Blender and Colored Sandstone Tutorial

Discussion in 'Design and Modeling' started by Ray716, Oct 16, 2012.

  1. Ray716
    Ray716 Member
    So, I've been messing with blender for about 2 years or so now.. But i still havn't gotten the hang of adding color to my models. Is there anyone out there who is interested in doing a tutorial on adding color to a model in Blender to be printed in Colored Sandstone? Or if there are already some good ones, can i be directed to them?

    Thanks for any replies and help! :D

    Ray
     
  2. bvr
    bvr Member
    Ray,
    I have had some luck with it. There are some little things that are hard to find. Biggest one for me was...
    Even if you unwrap just the outside of a model...blender still applies the image to all faces. What I had to do was to unwrap the entire model and place white wherever I did NOT want my image to appear. That little bit drove me nut for awhile.
    bvr
     
  3. Ray: decide on a simple basic model you want printed in Full Color Sandstone, with a rendered pic created in blender for comparison. I will make you a walkthrough. Deal?

     
  4. For Full Colored sandstone in blender, you can add color 3 ways. UV mapping, texture images, vertex paint and assigning materials(diffuse)
    . x3D format is great for an export. Preserves material colors you have assigned to faces, vertex colors in combination with UV mapped image textures.
    An added bonus, Blenders bounding box alignment matches Shapeways in this export. So you can regard Blenders Z axis actually pointing up, and the Y axis pointing forward, unlike a stl where in blender Z axis is regarded as forward by shapeways bounding box, and its Y axis is regarded as up. Odd stuff, experiment with Meshlab. That program displays your model as SW does.

    And to upload, select the .x3d file plus all texture maps involved. Compress(Zip) all into a file at the same time. When you upload, just select that zip file to upload.
     
  5. Ray716
    Ray716 Member
    BVR - thanks for that tip.. very useful. :D

    Fredd - Thanks for the help... I havn't yet come up with a design yet.. i'm still in lerning stages... So I've not yet thought of what i want to use with color.

    BUT thanks for that information, it gives me a nice place to start. :D

    Ray
     
  6. One thing that helps is that you do not have to unwrap the entire model in some cases. Consider if you want to map a texture image on 1 face of a cube. Assign the face you want to to unwrap a white material. Create a new material and assign it to the remaining faces.
    Select the face you want to unwrap, unwrap, then in the UV image editor open the texture you want to use for that face.
    While that face is still selected, open up a new texture slot for it, in panel to far right. With its material also being selected, open up the same image you did earlier, change its mapping coordinates to UV. Under Map, select UV map. Now that faces material has a UV mapped texture applied to it.
    This works with several faces also, as long as these faces have the same white material. Reason to use white is that other diffuse colors will tint your image that color in printing. Interesting point you can have several materials the same diffuse color, which will not tint the uv image textures applied to them.

    If you want to hollow out out a model, with no problems from UV's just assign the hollow area a material that has not been UV mapped.