Making Sense of Texture Mapping

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Texture MappingEver see those little coordinate buttons in your Texture Input panel beneath the mapping methods such as Orco, UV, Sticky, etc. and wonder to yourself – what are the XYZ coordinates for my geometry? This small article describes exactly what is going on with those buttons and how you can use them.

The article explains how to figure out the axis geometry of your model and then goes on to explain how those 9 confusing buttons are used to map textures to your object. One of the key tips mentioned in this article is:

Sometimes figuring out how to map an image onto an object can be dizzying. It gets much easier once you get a look at your objects axis!

Read the the article here.

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    • ChewChewThe LoveTrain

      Awesome!!

      now that is nice! thanks!

      very well done , and helpful tips :)

    • stinky wizzleteet

      ***Comment Removed: Please, no personal attacks please.

    • red planet

      Sorry….but on principle I will not use websites from religious propagandists of any persuasion….

      The notion that any religion is the “only true path to salvation” has caused more trouble on this planet in the last 2000 years than anything else.

      So.. I may be missing out on some great tips, but at least I don’t have to be bombarded with creationist bullshit.

      Love n Stuff

    • stinky wizzleteet

      Hey, I’m on your side.

      It’s just hard to see that ‘free as in freedom’ implicates one can also do questionable things with it.

    • blendercross

      Amen!!!

    • http://www.blendernation.com Bart

      @everyone: I don’t think that the religious aspect is relevant here, but I think you’ve made your point. Please stop discussing this further and stay ‘on topic’ (i.e.: write about the post)

      Thanks!

      Bart

    • blendercross

      Okay Bart!
      ….but it fears me a little to see that “religious aspekts” in some disscusion are heating very fast up – mean´s, that the tolerant way we see people of many different countrys are working together ( like the ED projekt ), collapse very fast on other fields in comunication.

      World is to small to benefit intolerance! [...sorry for my Borat english ;-) ]

    • http://www.cginsomniac.com Brian

      Looks like a great tutorial. Some other things on the site…

      http://creationanimation.com/sites/thoenes/animation/gallery/scud/Scud-GI-Render0001-skydome-best.jpg
      And he even has the .blend file.
      http://creationanimation.com/sites/thoenes/animation/gallery/scud/Scud-Yafray-Skydome-test.blend

      Looking at the creationanimation.com website its quite cool that Blender (seems to be anyway) is being used to make the short videos for that project.

    • 5to11

      [Bart: comment removed; I asked everyone to stop the religious aspect of this site. It's offtopic]

    • 5to11

      brian:

      Thanks for the links, the skydome tutorial is interesting, content wise included. Bart is that ok?

    • http://www.blendernation.com Bart

      very ;-)

    • Morris

      [this part of the comment deleted - see my remarks above. Bart]

      The tutorial seemed a little pointless to me. Its very rare that you want to map an image to a whole cube, so the example wasn’t good. maybe if it at least explained how to add a material to one face, then it could be ok. This is not a complaint against the author, who can put whatever he wants on the page, but I would think blendernation might not hype a rather pointless tutorial. It would have been better just to say “hey, there’s a new kids site with blender models, come see”

      enough complaining :) I guess I used up all my thanks yesterday on thanksgiving.

    • slayer

      [comment deleted. Bart]

    • http://blendernewbies.com Kernon

      Nice quick tutorial that provides info on something that, otherwise, would require some time-wasting piddling to figure out. Thanks!

      BTW, what’s so wrong with someone expressing their own beliefs, especially in such a civil way? You know, sometimes the immaturity of the Blender community shines through with such a glaring brightness it’s embarassing.

    • http://www.cginsomniac.com Brian

      Morris- Please keep in mind that Blendernation isn’t about posting “amazing” articles. But rather about posting information, news, tools, etc. that are related to blender and its community. If we see something that we think might be useful, we will post about it, it doesn’t necessarily need a lot of flash and excitement. Now of course we try and show off things that are cool too! ;)

    • johnj

      very useful!
      and … freedom is not to stop people trying to say what they think, but to let the people to say and to do what they love; it’s a logical fact that a belief can do good things; also michelangelo had his ideas about God, and we appreciate his works; fidia too; other ideas, not mine, but interesting ideas; no wonder if having something to say people use a free tool like is blender; no money, other people with their own different ideas, a communitarian way of creating… great, a place to love each other! i’m waiting for other good tuts by buddists, atheistics, induists, muslims, etc etc
      up with freedom! and welcome to all your opinions!
      all imho, of course!
      and if i am ot, sorry for this and for my english… i try to say something not about religions, but about what can be freedom here…
      giovanni

    • http://ingo.freio.de quiss42

      @Bart:

      — to be removed by the Spanish Inquisition —
      Isn’t removing everything related to the “religious” aspect of that site a little bit “dogmatic” (to use a more non-theistic adjective), too?
      — to be removed by the Spanish Inquisition —

      On topic:
      Sorry, but the tutorial was for lamers. If you don’t know your X,Y and Z – how can you get around in real life? ;)

    • http://ingo.freio.de quiss42

      @Brian:

      > Looks like a great tutorial. Some other things on the site…

      > http://creationanimation.com/sites/thoenes/animation/gallery/scud/Scud-GI-Render0001-skydome-best.jpg

      Yes, of course this is really a great example of what can be done with blender.
      Just imagine Dexter finding the coordinates of the target without any electronic devices (e.g. pocket calculator). This could be fun.

    • http://www.blendernation.com Bart

      @quiss42: it’s not removing anything that has to do with religious aspects per sé, but these discussions have nothing to do with the post itself and they draw attention from the central topic. The ‘rules’ here are simple: commenting is fine, as long as it is on topic. I have nothing against other debates, but there are other and better places for those.

    • http://ingo.freio.de quiss42

      @Bart: Yes, I understand this and agree. If we start discussing religion, politics, sexual orientation etc. here, we will run into big, big trouble very soon.

      The problem for me lies somewhere else: I’m visiting BlenderNation daily (often more than once) and I’m following all the links to see what other Blender users have to show me.
      With this post I had a big problem from the beginning. Following the first link lead to a page that, in fact, has nothing to do with Blender, but a lot with the quite discussible religous opinions of some people. The second link leads to the article that is announced in the post. There is no way from the first page to the second one (at least I found none, that someone would find without knowing the second link), so this first link is not only useless, but looks like an attempt to make people visit this site under wrong premises.

      So I can understand that people felt annoyed by this post and tried to express this. And of course they couldn’t avoid talking about exactly that topic that was the reason for their anger.

      Removing this comments is OK to keep the discussion blender related, but then the first link is off-topic, too.
      Therefore it should also have been removed.

    • http://www.blendernation.com Bart

      @quiss42: that’s an excellent point; I hadn’t checked both links and I didn’t know the first one was the main cause of all of this. I’ve edited the article to lead only to the tutorial itself. Thanks!

    • bludragon

      I thought the article was useful. The information was trivial, but it made me go about the process of determining exactly what I have to do with povray (running blend2pov) to get an image rendering with blend2pov to appear like it does when using blender->internal. In order for the image to appear correctly on the cube, I have to (in map input) double sizeX, sizeY and sizeZ, and then offset the X, Y and Z values by 1.000 (each). Its a bug translating from blender to povray. This example was simple enough to make finding the proper correction trivial (and so in that regard, this article was useful). Sorry about the religious warfare, I have no Karma to burn, so I will have to save my religious opinions for another life ;)

    • Michael Thoenes

      To my fellow Blender users.

      I am glad some found the article useful. I created the piece years ago to help me understand texture mapping. I believe the information is certainly not trivial to those who are new to Blender. In fact, the Blender interface is entirely alien to even seasoned Graphic Artists.

      With regard to the site contents. We all have our motivations in life and my intention is to share mine. I encourage you to do the same on your site.

      Michael Thoenes

    • Spartanis

      Im sorry but, where does “religion” comes into this? lmao

    • Bigyan Chaulagain

      i want to be a 3d artist as a part of a 3d simulatiob programme so please relay me message to help me update