Last week I brought my camera to the secret laboratory and shot a ton of texture reference of the VN armor, LINK so now I’ve been banging my head againsed this for the last three days.

I’m working on texture maps and I’m getting some weird edges and tiling, seems like the model is repeating the diffuse map. I have played with the tiling but it repeats and centers the map, wondering if its something that can be fixed from your side, is it a normals thing or a UV map in the OBJ?

Right now I’m importing the texture in iClone and opening the texture in photoshop, edit…update…edit… there has got to be a better way to paint this map but not sure what it is.

you can see the tiling more clearly here, its as if each face repeats the same diffuse map centered on the face of the obj.

I’ve heard the new photoshop can paint directly on OBJs, but i don’t have access to it right now, I tried using this uvmapper, but I’m not sure what I’m doing – http://www.uvmapper.com

I know there must be a way to ‘unwrap’ a model to get the texture to stretch across the whole thing.

Minor update:

I’m pulling reference of the UV maps and it seems like that is the problem. I must be overwriting the UV data while I’m doing teh textures;

You can see here that the end caps are placed over the unwrapped sides;

That is in comparison to this, which is the UV ref from a primative generated from within iClone;

I’m still unsure how to fix this, but I feel like I must be getting closer…

Minor Update #2

I’ve spent a couple more hours putting together teste and think I’m getting closer to understanding whats happening, but I still think there must be a better way to do this.

Here are three different tests. The first from the left is a primitive generated from inside iClone, the texture is wrapping properly, the UV ref seems to map correctly, however I am NOT going to try and create the whole model from this method, the shapes are just too complicated to make without a real modeling tool set.

On the right is the first exported prop, generated from the OBJ. It seems like I must have replaced the OBJs UV and regenerated it through iClone, which appears to have overlaid the side and front faces causing the tiling problem. As far as I can tell there is no way to revert this UV swap.
Using OBJ’s UV in iClobe
Replacing UV in iClone

In the center is the OBJ imported and using it’s native UV, which is supposed to map like this;

But as you can see it isn’t. There is a split happening in the middle and it seems to be grabbing from the ‘back’ to fill it…

Seems like I’m closer and further away at the same time.