3d design tool whoo's..

Started by Rick Nasher, June 01, 2018, 00:17:23

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Rick Nasher

It's official: I hate most of the 3d programs available to my disposal for I think they are counter intuitive and I need to rtfm the s out of it before can actually perform an (in essence) simple, standard manipulation.



Couple of years back I made a building model in SketchUp, which worked like a breeze: Just 5hrs work and pretty much copied the in- and outside of a building. Pretty good for a first tryout and to be used in Blitz3d. Of course SketchUp is a bit of an odd duck so via a painstaking procedure in several steps and diverse apps, I finally managed to end up with 3DS, X and B3D formats + 15 or so textures to go with it.


Now I've switched to AGK I want to use it in there, but I'll need to merge all the textures used in the model into 1 single texture for X format. For this I've used Blender 2.79 to import the model directly from SketchUp, but that gave some distorted tris so I had to resort to 3DS as source.

However, auto-unwrapping all the textures and then to combining them into one didn't prove so easy either using Blender as not all tutorials I've seen(sofar) are covering all of the subject or do not work for this version.
I've managed to do it 1x,  but tiled textures are now not tiled at all but stretched over.  :(



Pff can't believe this has to be so much of an hassle still in this day and age..   ::)




_______________________________________
B3D + physics + shaders + X-platform = AGK!
:D ..ALIENBREED *LIVES* (thanks to Qube).. :D
_______________________________________

Naughty Alien

..i have had same problem some time back..yes..thats the main reason why i have invested in to 3dsmax and i can tell you that, i never regretted that..export to anything under the sun and it just works with tons of tutorials and scripts for whatever you could think of..

Derron

#2
@ Blender

Let all the different models use the same image texture and assign a different uv area (means you open up the UV editor and move the selected object vertices at the position of your choice).
To merge the texture images:
- bake a new texture in Blender (select all needed models, "ctrl + j" to join them to one model and also add all UVs into one stack, then bake as a new texture...at least it should work that way)

Edit: others describe it very similar:
https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/32677/how-to-combine-two-different-textures-into-one?utm_medium=organic&utm_source=google_rich_qa&utm_campaign=google_rich_qa


Dunno about merging etc (saw it in a tutorial some months ago) tough as I already create models in Blender and not "outside". But for "baking" there is a really cool addon to even auto bake in stuff like "wear off":
https://www.blendernation.com/2018/03/13/textools-1-1-0-released/
(excuse as this might be a bit offtopic)


Another alternative is the more manual one: open all textures in your image editing programme, merge them manually and save as new texture. Then in Blender you assign this new image as texture for each model - and in the "UV editor" you move the vertices to their position. You could also "ctrl + j" join them if you really need them as one single model.



As I am using Blender for about 15 years now (2.3x) and from then on 3dsmax was no longer an option for me (- last 3ds Max I really used was R4 under DOS - Windows variants, hmm were not really mine and got only "tried out". Of course price tag was what counted the most).


bye
Ron

Rick Nasher

@Naughty Alien:
I really get that. Way back I used to have a 3DSMax (2009 I believe) with all the bells and whistles, but then never really made full use of it. Worked pretty good though. I believe it is what the major studio's use so there must be something good about it. But pretty expensive indeed. I doubt if newer versions would even run on my aging rig too.
Only thing Blender's got going for it is that it's free and apparently if you're willing to be persistent and bite your tongue you'll get something done.  :-\
 

@Derron:
It's not really 2 objects I want to join. It's a building. Basically one huge object, that contains different textures all over the place for roofing, ceilings, carpet, walls(marble in some areas), doors, direction signs on the wall and outside some pavement textures etc.

Blender's window splitting and placement really drives me nuts too. I hate it when developers do not use the build in OS GUI stuff for that would really make things so much easier to get used to. For the same reason I hate Adobe SW where every time they try to reinvent the wheel with their own UI elements. Might be easier for them to maintain cross platform, but imho it just sucks for takes up more resources then necessary and also makes it less intuitive.
Enough ranting. lol

I'll try the texture tools, that might just come in handy, many thanks for that hint.
_______________________________________
B3D + physics + shaders + X-platform = AGK!
:D ..ALIENBREED *LIVES* (thanks to Qube).. :D
_______________________________________

Naughty Alien

..one of the things i really like about 3dsmax is , it really feels like an engineering tool..user interface and all is somehow tailored like that and it feels right 'at home' for people inclined on to 'engineering' side of things, which programmers are..i tried blender and i just couldnt get my head around user interface for example which is why i just dropped it after i realized im fighting user interface instead of creating some stuff..

Rick Nasher

Quote from: Naughty Alien on June 01, 2018, 13:53:20
..one of the things i really like about 3dsmax is , it really feels like an engineering tool..user interface and all is somehow tailored like that and it feels right 'at home' for people inclined on to 'engineering' side of things, which programmers are..i tried blender and i just couldnt get my head around user interface for example which is why i just dropped it after i realized im fighting user interface instead of creating some stuff..

Exactly!
_______________________________________
B3D + physics + shaders + X-platform = AGK!
:D ..ALIENBREED *LIVES* (thanks to Qube).. :D
_______________________________________

Rick Nasher

Contrary to that: in SketchUp is so easy create a building in no time(no reading required). If so I don't understand why all of these tools can have a more similar approach( 3DSMax has similar tools actually).
_______________________________________
B3D + physics + shaders + X-platform = AGK!
:D ..ALIENBREED *LIVES* (thanks to Qube).. :D
_______________________________________

Steve Elliott

#7
I really don't know what planet 3d modelling software coders are on lol  :P
Win11 64Gb 12th Gen Intel i9 12900K 3.2Ghz Nvidia RTX 3070Ti 8Gb
Win11 16Gb 12th Gen Intel i5 12450H 2Ghz Nvidia RTX 2050 8Gb
Win11  Pro 8Gb Celeron Intel UHD Graphics 600
Win10/Linux Mint 16Gb 4th Gen Intel i5 4570 3.2GHz, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 2Gb
macOS 32Gb Apple M2Max
pi5 8Gb
Spectrum Next 2Mb

Holzchopf

You're right, they're coders too - why don't they think like coders? o_O

plenatus

Its not free but in past i always use https://www.unwrap3d.com/u3d/index.aspx for uv mapping.
I think its an fantastic tool for that.

Derron

#10
@ Rick



I created a simple multi-material object. Selected the object (in "object mode"), used the "\\\"-part in the top right of the 3D view window to open up a new panel (so another 3d window). Choosed "UV/Image Editor" in the bottom-left dropdown of that window. Clicked on "new" in the middle of the menu bar in the "UV/Image Editor". Selected an texture size and created the new texture.
Clicked on the "camera" icon in the navigation bar on the right (render settings) scrolled to "bake", opened this section and selected "Bake Mode: Textures". Hit "Bake" and saw the result in the screenshot - now all textures would be joined into one image.

Is this what you wanted to do?



If you have some UV sets created already (so the windows are UV layouted etc) then:

you can create more UV sets there ... eg a "all textures"-UV-set or so.



@ UI
While there are some small issues I have with Blender (label-truncating in small resolutions rather than input-resizing) the whole shortcut-centered approach helps the users who want to use Blender extensively. "G", "S", "R" ... works nearly everywhere (move, scale, rotate). It is a fantastic piece of software for the price tag of ... nothing.
Biggest problem is the steep learning curve - which v2.80 will tackle (there you get all your mouse-oriented clickable icons to do stuff - so they also attract the modo, 3dsmax, whatever people who do not like the approach Blender <= v2.79 uses).

And yes, I am by way no longer having a neutral POV there - addicted to this software for years now.

bye
Ron