Ghost Recon - Texturing Tutorial

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Texturing Tutorial
by SnowFella

Published : 26th February 2004
Feedback : Here

Introduction

Well, here goes on a short tute on how to texture individual faces and polygons without detaching them first. I might be making this way too simple, but hopefully you won't mind if I go over something you already know. Please click on any of the images for the larger version.

I'm going to use an earlier version of my CV9040C model as its one of the few models I have laying around right now without any textures applied. I'm going to texture the sideskirt of the hull using the texture I'm working on right now.

Procedure

If you look at this picture you can see that the hull is totally without texture and the stack of modifiers (marked 1. in the picture) has been collapsed down as far as possible.

It also shows the texture (marked 2.) just to give you a better idea how I've laid it out.

Now to apply a texture to the sideskirt only and map it to fit the texture I first select all the faces making up the sideskirt by going into sublevel-polygon (marked 3.) and selecting all the polygons.

You can easily see they are selected since they turn red (you can toggle this on and off by hitting F2)

Now I apply the texture to the mesh while still in sublevel mode and with the polys selected, should be able to see that the whole mesh changes colour but the texture will only show up on the parts that you selected. You know how to do this but still, 1. to apply the texture, 2. to make the texture visible on the mesh and 3. the brackets around the texture icon shows its in use on the screen. The texture still isn't visible on the selected faces though.

Now comes the nice part, time to apply a "UVW Mapping" modifier (marked 1.) to the selection, I'm using the standard planar map (marked 2.) as its a flat surface.

As you can tell the texture now shows up on the selected faces but we still need to scale it so it fits.

To scale our mapping to make it fit the selected polygons we apply an "Unwrap UVW" modifier (marked 1.).

By clicking the Edit button (marked 2.) the "edit UVW" window (marked 3.) opens and there you can see the outline of the polys we selected earlier.

	Now I'm going to maximize the "edit UVW" window so I easier can line outline of polys up with its corresponding part in the texture. As you can see in the top of the window there are a few tools (marked 1) there for us to use in lining everything up. They are from left to right: Move, rotate, scale, freeform (no idea what that one does really) and mirror.
Scale and mirror has dropdown lists and each contains a few extra functions. I've also highlighted the whole selection to be able to scale and move it, you can tell if its highlighted or not by the colour of the corner points (red and they are selected, white and they are de-selected)

By using the scale and the move tools I've now laid in the selection over its corresponding texture bit. I've found that this usually is easier done by first using the uniform scale tool (marked 1.) to get either the horizontal or the vertical scale right and then using either the horizontal scale tool (marked 2.) or the vertical scale tool (marked 3.)

Time to see the finished mapping, if anything looks odd you can always go back to edit mode and re-align your selection until it looks the way you want it.

Looks pretty ok for me first time out (done this once or twice before ;) )

Time to lock this mapping in and that's done by collapsing the stack of modifiers down to "Editable mesh" again.

Easiest done by simply right clicking until you get the modifier window up and select "convert to - editable mesh". This will lock your mapping in.

All you have to do now is move on to the next part of your mesh that you what textured and go through the same procedure again.

If you want to go in and edit your earlier mapping again after you have collapsed the stack you can do this in 2 different ways. Either by selecting the faces again, applying an "Unwrap UVW" modifier and using the edit function or by applying the "Unwrap UVW" modifier to the whole mesh.

If you do the latter before you have textured and mapped the whole mesh things will look a little weird though, any faces that hasn't yet been mapped will show up in the edit window and things look pretty messed up as you can see. Not to worry though, its only unmapped faces that will end up jumbled and once you get all the faced mapped properly everything will look orderly.

Hopefully this will help somewhat, at least it gives an insight into texturing polys without detaching them.

By Snowfella