The Best Way to Make Your Textures
The other tutorials I have wrote about texturing work well if you want to texture using another person's texture, but what if you want to create your own? What is the best way to do this?
I recommend that you follow this tutorial using the stopsign.blend it will help you understand it better.
Fire up blender and we will begin. Open the file you want to texture (UV Map) I am using a a simple sign I made for a game which looks like this:
My stop sign is all one object, but you could use the same technique to texture a bunch of objects.
So hit F on your object and you will now be in UV Face Select mode.
Select all of the faces and go to editing (F9) and under texture face select two sided then copy draw mode:
That makes it so that you can see the texture on either side of the object.
Now we need to split the screen so right click on the border of the window and choose split area:
Your screen should now look like this:
Now in your second window we need to change it so that we can start the UV Mapping:
Now we need to start laying out our UV Map, I am going to start with the actual sign to the stop sign. So select the first sign (the entire thing) and in the UV/Image Editor window hit E, now it should look like this:
Now make sure the the circle is selected (the one in the image above) and scale it down a bit (s) then place it in the top corner of the grid. It should look like this:
Now A in the UV/Image editor and 3D window to deselect the sign, then hit CTRL 1 (this is mainly if your following with the stop sign file) and select the other side of the stop sign and do the exact same thing as we did, hit E then scale it down. Now in the 3D window select all the faces, in the UV/Image editor window you will see the first circle we scaled place your second one beside it, now it should look like this:
Deselect all the stuff in the 3D window and UV/Image editor window now. Select the entire pole except for 1 face or it will become all strange, in the UV/Image editor hit E, scale it down, and place it near the bottom of the grid so it looks like this:
Now deselect everything then select the one face on the pole that you didn't select when you unwrapped the pole in the UV/Image Editor, then with it selected hit E, then in the 3D window select the entire pole so you can see all the UV/Image Editor and place the part of the pole that you didn't select right inline by the rest of the pole pieces so its like this:
You may need to rotate it ® to get it to fit too. Now your done setting up your UV map, so click on the UV button then choose Save UV Face Layout:
Then save it where it has defaulted to. Now open that file up in your paint program. You will see all of the lines for the UV map you made, so simply start brushing over them (this tutorial isn't going to show you how to make a texture though). Here is my texture:
As you can see you don't have to color right in between the lines.
So now make sure your entire object is selected the go back in blender go to Image/Open in your UV/Image Editor:
Now select your image and it should look like this:
Make sure the other stop sign isn't backwards, you may need to edit it to make it so its correct. Now in the 3D window if you hit ALT Z you should see the texture:
Now if you want to render it here is how you do it, Start by going into object mode:
Now go to shading (F5) and turn TexFace ON, then render and the texture should be there!
Here is what I got for a final render:
Here is the download to this file: StopSign.zip
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