Explore the intriguing process of finishing a 3D koi fish model using texture projections. This article provides a step-by-step guide, demonstrating the use of various tools to ensure precise alignment and projection of textures onto the model.
Key Insights:
- The article discusses the process of aligning textures onto the 3D model. Specific tools like the paint bucket, the cursor select, and texture position are used to appropriately position and align the texture onto the koi fish model.
- Manipulating the texture to fit the model perfectly involves utilizing the move, rotate, distortion, and scale tools. The article elaborates on how these tools help move the texture, rotate it around a point, distort the image, and scale it precisely.
- The article emphasizes the importance of projecting the texture onto the model rather than applying a non-projected material which results in a jumbled mess. The use of the eyedropper tool is highlighted for projecting the material onto the model.
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So in this video we are going to finish our koi fish. If I orbit my model and look at this texture right here, I can see that the intention is to project this shape onto the side of my koi fish.
However, the texture appears to be out of position. With my paint bucket tool selected, I can right click on this surface and go to texture, position. Now I can click anywhere along this image and click and hold and drag to line up this shape within this rectangle.
Then once I'm done, I'm going to click outside of this shape or click enter. I will go back to my cursor, select key, and I will orbit around this side and I will do the same thing here. You can either use the paint bucket tool and right click texture or you can click the cursor select tool and click this and then right click texture position.
Now do the same thing, click and drag to match that to the appropriate size. Wow, so we can see that this texture is backwards to the fish. It doesn't align up to where we wanted to do it.
So I can go back to my texture, right click texture position, and then right click here, flip, left, right. And then you can see that this all lines up right. So then I can click out of this and that looks like that would project nicely onto that fish.
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And finally, we have the top koi head texture that we want to adjust. So I can click this and then right click texture position. During this one, I want to talk a little bit about these four corners.
If I was to move the middle around, it moves everything at once. However, each of these do something special. This is your move.
If I click this and hold, you can see that I can drag and I can snap to specific corners. That's what the move does. This is your rotate.
If I was to click and hold, actually rotate around a point. This is your distortion tool. This allows you to kind of distort the image.
And this is your scale tool. So I will undo this and click escape. And I will do right click texture position.
I want to move this here. Then I want to rotate this 90 degrees. So that way this gray triangle is at the top of our fish.
And once that's done, I'll click enter. Now we have all three of our planes ready to have projected materials onto our koi fish. So to do that, we'll go to our paint bucket tool, click this.
Now all three of our textures are in the right orientation and are ready to be projected. We will right click this material and go to texture projected. And then using the eyedropper tool, which is right here on our materials dialog box, click this and then click the material that we want to project.
Now if I go to paint our fish, you can see down below that ALT equals sample material, shift equals paint all matching, control paints all connected, and shift control paint all on same object. If I click control, you can see I have these little three squares. And then shift control has these these squares, but I'll make sure that I have none of the squares open.
So that way I will paint only on this material. So I will click paint. And as you can see, this material projected nicely onto the fish.
Now I would do the same thing and orbit around the model. And I want to project this material onto the left side of the fish. However, this time when I right click texture projected, I don't want to actually click projected.
I want to show you what happens if we apply the material that is non projected and what that will do. So I go to my eyedropper tool. I'll click this material and I will paint this face.
As you can see, this becomes a jumbled mess and it's not the nice projected material that this size has. So over back around and I will undo that. This time I will right click the material texture projected and then eyedropper, click the material and then paint the fish.
And as you can see, this material is painted nicely on the body of the fish. And finally, we want to paint the head of our koi fish. We can right click the material texture projected and then instead of going to the eyedropper tool, we can see in our tooltip that ALT equals sample material.
So I can hold the ALT key and it gives me that eyedropper. So I can click this material and then as it's selected here, I can paint the head. And there we have it.
There is our painted koi fish. Now that we are done with our textures, we can go back to the tags dialog box and actually delete this texture tag. And to do that, we can right click textures, delete tag.
It'll ask me to assign all these to a different tag or to delete everything that's on that tag. I will select delete the entities. Finally, I will save my file as our koi fish.
Now that is all I would like to do to build our koi fish. We can now load this fish into our fountain as a component. Now that our file is saved as a koi fish, I can go back to file, open, and open our fountain we previously created.
I will close my materials and tags dialog boxes, then open the components dialog box. If I click the home button right here, this will show me the components that I have currently loaded in our model. We have our fountain profile that we created, and we have the original man that we deleted at the very beginning of this file.
Now if we go to file, import, and then if we're not already in our C drive, we can go to local to C, SketchUp 101 file downloads, and then find our koi fish. We can actually load this in our model. If we do import, it actually brings in these objects as components.
I will click out here for now as I just I wanted to see this loaded in our components, and I will actually delete this key by clicking delete on my keyboard. Now if I click this koi fish in my components box, I can start placing this fish all around my fountain. I will do so now in various areas.
I click it here. I will go back to my components box and click it again, then move it here, and then once it's in here, we can use these quick keys for rotate around. Please have fun placing as many fish as you would like inside your fountain.
Now I will save my file, and this completes our fountain. I will see you in the next video.
