Cineversity

Thanks a lot for the feedback, williams.7489.

I hope that I get you up to speed with more modeling options as we go. However, I try to fit it to your needs, of course. The island/landscape could have been done with Volume Modeling, but here I thought the Remesh was the better way.

Let me know if there is anything else. I’m always happy to look into it.

Enjoy

Materials. I kind of get them, but once I UV Mapped out the land to have 4 distinct sections I can’t figure out how to affect the different sections. My sections are; the ground on top, soil layer just below surface, roots layer below that, sliced end. Currently the roots texture is on both the sliced end and the below surface, but I have UV Unwrapped them separately.

Here is the C4D file.
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/DhYoIq2rEEcOVApMikgj6IlVhwPEnjOWp9UVTRl1SgJ

I used your model because your mesh always worked better than the one I created with Remesh, not sure why. However, you used an old version, so I have to go through and recreate everything I did today, which is OK, because I need to understand it.

Your steps were… Loft to Object, Remesh with Quad Dominant, Mesh Density at 50% and using the River Spline as a Flow Spline.
1. Did you do any thing after that? If so what, I don’t get the same results. Once you had that you made the Remesh and the Loft Object into another Object?

With this version, I cut apart all the sections that I need to have different surfaces on them in UV Mapping. I did a sloppy job, not sure how to include those 10 or so polygons I missed, but I spent hours getting what I have currently. None of the tutorials I watched helped with selection because they all used loops and I couldn’t get one to work. I had to use Live Selection and pick all the polygons I wanted by hand.
2. Is there an easier way?
3. How do I include something into an Unwrapped UV section after it’s been unwrapped?

Next I have the Quixel surfaces that I want on each section, but I want to resize the surface textures. The size of the model is 164’ x 179’ and the elements on the surface textures should be exponentially smaller than they are in all cases.
4. How do I choose the surface and resize it when there are multiple material tags on one object?

And lastly, I need each section to blend and bleed into each other so that it doesn’t show the square polygons as the edge.
5. How do I bleed the sections into each other?

Thanks for your help. I have watched a lot of tutorials on UV Mapping, so my knowledge is getting there, but lot’s of holes still.
Also, I just signed up for the School of Motion’s 12-week Cinema 4D class starting in April, so that should help fill-in all of the foundational holes I’m missing that you are helping me with.

Hi williams.7489,

Thanks for the file.

Here is a short screen capture of my UV setup. Since the texture is mostly organic, this should be fine.
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/tfKbtBjyVKGq77eQSNakPz0Dhnanysd5kC2xyNu2qMC

I assume the best advice, for now, is to go one time through the Select menu. These are all essential tools, and only using them will tell you which one will be YOUR favorite. I assume I have indeed found mine, based on each present goal, but that might not be yours. The Path tool can be really annoying if you like to get a path in one go. I typically use a small portion, then stop, and while the shift key is down, I add more.

In the file, you will find two Vertex maps, which I used to blend between soil layers. They are used in the Alpha channel.
I switched to Fields inside of them, used the Average options, then clicked Freeze, and went back to no fields to keep it simple.

The mesh can take a little smoothing. I left the three steps in the scene file, marked with different Layer colors, so you can see what I did.

Typically the Tiles are the way to go with UVs already set. A tile of 0.5 equals a 200% scale. If it needs to be smaller, use the 4 tiles that you had before or even smaller. I assume you place many plants on this island, so the repetition will not show up.

Enjoy your class.

Thank you for the video and reference file. I went through the steps, started by selecting the river using the method you showed (there needs to be rocks in the bottom of the stream, so I want to put a rock surface where the ground is underwater). Beforehand I had been just selecting polygons in the BP UV Mapping Layout. I tried your method, but when I Relax the UV I am getting some wacky results. See my file without textures, (it’s getting too big with them).

https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/yzBrQNHyA1ykm3emihpFuz4UeBbsw8WupVc6u2DMKLO

In the UV Mapping window on the left (Texture UV Editor?), when it shows the lines going all the way through the V axis what does that represent about my selection? (see attached screenshot)

If you look in the Null “Pre Object” Layer, the Layer named “Loft_remesh” & look at the UV Maps that I Relaxed (is that the right term?), I was closer to what I want here (also see attched screenshot), but I don’t know how to edit (add and subtract polygons mostly) the relaxed UV Maps once I have them. You can see that random line and also in End View Camera there is a whole section of the stream not included in the current UV Map.

If you could point me towards a tutorial on editing the UV Maps, or head me in the right direction it would be appreciated.

Hi williams.7489,

I really encourage you to watch some of the newer training about UV here on Cineversity.
https://www.cineversity.com/vidplaylist/hard_surface_model_uv_unwrapping/
Just to get a feel for it.

To place rocks on a surface with the Cloner, a selection is all you need. No UV whatsoever is required.

The UV(W) is the equivalent for textures, like XYZ. Since images are flat and have varying sizes, the UV space for images is normalized. This means the max image size goes from zero to one. If you change the texture size later on while the content is the same, you will see no change in position. When I learned this stuff 25 years ago, the 1,1 confused me first. (As in Germany, the “,“is used like a “.” here in the US) But at the moment, these are not seen as a single number. It is pretty clear how it is defined.  (The letter W is for the 3D shaders, for more spatial stuff, textures are not really using it.)

A drill that I have done over a decade by now is discussed in post #9
https://www.cineversity.com/forums/viewthread/3551/#13850
I have done it with students, art-department-professors, senior graphic staff, etc. So far, after ten minutes of playing with it, it clicked most of the time. The key is to understand one single UV polygon and how UV points’ movement influences the result on the object’s surface. This (!) is crucial, and so far, you will search a long time to find that as a drill. But it works; it is easy and fast.

The Relax option needs a seam for volume-based surfaces. If that seam is not done so that the surface can be flattened easily, it might fail. The river as edge will fail, except for the river; anything else will be useless (distorted). The Relax function also uses the Flat project as a starting point while showing the model’s most critical part. In other words, the seam is on the backside then or around somewhere. There is no general suggestion other than think of peeling an object in a way that the surface has the least of distortion

BTW, for the water flow, create an object with the spline. Use Sweep here. In this way, the UV of that object follows the flow.

For the stones, please note that they have their axis in the center. I used the Mesh> Axis> Axis Center to place the Y-axis to -73%. They have all a different size, so they would be all half in the soil otherwise, or if lifted, some would be in the air.

This thread has become quite mixed and will be hard to follow, for people with one specific problem. I mention it, as I typically point, that each thread should have a leading question, and focus on that. We can finish this island in this mixed way now, but I have to try to keep it a little bit more organized in the future. Again, this is my fault, as I have answered to mixed questions here.

Here is your file back (new objects are on a green layer)
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/SH4CGCftDxRjwWaO8gIxrYknnu9mIZmbqW8bHfhR9Zv

My best wishes