Texture mapping materials with bitmaps

In this video we'll start to add images to our materials, helping these materials look way more detailed and realistic. This process of applying an image, like a JPG or a PNG, is called texture mapping. These images are referred to as bitmaps, which is just an old school way to say, it has pixels as oppose to vectors. First though, a few tips. I'm going to jump over to my Windows Explorer. And tip number one, is try to keep if possible, all of your texture maps in the same folder or subfolder.

As your Rhino files. It's going to make things a lot easier for V-ray to track down where that texture map is, especially if you move from computer to computer. The second tip, is always stick with the standard file formats. I prefer the PNG file format because it's got higher quality and smaller file size compared to like a jpeg. These are examples as opposed to Photoshop, which would not work at all. So avoid the complicated file formats. Stick with JPEG or PNG. Okay, let's jump back to Rhino. And, I'm going to cover a few scenarios, on how we can apply maps simply and easily to our geometry.

Let's first go to the penguin eyeball. Zoom in here, and down below the eyes, let's split out these little round pupil areas. And then apply the texture map, that has a very similar size and orientation directly on there. So this is about as simple. Just splitting out geometry, only where you want the map to go. And you don't have to worry about, things landing in other positions. Let's switch over to shaded view, just so you can see this a little more clearly. So these eyeballs start off as spheres and they were split out, so they're separate piece of geometry, it looks continuous because it hasn't been moved. It's been split but not moved, so that's the technique. Okay, back to, rendered view and we're going to zoom over. To the CRT frame, so this can happen from time to time where the map does not go in the correct orientation. In this example, it's sideways. So the quick fix for this, would be to select the geometry. There's a command called direction, it's going to be on the main toolbar. There's a simple plane with some arrows. You will get some arrows coming out. This is designed to help you determine which direction is out or the normals.

We're actually going to be worried about the Us and the Vs. So we want to swap those two. Those are the two directions of any surface. So once we swap those, clicking on the command line, and I'm going to right click or hit enter to accept. And they get swapped out and now it's perfectly oriented. Very simple fix, as long as it's aligned properly. Okay, take a look at the third scenario, turn on this mapping fix layer. And we're going to talk about surfaces that get edited, meaning that they're, trimmed or split out.

First you should know that, any time a surface is created it's getting mapping coordinates automatically. So if you're not going to trim anything, everything is fine. In fact most modelers you're taking part and pieces and splitting them out. So what happens is you end up with. Parts of the mapping coordinates. And the way this is, demonstrated, is I can select on both of these. I'm going to hit F10 to turn on the control points. And you can see, both parts, kind of remember the original size, if you can see those control points highlighting. I'll turn those back of F11.

So our goal here is to make this smaller piece. Appear to V-Ray as if it was created originally that size, not coming from something larger. So, the command would take care of it is called, Shrink Trimmed Surface, so I'm going to select it over here. Go to the surface menu. Surface Edit Tools. And select shrink. So you'll notice that the dog got properly scaled in there,. And so, at least for mapping purposes, it's treated as if it was built from scratch that exact size.

So now that we saw how texture maps can enhance materials, we can also see how placement, orientation, scaling can be a problem. Good news though, we'll cover strategies to control these placements in the next video.