Texturing a curved road

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Unfortunately there’s no easy way to do that in Cinema 4D; the UV tools are a bit primitive, I’m afraid. When I have complex UV editing to do I use a third party program called UVLayout. Fortunately for you, I took a few seconds and straightened out your UVs for you. 🙂 It literally takes a few seconds in UVLayout whereas it would take hours and hours in C4D.

You can’t copy the sculpting tag from one object to another, so what you’ll have to do is merge the attached object into your scene. Then delete the UVW tag from your road object and drag the UVW tag from the imported object to your road. Then you can delete the imported object.

File: 7751_7745truck.normalroad.obj.zip

For future reference, the best way to deal with this kind of situation in C4D, IMO, is to create the geometry with a sweep nurbs. That way you’ll be starting out with straight UVs. If you need to push and pull points to get the exact shape you need you’ll still have relatively straight UVs when you finish.

[Kelum Jayasinghe]

Hi, thank you very much..I know Headus UV Layout…I have tutorials and yes its superb…will try it…but please advise…

1. What is the file format you should export from c4d so that UV layout will recognize?

2. Lets say you opened the file in C4D with the way you describe as answer to 1, you do the UV edits and how would you import that data into C4D and utilize without an issue?

3. C4Ds problem with straightening the UVs is the issue here??

4. Splines/// when splined objects are made editable, the caps stay detached from the rest ( hull )..and when you go sculpting such an object, you run into trouble.. thats why I used box modeling…

Thanks for your valuable tips mate…

Cinema 4D ROCKZ!

[Adam Trachtenberg]

1. I always export to wavefront (obj.) when going to UVLayout. Then export back the same way. Cinema will open .obj files in a new scene, or you can merge them into existing Cinema scenes.

2. The UV changes you make in UVLayout translate to Cinema, no problem.

3. Yes, in this case Cinema has no facility to easily straighten curved UVs, but UVLayout has lots of other advantages (symmetry, alignment, stacking, etc.).

4. You can weld caps to the geometry by using the Mesh>Optimize command.

[Kelum Jayasinghe]

Wow…Adam thank you so much for your precious time…I should start using it..I have UV Layout with me but I thought C4D’s UV Editing is the thing I should master..We Should suggest Maxon to copy UV Layout’s capabilities into Cinema, shouldnt we?? I will make a suggestion through their site…

Does wavefront format preserve the model’s polygonal surface as the model becomes a wavefront from a c4d file? No distortions or surface missing at all?

Thanks for the optimizing tip…lot more to learn…lets do the proposition to Maxon on working on UV editting module…

Thank you…. 🙂 🙂 🙂

Cinema 4D ROCKZ!

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Glad I could help.

Obj format preserves the geometry. The only thing that isn’t supported by Cinema is material export, though of course UVs are imported and exported fine.

[Kelum Jayasinghe]

Thanks a lot… 🙂

Cinema 4D ROCKZ!

[Kelum Jayasinghe]

UV Layout lessons are done..You are right, its amazing and fun..Thanks for the guiding Adam…Just a thought…in UV view ( keyboard shortcut 1 ) I see red straight lines and dash lines keeping the UV shells within some proportion…Does tht indicate a texture size or texture resolution? How can you determine the size of it? Does that have any kind of texture quality related influence when I zoom the camera in? In order to achieve highest quality texture upon zooming in or to get texture quality procedurally, what should I do…? Thanks!

Cinema 4D ROCKZ!

[Adam Trachtenberg]

The solid red square represents the object’s UV space. It has no real scale outside of the object. If you want to avoid pixelation you either need to use bigger textures or use procedural materials.

[Kelum Jayasinghe]

Thank you so much… 🙂

Cinema 4D ROCKZ!

[Kelum Jayasinghe]

Hi Adam, I did work on the road by straightening UVs like you said..I applied the texture tag like you said and it worked…I noticed the UVs were very longer than the texture…In such a situation can you scale the canvas in order to contain the whole UVs or…..what should i do..?? I loaded a bigger road texture which was tilable…and scaled down UVs to fit the canvas…then applied color channel only texture and set it to 10 tiles. Then, since the road was a sculpted object, I baked it and applied displacement and normal channels only texture to the object and I set tilling off…since you cannot make displacements/ normals tiled…

The render looked good this way, but I wanna know if this is the procedure I should go when applying textures..

Is it possible for me to set another different texture to the banks of the road using set selection tags, otherwise the tilable road applies to road banks? Please advise, thanks!

Cinema 4D ROCKZ!