Facial Sculpting& Setup

< -Previous Page -- Next Page- >

Step-8-Uv Snap and Texturing

Next I want to introduce you to some Texturing. so we will use those flat states and snap the uvs onto the geometry. and then morph back for Texturing. ( people usually use photoshop to aid them with the wireframe..and pasting it into PS to put that together into a map. and then snap to geometry in their own app. but I want to keep this strictly focused around Mirai. )

Preparation

To snap the UVs you will need the Map Per Face, and The Plugin Texture Viewer loaded. To do this to to Applications/ Plugin Manager and load up the plugins I mentioned ( you should enable them under both Current and Startup states. Press apply and close that window.

Make an Image file. ( F5, image, make it 800x800 or whatever your comfortable with and for pattern choose white. You should now see an image in your Scene Graph.

Go to Applications/ Plugin/ Texture Viewer. This is the Viewer that will let us snap the Uvs/ Image partition to the Geometry. But to do that we will need the image in the actual viewer first. to do this we will click and drag the image from the Scene Graph to the Texture Viewer. ( press and hold alt+ middle mouse button, and drag the image onto the texture viewer ) You should have had a little dialogue open up asking if you want to make a material , just say yes ( not like it gives you a choice ). the texture viewer should have also come with a Texture Viewer Graph. as a preferance i turn off the Grid, so ctrl+ right click, choose modes and turn off grid.

Ready

in the Texture viewer graph you should open up the sub-data for the model and make the front of the model visible. we now will need to use that morph that we made eariler. go to your Geometry view choose body, bring up the menu, and Ctrl+ left click on displace. choose unfold-front, keep a value of 1.0. Go to your Texture Viewer, notice your model is unfolded, and you only see the front partition. select a face anywhere, bring up the menu and choose part ( head front ), or you could have lasso selected as well. Go into an Orthographic view ( press P) and then Z to go into a front view. then use the pan/zoom to get your mesh placed accordingly onto the image ( you will probably want to place the wireframe as far to one side as possible. . with the faces selected now, what you will do is snap that area of the image to the selected polygons using the " \ " key or you can do it from the menu choosing snap material.

We have fused the image area to the polygons on the front of the head, next thing we should do is paint in that area so we will know where to place the back part of the head and mouth on the image. So open up the 3D painting module and in the 3d Paint:Graph choose the object you want to paint. pick a colour and Fill the front of the head with paint. Go nuts, just make sure you cover the entire front portion of the head.

Notes: In Mirai Left mouse button is used for picking a colour, so if you have a material editor open, or a palette, and you left click on a colour, The Colour Editors' Currently active colour slot will be turned into that colour.
To apply a colour you use the Middle mouse button. you can store a number of colours in the Colour Editors' available slots at the bottom. The downside is that these colours are lost when you restart Mirai.
To solve this problem you have to make a Palette. ( F5 and scroll down till you see the Palette item. )
It will appear in your Scene Graph. From there you can right click and choose edit. this will open the actual palette. I usually keep this open while working with Paint, for storing and retrieving colours.

Navigation inside the 3d painter isnt as nice as the rest of the 3d navigation windows found inside Mirai. What i like to do is press that paint brush button so that it turns into a cube, ( meaning that you get 3d modeler type of navigation ) pick a vertex and press aim. Then all you do is press the cube to get you back to painting navigation.
Updates can also be changed from "camera activation" to "after each stroke". to do this just click on the upper left of the window to bring up the options for that window.
Before painting details, you should go to the Geometry view and initialize your model back to its original shape.

Go back to the Texture Viewer. You should see that the image has been painted. Go to the Geometry view, initialize the mesh to its original state, and then CTRL+ displace it to the "unfold- back" target. go to the Texture Viewer and hide everything except the back fo the head. use alt+z to go into a back view. Place the wire where you want it, and snap the image to those polygons.
Paint the back just like you did with the front. If you see a little seam between the front and back, just go to the 2d image painter and paint around the border to fill in. After painting in a few colours you might want to use smudge or blur to blend the seam. ( for testing my seams i just painted a little cheap tattoo across it. ) ( though you shouldnt try this because mirais undo in the paint system has a short term memory.
So often once you painted the tattoo in the 3d viewer, and the paint has been applied, you will be unable to undo. ( Mirai only lets you undo while you paint your projection, but not after you applied the paint ( by moving the camera ).
You could always try to duplicate your image or some other trick where you save your image externally and after painting to test seams you just right click on the image in the Scene Graph and press Revert Image.
Repeat the above for the mouth.

( click on interface images for close up )

Notice how my Map is clean for now. This is because we havent finished modeling the character yet. I didnt want to set the paint details in stone before finishing the modeling.

< -Previous Page -- Next Page- >