Apply a texture to a large model

dubcanada

Hello,

I have a boat model and I am trying to get something like https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1349726/BFHeroesOldRowBoat.jpg

And I want to have a texture like the following
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1349726/RowBoatTexture.jpg

However I don't know how I can UV Map my model to make it just apply that texture to certain areas, tiled. I only know how to do like normal maps (take the model and flatten it and what not)

Any idea or direction?

Regards,

renderhjs

You simply scale the uv faces outside the 1.0 x 1.0 box so that they go beyond the UV square area. That way the texture will tile on the 3d face area.
Obviously the textures need to be designed in a way so that they loop with the other side. Alternatively you need to cut the faces several times to map it again.

Eric Chadwick

With the above texture, you need to slice up the model wherever the texture is meant to repeat. Then take each segment of faces and UV them to fit within that wood-plank section of the texture. Make sure you leave a bit of room all around the edges of the woodplank texture... don't UV right up against the edges, otherwise you'll get color bleeding as the model recedes into the distance (or portions are seen edge-on).

Example at the bottom here.
http://ericchadwick.com/img/world_of_zoo.html

dubcanada

Thanks, but I am still not 100% sure what you guys mean. Each of you gave me a different answer that doesn't make much sense to me.

Here is my current UV layout, http://j.imagehost.org/0407/example.jpg (I know I suck)

Now what I want to do is seperate the center wood part and bottom of the boat part away from the seam binder (very top two peices and the aprt that goes along the outside of the bottom two peices) And then I want to seperate the top of the wood boat (the two peices in the middle on the outside of the oval shaped bottom of the boat)

So the texture would be a large square (for the actual boat part) with two smaller rectangles for the seam binder and top of the boat.

So what I got is I take all the peices that the large square would tile too and scale them so they fit without the large square, but wouldn't that just overlay a HUGE single peice of wood?

Eric Chadwick

Here's a quickie Max 2010 file, using the example texture from your first post. Take a close look at the modifier stack.
http://www.ericchadwick.com/examples/files/RowBoatTexture.max

MRico

Man, thanks for that example Eric, I also didn't know how to do this.

dubcanada

That helps a bunch, thanks! So now I figured out how to apply a tiled texture to all the faces on the model.

How do I seperate different sections of the model. For the different wood colors.

Eric Chadwick

Glad it helps, texture atlases are a good thing to know how to use.

To separate the different sections, I face-mapped the whole model first (UVW Mapping modifier set to Face) then with UVW Unwrap in Edge mode I selected the edge ring for one of the "boards", used the Edit UVW menu Select to convert the selection to Faces, then I Free Transformed them to where I wanted them. Make sense?

One thing I didn't do in the example, was to weld all the verts afterwards in the Edit UVW window. This is a good thing to do as an optimization step, since it reduces the number of vertices in the game. UV splits = more vertices.