Procedural Textures?

(Nephthys) #1

Hello!

Is it possible to get blender's procedural textures to display in sketchfab? I am very new to modeling (only started about a week ago!), so I am not sure if I am doing something incorrectly or if there is no support for this type of texturing. I've spent the past few hours googling and seaerching, and have only learned that I don't know enough to figure out what I need to do. I've found that looking at my models in sketchfab makes it easier for me to see where I have made mistakes, so I would like to figure this out, and would appreciate any thoughts/insights/instructions/etc!

Here is my screenshot rendering from inside blender:

sword2red.png1904x1041 183 KB

ANd here is what happens when I upload to sketchfab:

Red Sword by nephthys on Sketchfab

As you can see, they are very different. The procedure textures don't seem to be applying in sketchfab. I think?

Thank you. :slight_smile:

(Lord00120) #2

Yes you can :slight_smile: Procedural textures are basically textures generated by different math algorythms, which is great because you can change a lot of settings around and easily get different patterns. When you export your model for a site like sketchfab or a game or for other 3D applications, the procedural texture will not transfer. You need to "bake" a diffuse texture which you then save as an image and upload as the texture on sketchfab :slight_smile: You can look up "blender bake procedural texture" yourself or i can give you some pointers :wink:

(Nephthys) #3

Oh, wow, thank you very much for such a quick reply!

I would appreciate any pointers you are willing to give. I can count how long I have been doing this using a scale of days, so when I try googling things I get lost in trying to sort out tutorials from varying time periods and versions of blender.

(Lord00120) #4

First off, have you UV unwrapped your model?

(Nephthys) #5

Yes, I even muddled through marking seams. Although I know I still don't know enough of how it works to have marked out good ones. I also can't figure out where the UV unwraps are going though. Every time I want to work on it, I seem to have to unwrap it again, so I'm pretty sure I've made a muddle of things somewhere.

(Lord00120) #6

Okay, for baking we're gonna need to have the model correctly unwrapped :slight_smile:
Start by splitting into two windows, one with your 3D view and one with UV editor

Capture3.PNG1920x1034 204 KB

(Lord00120) #7

Now if you press tab over in 3D view while sword is selected and then hit "a" until you select all the vertices of your sword, you should see your UV's over on the right

Capture4.PNG1656x913 100 KB

(Nephthys) #8

This is what I have right now:

sword2redunwrapped.png1904x1041 105 KB

(Lord00120) #9

That seems like a fine starter UV

(Lord00120) #10

Over in 3D view you can also hit "u" and then "smart UV project", and it will do a quick UV, which experts hate but i found it nice in the beginning :slight_smile:

(Nephthys) #11

I used to do a lot of modding for Morrowind, and while I never modeled, I remember enough people discussing mesh creation that I have an instinctive avoidance of "quick" automatic UV creation and so went in manually.. haha.

This is the step where I get lost though. Everything I've found online seems to say UV unwrap, then bake. Which I read as:

Step 1) Unwrap
Step 2) ???
Step 3) Profit

(Lord00120) #12

Yeah I'll lay it out in steps :slight_smile:

(Nephthys) #13

You are a prince among men. :slight_smile:

(Lord00120) #14

So first in your image window, you create the texture you're gonna bake to

Then you choose said texture with the select tab:

Now be sure to be in edit mode and have all vertices selected, so you can see your UV's

Open a third window in blender, change this to "properties" (You now have 3D view, image editor AND properties windows on screen) Under the first tab called render (its a small camera), you'll find the bake option at the far bottom
Here you change bake mode to textures, and then press bake

(Lord00120) #15

After this you save that image and then use that on sketchfab. Now it goes without saying that when you create your texture, you set the size in pixels, and the higher resolution the prettier the result

(Nephthys) #16

Oooh oh I think I got it...

Do I upload the image separately and manually apply it here in sketchfab somehow?

(Nephthys) #17

I am still not managing it. :confused:

I have the bake image, and the .blend, but sketchfab still doesn't seem to recognize it. I tried uploading it by itself, but sketchfab won't recognize pngs, so I tried packaging it into a 7z with the .blend, but when I opened up the manual settings here in sketchfab it's still not there to select.

Will it be alright if I just use gimp to convert it manually to a jpg?

(Lord00120) #18

sketchfab can handle png just fine, I've always used those :slight_smile:

(Lord00120) #19

Yeah i just always upload all my textures manually afterwards, had less fuss with that:

Capture3.PNG992x688 44.9 KB

you are manually uploading like this right?

(Nephthys) #20

Yeah. I've got the texture in there, but I have clearly gone wrong somewhere. Progress!! Which is excellent!! You are awesome!!

But here is what it looks like now:

sword2redunwrapped by nephthys on Sketchfab

I wonder if I have somehow got the resolution set far lower than I think I did when baking ... ?