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The World of 3D Textures - 3D Tutorial
Steve Shanks | 1 | | In the world of 3D, textures can play a very important part in the final image or animation. In fact, I would go as far as saying even the greatest model will only look mediocre with poor texturing. So in this tutorial I will try to give a few tips and lay a few ideas out to help improve your texturing and how to get good textures. | | 2 | | There are many ways of applying a texture, but lets cut this right down to basics and say there are 3 ways, Tiled, UVmapped and positioned textures. First we will look at tiled textures and when to use them and when not too | 
| 3 | | Save the image above to your hard drive then apply it to a cube in any 3d program and have it tile about 4 times over the cube, then add something in front to add perspective and add a light with shadow. Then render to get something similar to the image below. | 
| 4 | | Now that's not to bad for a basic render and this is a classic use of a tiling texture, now zoom back to show the bottom edge and side of the cube then add a floor and tile the image below on that. | 
| 5 | | To end up with an image similar to below. | 
| 6 | | Still not bad but as you can see our image looks to clean, walls rarely look the same from top to bottom. But before we move onto how to fix this lets look at the floor. Its hard to see the tiles in an image this size but its very difficult to texture floors in any other way but tiling for two main reasons, one its hard to get a good photo of a full floor and two the texture image would be huge (Tip- use Vue d'esprit or Bryce to render big floor textures for grass and similar) so from this we can say that generally use a tiling texture on floors and walls where either the edges aren't seen or you want a clean wall such as interiors. | | 7 | | To make the wall look real we'll use a positioned texture instead of a tiling one, the image I'm using is too large to put here but you can download many similar images from hundreds of texture sites around the internet or make your own, again more on this later. To apply this texture apply it flat and then scale it to fit the front face of the cube being careful to get the bottom of the texture inline with the bottom of the cube. | 
| 8 | | I hope you agree that this wall looks more realistic with the variation of texture. This technique can be put to great use with an Alpha or Opacity channel added. Lets go into this in more detail, in the image below I have a photo of a fence I took, I need to create a second image in black and white so that my 3d program knows to remove all black and keep all white. | 
| 9 | | So I end up with an image like this one below. | 
| 10 | | Now to apply this in 3D I am using Cinema 4D XL but any application will do it. Create a plane and make its dimensions the same as the image (in my case 640x480), don't worry if its too big its easier to scale down the model rather than have the texture apply wrong. Now create a new material and add your photo as the color and the B&W image as the alpha then apply to the plane and leave it as the default mapping of UVmapping (In this case this just means fit to the object which in our case is the same size as the texture). Now you will see something similar to the image below and we have saved ourselves a lot of fence modeling. | 
| 11 | | Now lets look at UVmapping. This is the way to get really good detailed textures on very complex models, to give an idea of what I mean here is a fireman model and his texture map before painting. | 
| 12 | | As you can see from the texture map you can get great detail and precise texturing using this technique. Rather than repeat previous tutorials here are a few links to others at the Internet EYE 3D.
Precision mapping for max shows how to remap a laptop model the lap top is included and the tutorial works for most 3D programs.
Customizing Poser clothing part 1 shows how to remap and adjust a UVmapped model and Customizing Poser clothing part 2 goes into the advanced techniques. | | 13 | | One final thing to look at is where to get your textures. There are hundreds if not thousands of texture sites on the internet with free and pay for textures, also if you play games check in their folders you may find hundreds of great textures in there. But be careful free textures may not be royalty free and gaming ones are sure not to be. If you plan to sell images then the best bet is buy your textures and be sure to read the license that comes with them. If you plan to sell or give away models life gets a bit trickier as you will need to create your own textures but don't worry there are thousands within a mile of your backyard, armed with a digital camera and a scanner (for smaller objects) you can fill your hard drive with textures. Next time you go out take a look I promise you'll be itching to get snapping. To show what I mean take a look at the image below it uses 3 textures, one is a photo of the gable end of our local DIY shop, the floor is from Vue d'esprit and the wood is my neighbors fence. I hope this has given you a little to think about and maybe layed a base to work from. Just remember there are no rules when it comes to textures try applying the weirdest images as a texture and you may be pleasantly surprised what you end up with. | 
Copyright 2001, Steve Shanks, All Rights Reserved
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Join our PoserWorld subscription site and download thousands of Poser Models, Poser Props, Poser Characters, Poser Textures and more for one low price. www.poserworld.com . Subscriptions starting at $30.00. No hidden fees or charges, just one low price for everything. All content is royalty-free for commercial use. No download limits.
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