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Assistance with texturing a keyboard.
Hi,
I’d like to ask you for your assistance. I’m working on a project that contains a keyboard and I’m at the stage to texture the characters and symbols on it.
I used the Cloner Object for the standard majority ones and separate ones where the size and shape differs.Ultimately, I’d like to export a texture map of the keys in the layout as they are, place all markings of the keys in Ps and then project that single texture on all keys at once.
Now.. I never did any detailed texturing like this yet and don’t have any idea where to start. I did look tutorials and info about UV-mapping and such but wasn’t able to extract what I need to solve it.
I attached images of both the keyboard and a snip of the project in the Object Manager.
I’d really appreciate any help.
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3 Replies
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Treat it like they do in manufacturing. Use a material that is the color of the keyboard for the whole thing, then on a second material that sits over the first, use a flat mapping to put a stencil of just the letters over the tops of the keys. The image of the letters would be all black (or whatever color you want the text to be) with an alpha of the letters to “cut them out” when placed over the base texture.
If you take a snap shot of the key board from above (perpendicular to the face of the key tops). then close cut that image to the edges of your model, and use that image size and reference to place the letters in the alpha., Then when placing that in 3D you can simply right click on the texture and say “fit to object” : no messy line up! (tip: you have to get the orientation of the flat mapping right so that the arrows in the texture map orient properly when using the texture tool: the red arrow points to the right and the green arrow points up) -
Thank you very much, Steve ☺
Looks like I was first looking in the wrong direction with UV edit, and all that. Doing it like this works perfectly ????
Note to self (again): a lot of things are simpler than you might think at first.I had problems with showing the text texture smooth. I leave it as a note for others that might experience this once.
I created part of the markings in Ps with text-objects (non-flattened) and was surprised it showed the text low-res/not-aliased like when rendering. No matter how high resolution the image and what “Sampling” setting I tried in the Alpha channel.
Finally, the problem was that when experimenting I’d checked “Mix Texture” in the texture-tag of the object. After un-checking that, it showed up great. -
Mix texture isn’t needed when the second material has an alpha. If the alpha text material is the second (to the right) texture on the object, the alpha should cookie cutter the text over the base texture. However depending on how the alpha was made, you may need to try different settings in the alpha channel of the texture.
It used to be that C4d couldn’t process smart objects or text from Pshop but I haven’t checked that in R19, but still, I would be surprised: half of what should be cross product compatible doesn’t even work between adobe products.
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