Cinema 4D to Element 3D Workflow: Create Textures in BodyPaint

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Instructor Vic Garcia

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Adding base color map using Bodypaint.

In this lesson, you will will use Bodypaint’s texturing tools to facilitate the texturing process. You will utilize external bitmap textures to create the base color map of the Bottom Shell of the drone.

Less...

Transcript

In this lesson, we'll begin texturing the drone. We'll use Body Paint's tools to quickly add textures to the bottom shell of the drone. Okay, so we don't need these checkerboard textures that we created in the last lesson. So let's clear those out. I'm going to select the three materials that we created earlier: propeller, bottom shell and top shell. And then in the attributes manager, under color for the materials, we'll go to texture. Let's click on our little drop down menu here for textures and let's clear those out. And with that done, let me go and tumble around until we get the bottom shell showing here. We're going to go ahead and add a texture to the bottom shell in order to start texturing. So we need to do that by activating the material for the bottom shell, this one here. Right now, it has a big red X. Let's click on the X and that makes the material active. And now let's create a texture. So there's two ways to do that. We can either use the paint wizard tool to create the texture or we can do it manually. And I prefer to do it manually. So I'm going to double-click on this little X here, see, and it will bring up our new texture panel. Here, we can go ahead and name the new texture. I'm going to call this "bottom_shell_colormap." And for the resolution, I'm going to keep this at 2K. So that's going to give us a nice amount of detail or resolution to paint on. And it's going to look nice in Element 3D, too. So let's go and click OK to accept that. And right away, you'll see that we have a new texture. And if we go to the bottom shell material, we click or twirl on this little icon here, you'll see that we only have one texture and that's that gray background. So we can change the color of the background. We don't want this to be gray. We want this to be white. Our color -- if we go to colors tab and see our color is already set to white. But you can go in here and click any color you want. So let me go up to our fill bitmap tool which is under here. It's hidden under the gradient tool. I'm going to hold it down and go to the little paint bucket tool here. And with that, we can go ahead. And when I did that, our UV mesh disappeared. You go up to UV mesh, show mesh. There's our UV map again. Let's go ahead and fill this area with that color. There we go. Now it's white. And that's what we want. Now noticing right now I forgot to flip this UV around in the last lesson. So, as you can see, this is a front area of the drone. We want this to be on top. So we can easily flip the UV map around. Let's go under UV mapping. Let's go down to commands, make sure that UV polygons is selected. And we have all our polygons selected. Let's go down to mirror B and that will flip it vertically. I'm going to click on our model tool. And let me go ahead and add our first texture. The textures I'm going to add are already pre-made. I made them in Photoshop. So let's go ahead and bring that first texture in. So let's go up to file and let's go to open texture. In here, I'm going to click on drone text. All these other textures we're going to talk about in a later lesson. For now, we're going to focus on drone text. Let's bring that in. When we do that, you're going to see that our UV map for the bottom shell disappears. That's because if we go under textures here in our texture UV panel, you'll see that we have our drone text PSD selected. This is stored in memory right now. We're not in our actual bottom shell color map that we made a second ago. We're in this one. So here, we don't have to worry about the UV map shown in the background. We can just go up to select and click on select all. That's going to select everything in the scene. It's not going to select the UV map, only the texture. Then we can press Ctrl+C to copy, or Cmd+C on a Mac. Let's jump back into our bottom shell color map. And in here, we can paste it. Press Ctrl+V to paste and there we go. Now we're in our UV map for the bottom shell and our texture shows up. I'm going to make sure that we're on our move layer tool and let's move this across and right on top. You can also move the texture in our perspective viewport, as you can see. I'm goignt o click and drag until I get it centered to where I want it. Almost there. I created the work for the text in Photoshop, so I kind of have a warp already, but it's not exactly what I want yet. I'm going to scale this up, because from a distance I want this to be able to be legible or readable from a distance. So it's not large enough. So I'm going to go in and scale this up. I'm going to use a transfer bitmap tool, click on that. And in our texture UV panel, I'm going to go in here and scale this up. If you hold down shift while scaling, it will constrain the scaling, keep that proportional and I'm going to center it a little bit more. I'm going to click on our transfer bitmap tool to accept the transformation. And let's get a little bit closer here in the perspective viewport. All right. So that's better. But now I'm not liking the way this is flowing across the bottom shell. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to use another tool. First, I'm going to go ahead and select UV points, move back, make sure that I don't have any of these points selected. I'm going to press Ctrl+Shift and A. It will deselect all the points. I'm going to go up to tools, UV tools. I'm going to select the magnet tool. This is a nice tool because we can move UVs with them. You can move them in the perspective viewport or you can move them here in our texture UV panel. As you can see, we're not moving the text. We're just manipulating or moving the UV points. So I'm going to use this to our advantage and just slightly move some of these UV points to where we have the text flowing along this top line right here. Okay. So we're not really going to do any damage to the UVs. We're just making some really subtle modifications that won't really affect anything. So here we go. That looks better. I'm just going to line it up to that edge. You can also dial the radius down with the magnet tool. If you go down to the magnet tab here, you can dial this radius down just a little bit, so you don't have such a large radius of UVs to move. And just going to move the C up a bit down here at the bottom, too. All right. That looks better. Let me click on the model tool and it looks a little blurry. It's blurry because...let me go back to materials tab...because the resolution for the material is set pretty low. So let me double-click on the material. Let me go down to editor. And under texture preview size, let's change this from default to 1K. And now you'll get something a lot cleaner. So that looks pretty nice now. We can read that from a distance. I'm liking it and it flows really nice with the bottom shell. Okay. Let's go in and add the other texture and that's going to be the cross logo that's going to go on each one of these arms. So let's go up to file, open, bring in cross logo PSD. And as a form, we go up to select, select all. And I'm going to Ctrl+C to copy, jump back to the bottom shell color map and move back a bit. I'm going to paste it in here. There we go. I'm going to use the transfer bitmap tool. Go and scale this down, while holding down shift and do that. Press that again. It didn't accept that . So I'm going to hold down shift while scaling down to constrain that. I'm going to move it in place. And while I rotate, I'm going to hold down shift to constrain the rotation. I'm happy with that position there. I'm going to click on transfer bitmap again to accept the changes. Move around here and just make sure that this looks good in our perspective viewport and it does. I like that. So let's go to the layers tab. In here, you'll see that we have our layers. This bottom one is going to be for the drone medic text. Let's go in and rename this. Let's name this to "drone medic" and let's call the cross "layer cross." We go ahead and duplicate this layer. We can do that by holding our Ctrl+clicking and dragging right on top of the layer. It'll make a new cross layer, move this to the side, make sure it looks good here in our perspective viewport. And we can move it in the perspective viewport, too. That looks better. Okay. Let's go ahead and duplicate this again. Let's move it down, move it right there. Make sure it looks fine in the viewport and it does. I'm going to just slightly move it up, right there. And let's do one more duplication, Ctrl+click and drag, and bring that across. Let's make sure that looks good, move that up a bit, nice. All right. That's looking pretty good. And we're pretty much done with the base color map. This still needs some damage detail to it. But, for now, we're going to fast forward. And in the next lesson, we're going to add damage detail to a base color map that I've already created for the camera case. We'll do that. In the meantime, you can go ahead and save this texture out either by saving the file out. It will prompt you with a dialogue box to save the texture out. Or you can go up here to file and save the texture out. Later on, we're actually going to save these textures out as PNGs because Element 3D accepts PNGs and JPEGs. It won't accept TIFFs. But, for now, we're all good. Let's go ahead and move on to the next lesson.
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