Doc talk:Manual/Textures/UV

imho, reading what is currently here and Broken's ideas and suggestions, this whole section and related section organization needs to be rethought. I suggest one section that transitions the user from procedural materials (the previous section) to texture painting by the natural evolution of skills and complexity and process they follow. So the section title would be "Painting" (users think of it as this, but also add Shading in keeping with Pixar's terminology for this step in the animation process) and a TOC would be:

C&C

It would be great if this section was updated, and I'm be glad to answer any technical questions on the subject.

Thanks! You can be my Technical Editor. You're hired, but the pay sucks.--Roger 15:18, 9 December 2006 (CET)

Sculpting and Painting

• Sculpting
  • ...

    Sculpting is a process and tools used to modify a mesh or its physical appearance, not paint it or color it. correct? If so, I don't think it should go under Painting, but under mesh modeling.--Roger 13:30, 9 December 2006 (CET)

The reason I would like to see group things is also because of how I see things evolve. And I will be making more changes to this area in the releases after 2.43.

• The painting modes and sculpting will become more integrated in the future, sharing (saveable) brushes and settings, and possibly also allowing e.g. sculpting and vertex painting at the same time. This is why I would like to see them under the same chapter.

ok, so I will put in the effort to write something that will address our user's needs for 2.42 though 2.43. I will be your baby for 2.44 release. When and if it does, and I can see it, and it works reliably, we can talk about moving it. But I will probably object because the sculpt tools I used over a year ago dealt with clay modeling and working with the mesh, smoothing, pulling, pushing, etc, and while FanTasTic, had nothing to do with painting the mesh. --Roger 21:39, 9 December 2006 (CET)

• I don't like to see the texture painting tools and UV mapping tangled up too much, because:
  • Many people use external applications to paint their textures, but still need to use UV mapping them.

Agreed. we need to show them how to do that. I'd like to reference Gimp. ok?--Roger 21:39, 9 December 2006 (CET)

• • Texture painting can be done in 2D in the image window as well.

Agreed. and we need to explain that to users. that section is blank right now--Roger 21:39, 9 December 2006 (CET)

• • Right now texture painting depends very much on UV mapping. But with projection painting (likely the release after 2.43), an automatic unwrap should be sufficient.

and when it is released, I think it should be another section right after vertex painting and before UV. I think it would be great if it did away with the whole UV thing anyway, in my stupid user opinion. --Roger 21:39, 9 December 2006 (CET)

• • UV mapping is just one way to map a texture to a mesh. Texture painting with other mapping types may be supported in the future.

But right now, with users and functionality we have right NOW, UV mapping is the only way, correct? AND, the features we have right now are not explained well, or even correctly (e.g. old, outdated)--Roger 21:39, 9 December 2006 (CET)

I prefer to have a logical structure rather than a tutorial style ordering, since that seems to me more in line with the other parts of the manual.

--Brecht 18:05, 9 December 2006 (CET)

Reference Manual versus User Manual, my man. Reference Manual can call out all the features organized by technical approach or whatever. User manual needs to be organized by user task, taking them from the rock simple stuff to the complicated stuff. People read a book front to back, building on knowledge gained in previous chapters. Asking them to jump around, when they dont even know what they're jumping around in is unreasonable. 'Stuff' in this case is coloring their little doodad. Otherwise, we get wayyyyy too many noob questions in the forums, and no coherent thought in how the material is presented. See Broken's user talk page for more info.--Roger 21:39, 9 December 2006 (CET)

Ok, I can agree with that, and I'm fine with the general ordering now. We should indeed not try to document 2.44, but rather 2.43 :).--Brecht

Hey, we agree. good. Building on your idea, I agree that the Reference Manual should have a section called Mapping all to itself, separate from Painting, because UV Mapping is a type of mapping, is a significantly different code set than painting, and deserves its own topic, separate from painting. If I'm doing UV mapping, and forget how to strectch the map, I want to go the reference manual and look up UV Mapping, cause that is the feature I am specifically using.

Useful Links

UV Mapping

Since we never really explain what this ominous UV-mapping is I've collected some links that might prove useful when writing a nice&short description. The problem is that one can find heaps of tutorials and howtos how to make&use UV-maps in the various 3D-programs, but i found not one good (i.e newbie-friendly) explaination. --Hoehrer 16:44, 12 December 2006 (CET)

• http://membres.lycos.fr/bobois/Tuts/uvmapping/uvmapping01.html
• http://www.siggraph.org/education/materials/HyperGraph/mapping/r_wolfe/r_wolfe_mapping_1.htm ... and following pages.
• http://www.blendernation.com/2006/11/24/making-sense-of-texture-mapping/
• http://www.tutorialized.com/tutorial/UV-Mapping-Texturing/5852 (some of the images are quite good)
• http://alexmunn.com/html/class_maya_week5.htm Especially the beginning.

What do you think of this image as basis to explain uv-mapping?

http://static.flickr.com/135/320521892_317793c497_o.png

http://www.flickr.com/photos/63231715@N00/320521892/

--Hoehrer 16:44, 12 December 2006 (CET)

Please don't cripple my statements. If I'm wrong here please comment here and/or point me to the place where the basics of UV Mapping (relation of 3d space to uv space) are explained to the inexperienced user. At least I couldn't find it anywhere, maybe i missed it. --Hoehrer 09:41, 20 December 2006 (CET)

Sorry; I was hoping I did a good job of explaining UV wrapping under "UV Explained", so that I could remove your partial comment that we didn't. I don't know what else we could say. I am trying to respond to C&C by adding to the text and thus removing the criticism. If you do think that the User Manual now explains to a new user, using common terms and real-world examples, please remove all of this diatribe and leave your links, because they are good reference material. If not, please add to the User Manual and what is there to explain what UV mapping is using words that mean something to you, and then remove your phrase "Since we never really explain what this ominous UV-mapping is". --Roger 19:30, 20 December 2006 (CET)

Sorry, my comment came out completely wrong ... I didn't meant to offend you or your work. I really like what you did in the "UV Explained" section actually - I don't know why I didn't see it sooner though since. :) But please don't edit comments with a time-stamp or signature in the future, because that's very similar to editing forum-entries for other people or putting words into mouths of others.

What do you think about the image above .. would it fit into "UV Explained" section as well? Since the cut-open cardboard box is really cool, but doesn't show the 'warp' of faces as good as the one above?

--Hoehrer 20:36, 20 December 2006 (CET)

Sure, more the merrier. upload to the wiki; ensure you created the image or that it is the public domain, and add it after the cartography example. talk about how the igloo faces are rectangles, but the UV faces are trapezoids. have fun!--Roger 00:16, 21 December 2006 (CET)

Terms

For multi-lingual translations and user clarity, I think we need to come up with or reuse a CG term that is different, and be consistent:

• Painting - verb - the act of coloring a mesh
• Mesh - noun - the appearance of an object; what an object physically looks like. Note: Meshes can be re-used and instanced multiple times as individual objects.
• Vertex - noun - little dots that define the surface of a mesh
• Vertex Painting - verb - the act of painting directly to a mesh
• Texture - noun - a layer of information that affects the appearance of a mesh
• Texture Painting - the act of painting a mesh indirectly by painting a UV Image
• Image - a picture, a series of pictures, or movie clip, saved in any of a wide variety of formats (JPG, AVI)
• UV Image - noun - an image that is UV mapped to the mesh and used to color the mesh
• UV Map - noun - a set of coordinates that map an image to a shape.
• UV Mapping - verb - a process of wrapping an image around a mesh
• UV Mapped - verb, past tense - an image that has been wrapped around a mesh and is now used to color the mesh
• Shape - how a mesh appears to a viewer/camera
• Surface - the physical geometry of a mesh. The surface could be a cube, but with the subsurf modifier on, the shape could be sphere
• Sculpting - verb - a process of modifying the shape?surface? of a mesh