Initial Setup
Go to your UV editor window and right click the joining bar and split screen, change the bottom window to Node Editor
Once you have done this you can move on to the next step of apply the textures and materials to your mesh.
Step One - Selecting the Vertices and applying a Vertex Group
In edit mode (F9) Select all the vertices you wish to apply a material too. In the link and Materials tabs under the vertex groups select New (material) and assign it to those highlighted vertices.(fig 1)
Fig 1 |
Step Two - The Node Editor
Once this step is done go to Shading (F5) and under Links and Pipeline select Nodes then in your Node Editor window you should now have the default node configuration. Right Click on material and press delete
Fig 3 |
Fig 4 |
Fig 5 |
Go back to your Extended Materials Node and you will now see
highlighted in red an ADD NEW tab, click this and it will generate a texture in your shading window. For now, thats as far as we need to go in the nodes window as we move to the texture part to select a texture.
Step Three - Selecting the Texture
Fig 7 |
Fig 8 |
texture you wish to apply to your mesh at this point. As I have already loaded the texture i require it is available to me in this case "rusty metal 2" (Fig 8), at this point there is no further action on the texture selection as we move to Materials to change our settings there.
Step 4 - Materials .... Huh
Unfortunately there is no keyboard short cut to select the Materials tab, however it is represented by a red marble icon next to the texture button (f6) but at this point, it should be starting to look like we have
something very much as we wanted, yet with a very distorted texture in our preview window wrapped around a sphere.
Fig 9 |
If you move along to the last tab set you can see an option for "MAP INPUT", if you click this tab you can see that the texture is mapped to "Orco " (Fig 9) Later we will change some of these settings but for now, we shall leave them as they stand while we look at other items in the materials section.
As we are doing a rather shabby looking texture in this tutorial we will only be placing a slight amount of reflectiveness on our texture, so under the third tab you can see the Mirror Transparency Tab. (fig 10)
Fig 10 |
Baking Bump-Mapping
This was something I wanted to do for quite some time, but i couldn't quite get a grip with how it was done correctly, With a lot of reading, and groping about in the dark I finally worked out how to do it and this is how.
As we have already set our nodes up we don't really want to have to delete them to bake our bump mapping on the texture so this little work around will apply a bump mapping to our texture.
Fig 11 |
(the red marble) to assign the bump mapping properties to this texture.
Fig 12 |
bump mapping so select the SECOND texture to edit .. and click the tab to " MAP INPUT" and we need to change the name of this UV to "UV-Text" and press enter (Fig 12)
Fig 13 |
Fig 14 |
Being happy that the texture is how we want it, we can at this point , bake the texture to the mesh.
As default, if we bake on a regular sculpty we will always get a low resolution image , so we would like a better texture in this case so, while all your vertices are still selected go to your UV window and select IMAGE - NEW and anything around the 512 x 512 should be fine, But you can do more or less depending on preference, and then select BAKE and if all is well you should have a nice texture you can save with both specular and bump enabled.
I hope you have found this tutorial useful, and if you have any comments or suggestions please feel free to post, and remember to follow us as I am certain i will be posting more as we go along.
Bray