Tutorials

 

Getting Around in trueSpace 5 and 6

Page 8

Quick-jump to topics in this tutorial:

  1. Help is available!
  2. Selecting views
  3. Finding the tools and options
  4. Creating a primitive
  5. Drawing curves with the drawpanel tool
  6. Selecting faces/edges/vertices
  7. Grouping and ungrouping
  8. Texturing (Texturing, Textures, Layers, Light emitting textures, Animated textures, Applying the texture)
  9. Lighting
  10. Animating (Animation Control Group and Animation Parameters, Keyframe Editor/Scene Editor, Rendering the Animation, Animation Paths)
  11. Simulations 
  12. Rendering
  13. Layers in trueSpace 6

 

8. Textures

 

Applying the texture

When you finished setting up the texture the way you want it, you can apply it to your object by clicking on the Paint Object icon on the left side of the Material Editor.

You can also apply the material to selected faces only. To do this, first select the faces you want to texture, then click on the icon underneath the Paint Object tool and hold down the mouse button, then navigate to the Paint Face icon. Once you clicked on the Paint Face icon, trueSpace will paint the selected faces one by one. If the selected area is fairly big, it might take a while for the program to finish painting, so be patient. Once the program finished the painting, your cursor will change into a paintbrush and you can click on other faces and paint those yourself. You can even change the texture, and, as long as you have the paintbrush icon, paint as many faces with the new texture as you want. If you want to stop painting faces, just click on the Object Tool (the white arrow).

If you have one or two objects where you want to change the material that you applied previously, you can do that easily by using the "Paint over existing Material" tool. Just load the new material that you want to apply, then click on this tool (underneath the Paint Object icon, in the same group as the Paint Face icon), then click on the material that you want to change. This way you can change the texture of whole objects (if they were textured with one  material only), or  all the faces of an object that were painted with the same material.

Another tool that is very useful in the Material Editor is the Inspect tool which looks like an eyedropper. If you have several objects with different textures in your scene and you want to get back to one of the textures and do more editing work on it, you can select the Inspect tool then click on the object you want. The texture of that object will be loaded in the Material Editor, so you can make your changes and re-apply the new texture. (Fig. 8.30)

 

Fig. 8.30

You can also select whether you want to apply your texture Faceted, Smooth, or to use the Auto Facet option. By default, the Auto Facet option is on, and this works well most of the time. But, for example, if you import an object from another program and it doesn't look smooth enough, you can try the Smooth option and that might help. You can set the autofacet angle by right-clicking on the Auto Facet icon. (Fig. 8.31)

 

  Fig. 8.31

Finally, in the last row of the icons on the left side of the Material Editor, you can set whether you want the preview to show the texture on a sphere, a plane, and whether you want to see the texture previewed on the object (Area IIR) or whether you want to see a preview of the textured scene in the Material Editor window. (Fig. 8.32)  In the case of the Area IIR, position your preview window over the object to see the texture on it. (Fig. 8.33)

 

Fig. 8.32

Fig. 8.33

Once you put a texture on your object, you can change its orientation by choosing a UV projection for it and rotating the bounding box. For example, if you have a box, you would click on the "cubic UV projection". (Fig. 8.34) A bounding box will be placed around your object. You can rotate this box around the object (with the little diamonds), and the texture will rotate with it (Fig. 8.35 and Fig. 8.36). You can tile your texture by changing the U and V Repts (Fig. 8.34). 

 

Fig. 8.34

Fig. 8.35

Fig. 8.36

The UV mapping you choose for your object can change how the texture is applied (the orientation and the tiling of your pattern). You can experiment with different UV mapping options, tiling, rotating, etc. You can also select e.g. an individual face and apply a different UV mapping to just that face. (Fig. 8.37)

Fig. 8.37

 

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Copyright ©  2002-2012 by Susan Lee.