Re: [OpenVSP] Best set of tools to apply texture map?

[Rob McDonald]

Yes, VSP does support texture mapping.

First, select all the components in the geometry browser and change the view to 'Texture'.  It will look the same as if you selected 'Shade'.

Then, go under the View menu, and pick 'Texture...'  That will bring up a GUI that will allow you to place textures on VSP components.  For starters, I would experiment with the texture files that come with VSP.  They are in the examples/textures directory.  Every airplane looks better with sharks teeth.

VSP supports *.jpg and *.tga files as textures.  I'm not positive, but they may have to be power of 2 and square in size (16x16, 32x32, etc).  Only *.tga supports transparency.

In addition to the texture mapping, VSP allows you to load a background *.jpg file.  It could be an airport scene, or a beautiful sunset.

If these features aren't enough to achieve the results you'd like, then you should look at the PovRay export capability from VSP, or possibly some of the other file formats.  PovRay is a very capable ray tracer, and there are other file formats in common with Blender and other 3D design tools.

If you get the hang of it, it would be great to see a short tutorial and some examples of working with textures added to the OpenVSP Wiki.

Good Luck,

Rob

On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 1:09 AM, mpac <mihovil...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi!

Can i apply a texture map in OpenVSP? If not, what would be the best, easy to use, set of tools to apply a texture map to a model built in OpenVSP? (Also i am looking to a resource on how to make realistic textures, so if anyone can point me in the right direction, would be nice.)

cheers

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[Rob McDonald]

Unwrapping a general unstructured triangle mesh is actually a really tough problem.  There are lots of papers about different approaches and products like 3DSMax and Blender excel at that.  It is not likely something that VSP will ever take on.

However, it gets a lot easier if you already know certain things about the geometry.  In our case, we know these things before any intersection or union are performed.  That is why we do our texture mapping on individual components.

We could write out the u,v texture coordinates for the unintersected coordinates if you had a file format in mind that supported both the x,y,z and u,v of points.

Of course, for our shapes, these u,v will always map to the unit square, so unwrapping them is trivial.

I don't know enough about texture mapping and this kind of programming to be of much more help.  My main suggestion would be to try to keep the components separate and apply separate textures to them.

Rob

On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 1:37 PM, mpac <mihovil...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi, what i would like to have is to uvw unwrap the plane model with a single click, which would make a texture template of the desired size, on which i would be able to paint a texture. The result should be seamlessly imported into 3ds max :)  Hehe, i know it sounds a bit unrealistic. Most likely i will just use 3ds max to uvw unwrap the model i exported as a stl, but it is kind of a long process which i would like to automate somehow.

I already had good results with stl export and max. I am a game hobbist, and i made couple of airplane models with openVSP, animated them and imported into the game engine. Here is a sample of one of my early imports if you want to check it out:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/79625595/HeroBlade%202013-07-29%2022-34-33-66.mp4

[Rob McDonald]

I don't know anything about 3ds max.

STL files only support triangles.

If you want quads out of VSP, the best bet is the XSec file, which writes out a *.hrm file.  That file is our own creation, but if you can find a quad file format that 3ds max takes, it should be fairly simple to write a script to convert them.

Note, the components in an XSec file have not been intersected.

The only way to get an intersected geometry from VSP is as triangles.

Rob

On Sat, Oct 12, 2013 at 12:57 AM, Mihovil Pupovac <mihovil...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi! i have one more quesion coming from a friend of mine who wants to do textures. It seems that when i export to stl and import to 3ds max i get tris and he wants quads. Is there a way to import to 3ds max and get quads instead of tris?

On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 11:05 PM, Mihovil Pupovac <mihovil...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi!

I hardly understand what u,v coordinates are, not to mention a file format that would support something like this :) I will need to dig deeper into the subject. Meanwhile, thank you very much for the quick response.

Cheers!

[Rob McDonald]

It would work, but there may be other options.

Interestingly, it looks like the OBJ file can support specification of texture coordinates -- something we had thought about adding to files from VSP.  VSP already supports OBJ files, but only vertices and faces.

In my rudimentary understanding of texture mapping for computer graphics, I believe that community prefers quad meshes over triangles because it is easier to re-construct parametric u,v coordinates.

So, rather than do that, it may be better to add support for VSP's native u,v coordinates to a file format like OBJ.

Also, you might try a totally different approach.  VSP can also write out NURBS surfaces to a Rhino file.  Rhino has a free trial available for download and can convert its file to many other formats.

Don't apologize for your questions, they are all good.  Unfortunately, people on this list know a lot more about airplanes than we do about texture mapping and computer animation tools.  You might try engaging the 3DS Max community for help.  If they don't know about OpenVSP, maybe more of them would find it useful.  Maybe someone can help us figure out the truly best way for the tools to work together.

Rob

On Sat, Oct 12, 2013 at 11:08 AM, Mihovil Pupovac <mihovil...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Rob,

Do you think this format would be suitable to convert to from a .hrm file?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavefront_.obj_file

(I appologize in advance if ask dumb questions, my knowledge about these things is still very limited)