Is there a short cut to UV unwrapping and applying textures?

[8thJinx]

Take a simple cube-shaped, flat-roofed office building from the town.  Forget the dead version for a minute.  When you export the shape to AC3D, and open the file in Notepad, the texture bmp file is in there.  Open the texture coordinate editor feature, and you see where the faces of the building are mapped onto the texture bmp. 

But what tells the notepad file to apply the bmp texture to the different faces of the model.  I can see it in the texture coordinate editor, and I totally get that I can do this in AC3D and blender or GiMP relatively easy.  But where does the file get the information to apply the portion of the texture bmp to the face of a building?  Where is the line of the file that provides the model this info?  The AC3D file (in Notepad) is just a basic text file, but I can't decipher where this step is accomplished.

Reason I ask is that while AC3D is a pretty simple program, their documentation is horrible.  So for anything other than a simple building, it's really hard to figure out how to do it.  The consensus on the interweb is to make the model in AC3D, but use Blender to apply the textures because it's a lot more robust and documented.  Then re-import it back into AC3D.  If there was a way to simply manipsulate the AC3D text file to apply a texture, I would love to know how.

[Ciaphas]

This may or may not help but a method I have used in the past is:


Apply your images to the face, adjust the image constraints to your liking, repeat for the entire model. Once you have it looking the way you want, unwrap the model by face (select face, unwrap) and then position each unwrapped face in your UVW editor above the 0,0. Then Apply a bake to texture. This will bake your images to the UVWmap. You can repeat this for AO, Spec and others. You can then pull this into your photo editing software and tweak it.


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[8thJinx]

Thanks for responding Ciaphas.  That's the idea behind AC3D's and Blender's texture editors.  I understand that part well.  You can even generate a skin template in AC3D and "paint" it in using photoshop or paint.net.  I was just wondering if there was a shorter way, by just using the text file. 

Reason I ask is that I'm working on taking one of the existing town building shapes and re-working it into the barn structures we used to have in AH2.  I also have a couple of rubble walls.  And I have a family of 9 separate berms that can be dropped into a terrain.  Some of them have rock faces and moss, some look like manure piles, some look like a long bull-dozed tank trench.  All total there are about 20 models that I need to skin, and I was hoping for a shortcut to skinning them all.

If I can finish skinning and scaling them in the next week, hopefully you'll see them in an upcoming Tank Night for testing.

[Ciaphas]

It depends on how you manipulated the existing geometry for the building to make it a barn. If you just added a few cuts and didn’t bust the integrity of the base mesh, the UVWmap should be intact. Set up a color map for the existing UVtemp ( give each island its own solid color) and apply it to the barn model. This will tell you how wonky things have gotten. It may be that everything is mostly fine and only minor adjustments are needed.

The berms are going to be a different beast. You could try, if basic dimensions are the same, use the box unwrap modifier, apply a seamless image to it and perhaps a mask or two to separate them visually.


Other than that I would look into the .x file type in notepad. This will give you a good understanding on how, through coordinates, images are applied.

Inside the .x (directx) file there will be the images name and then the corresponding coordinates that the images are applied to.


Applying them through a texted base solution will take longer as you will need to know the exact coordinates of the vertexes that make up each specific face.

Make sense?


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[8thJinx]

I figured out an easy way to do it.  I can skin a barn or a boulder using UV mapping, but simply drape a texture over a berm or a square land tile.