Hello everyone,
Perhaps someone can help me out, I just don't know what else to try.
I have what I thought was going to be a simple thing...wow, was I wrong.
I have made a hollow sphere I would like to print with an image on it and back-light it.
First I created my model with Hexagon. Model passes manifold and normal checks. I upload it and it renders correctly. The volume and pricing are correct. I am assuming my basic mesh is ok.
I tried to UV map with Blender 2.49 and worked through finding out it does not work quite right. Upon multiple people recommending the newest, I started over with Blender 2.61
After reading more than a few forum posts and watching a few tutorial videos I can fumble through Blender. I selected all the external faces and unwrapped them. Added my image, added a material then a texture. Scaled and positioned the uv map on my image. Everything looks good here,(because i did not know to actually render at that point, I was just viewing the textured viewport) Upload to Shapeways and in the render it now has the image on the outside as it should..but, it now has the image in full applied to every face I did not unwrap(every interior face). This is no good, as I am going to back-light it and it will show/degrade the lighting.
After a bit of searching I find a post that seems to deal with just this problem.
Yep it sure does, just not for printing. That method turned my hollow solid. Even though it looked ok in the render, the volume and price were for a solid.
OK, more searching and I find the post I was looking for and I'm pretty sure I followed what was being said.
(from a blender forum)
"Remember that you cannot unwrap just part of the mesh. If you add a UV Map either with the U key or from the UV Maps panel it applies uv coordinates to every face of your object. Any face that you didn't select when unwrapped would just have the default coordinates, each face mapped to the full UV area. If you don't want a texture applied to those faces just select the faces and drag them outside the UV area and set the texture Image Mapping to Clip. Or just drag the faces to a blank area of the texture. "
That explains what was happening when I was just unwrapping the outside.
I worked my way through this method. I did a second unwrap on the interior faces, dragged them outside the image area, set the image to clip. I get a perfect render(actual render), great.
I upload to Shapeways, volume and pricing are correct and I have my image on the outside, BUT, the image is now mapped to the inside too! The whole image, not tiled on each face.
I re-rendered the file here and Blender renders it correctly(i put a camera and light inside to check for sure). So now I am really confused.
If I had known what I was going to undertake(such a simple thing, right?)I probably would've paid someone to create the blend files. Now I just want that "ah-ha" moment. And I need two iterations of it, so I should learn how to do it.
Does anyone have any insight?
thank you
bvr