Successful UV Unwrap inside Sketchup!
-
Well guys I've found a manual method to successfully UV unwrap a texture in a sketchup model using only sketchup native tools and existing plugins.
EDIT - See corrections to the method here:
http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=15%26amp;t=63974#p586313
and 2 posts down here:
http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=15%26amp;t=63974#p586315
Or so it seemed... (maybe what I did was an Atlas texture... I dunno!
)Basically I used two or three plugins and a few native tools to do what I wanted that was to have a single texture in the right place so I could export my model to Substance Designer/Painter, directly from Sketchup.
So you know the plugins/tools were the following:
- Copied the model group;
- Paint bucket - to paint each face of my model with one color (I have to ask pilou how he paints his stuff...)
- Unwrap and Flatten Faces Plugin by Alex Schreyer inside the model - http://sketchucation.com/pluginstore?pln=as_flatten;
- Rotated Rectangle to make a square wich would fit the unwraped and flat faces group;
- Delete key - to delete the square's face;
- Explode - to explode the unwraped faces group;
- Generated a face(s) with default material to fill the void between the square and the faces islands;
- Context menu - "make unique texture" on one of the faces;
- Context menu - "combine textures" on all flat faces including the default colored one;
- Quad Face tools - "Copy UV" and "Paste UV" to pick a quad from the flat faces and paste the combined texture on the corresponding quad of the model
- Paint bucket with ALT modifier to Wrap the texture around each face of the model, following the pattern/map in the flat faces...
The result is a group painted with a single Wrapped texture but each face has a different color wich is defined preciselly:
1st Question: If this is not UV unwrap, I don't know what it is... an Atlas? What is it?
2nd Question: After having done this I exported every file format I could think of into Substance Designer (Collada, 3ds, obj, fbx... whatever). None of them looked textured, wich is natural, but baking model information resulted in black or transparent baking info. Anyone knows why is that?
3rd Question: Exporting to Blender using Blendup, resulted in a correct export when you view material mode, however in texture mode the texture is being tiled on faces, and in UV mode the texture is tiny and away from the Unwraped faces (so it seems it needs to tile all over so to fill Faces in UV Editor)... What's funny is that those Unwrapped faces are exactly positioned as I did it in Sketchup wich corresponds exactly to the texture, as you can see next.
Is it supposed to be like this and is it easily fixable?
4th Question: Did any of you guys did this sort of stuff before and also banged against a wall?
5th Question: Mr. O'Brien?
Thanks in advance guys!
EDIT: Here's the model...
-
If this leads to the creation of a UV-unwrap extension tool you'll be a super-hero!!
May the Force be with you
-
SketchUp really needs a better way of mapping and a good tool for unwrapping fast. The current toolset is... lacking...
There are so many wonderful tools available for (realtime) rendering your 3d models generated in SketchUp but to do so you need proper UVcoords, sometimes multi-channel UVmaps(0-1 space) etc.Crossing fingers a talented programmer will have a go at this soon...
-
It's unwrapping Jim. But not as we know it.
Try this on a sphere. Or some organic form. It would likely introduce lots of UV stretching or shrinking.
Regards the Substance error. You haven't unwrapped to a texture space you have brute forced geometry into a shape. That shape is then made represent a texture. But there's no relationship.
This is not unwrapping. This is like feeding Gremlins after midnight. Nothing but trouble.
Ingenious though, in a mad scientist way.
-
Now that I chew on it a bit more there's a Follow Active Quads unwrap mode in Blender that is close to this method.
But what is missing here is the relationship of the UV texture Space to the mesh. They are out of sync. Your blender screen grab shows the mesh is scaled compared to the resolution of the image. Scale it down and it will stop tiling.
What would be interesting to know here is what are the dimensions of the mesh and what are the SketchUp dimension in the material editor for your texture.
-
@rich o brien said:
But what is missing here is the relationship of the UV texture Space to the mesh. They are out of sync. Your blender screen grab shows the mesh is scaled compared to the resolution of the image. Scale it down and it will stop tiling.
I imagined I could do that, but I don't know how to do it perfectly and I'm afraid I'll get seams at higher resolutions.
@unknownuser said:
What would be interesting to know here is what are the dimensions of the mesh and what are the SketchUp dimension in the material editor for your texture.
You're a genius, I didn't assign any set size. I'll try it asap!
I'll also share the current model as I forgot to in the first post. For post coherence I will post it there.
-
You were being a genius but I was being Dumb!
Of course the textures are at model size. They've been combined from a set of faces that is exactly at real size.
So they fit perfectly... However I think I might have found the solution!!!
Take a look at this:
SCALE
While Sketchup Materials and Blender Materials work the same, and define the scale of the texture in model units. 15m in sketchup material is 15m in blender material, texture UV behaves differently.
A texture UV scale is simply put 1! That is 1 unit in Sketchup and 1 unit in Blender. However you can't see UV scale in Sketchup (probably you can in SDK but users have no access to it without plugins...)
Of course in Blender you probably can, in the UV editor! There, you clearly see that the texture is, in fact 1m!
You can clearly see that there are five tiles in the house wich is 5mX5m...
POSITION
You can clearly see the relationship right?!
I haven't checked but I'm pretty sure they texture origins are the exacly the same between Sketchup and Blender.
In Sketchup I copy+pasted UV's from the texture in the bottom to the mesh in the top.
Now I know what I did and I'm absolutellty sure I know how to fix this!
Rest assured guys, I don't know how to write a single plugin, but today I will manage to successfully UV unwrap a texture in Sketchup!! And it's pretty easy too!
As soon as I have it controlled I will make a tut on it!
-
it'd be easier and quicker to just unwrap in blender. but keep on trucking
-
Here you go! Perfect UV Unwrap Inside Sketchup!!!
Who wants a tut on how to achieve this manually with existing plugins?
Who wants to develop an UV Unwrap plugin with me?
-
There's a flaw in using Alex' flatten tool. It caves when the face in non-planar.
You need a tool that uses LCM or equivalent when flattening to a 2D space.
-
@rich o brien said:
There's a flaw in using Alex' flatten tool. It caves when the face in non-planar.
You need a tool that uses LCM or equivalent when flattening to a 2D space.
What is LCM?
-
Sorry LSCM
Alex' tools doesn't trap for this when going from 3D form to 2D space.
-
UV mapping in SU, the "holy grail".
Good luck, I will be following your adventure with jaded optimism.
-
You don't get that with this method.
For what I did understand with that scarse info is that LSCM method is great if you want to stretch the unwrapped faces to fit the bigger area of the texture map as possible.
That is ideal for bigger texture details with smaller maps.
With orthogonal meshes my method is able to make it all seem very right. With triangular and irregular meshes or organic meshes, my method will make every triangle fit the texture without any kind of deformation.
This is not very good if you want to optimize texture area... nor is it very good if you want to 2D paint your texture map in an image editor as, if your model is very organic, you will get a lot of islands and can't easily paint through them. However you can manually define your islands easily enough...
What you can achieve with this method, however, is a that you can create an UV Unwrapping with NO pixel distortion at all.
You can also adapt it very easily to a SubD workflow.
It's not great for a thousand faces as, right now, it implies manually following a map with paint bucket. But it's great for Simple shapes... I'm an architect and I'm thinking architecture here...
It's also the perfect method for a Sketchup+Substance workflow (I think) as substance is able to bake positional, normal, curvature, etc maps into an UV unwrapped model.
With these maps I'm hoping I can then generate all kinds of effects independently of face orientation and as I think I will be able to use Substance to ignor Islands and tile throgh seams, I'm hoping I can achieve something good here...
-
@JQL You don't think its more fast and easy to just export the object to Blender, do an unwrap there and import the obj into SketchUp again?
-
@kaas said:
@JQL You don't think its more fast and easy to just export the object to Blender, do an unwrap there and import the obj into SketchUp again?
It is! That's pretty clear...
But before I tried this I didn't really understand what the hell was happening...
I don't master blender, not even close, so I had almost no control of what I was doing, I had almost no notion of what was happening and I was't getting any useable results. So I also didn't understand exactly what was UV unwrapping.
Now I do, and this was the first time I managed to unwrap exactly how I was imagining things to be.
With this Unwrap method inside Sketchup I manage the following things:
- Texture the way I want to with the tools I happen to be confortable with;
- Wich means texturing as I please using Sketchup and an Image Editor;
- Model in Sketchup and export directly from sketchup to Substance;
- Remodel my unwrapped meshes in Sketchup knowing what I have to do to keep UV mapping, rebuild it or simply ignore it...
I was hoping these dablings could also poke someone to further take on this exploration and develop an UV unwrapper for Sketchup, inside Sketchup...
I already have a Lot of ideas of how it should work and what other features it should have.
I'm seeing Huge potential workflows using only native tools and Substance...
Obj Out Obj In wouldn't give me such control...
But now I know what I'm doing, I really know when I should use Blender for Export/UV Unwrap/Import and when I can stick with SU.
-
Several years ago I made this proof of concept:
http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=180%26amp;t=39198 -
Pixero, I didn't know about that, will you ever push it forward?
-
I think I have taken it as far as my ruby skills go.
Hopefully someone could build upon my idea and implement a better unwrapping algorithm.
There is code available for unwrapping that might be possible to convert to ruby.
Feel free to use the code if you want. -
Even though I'd love to, I'd first have to learn Ruby from scratch and for that I'd need free time.
I've got no free time on my hands... I've found this way to unwrap and I've got Blendup so I can do both simple and complex unwrapping spending way less time than developing a full plugin.
I think this could be a job for some skilled developer and preferably someone that as dealt with geometry unwrapping or texturing plugins...
What I could easily do is suggest UI or Worflow suggestions, but even there, I think there are people that are far more used to this than I am. I've just found a way to do exactly what I wanted, and even if I could have even better ways to do it, I think that is enough for me.
I'm probably doing a Tut on this one of these days.
Advertisement