. Ed Giddings [Main][News][Gallery][Downloads][Tutorials][Links][E-Mail]