Texturing and Rendering a Wine Bottle: Using Projections to Bypass Editing UVs

Photo of Raymond Olsen

Instructor Raymond Olsen

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  • Duration: 06:32
  • Views: 3501
  • Made with Release: 19
  • Works with Release: 19 and greater

Use a cylindrical projection to position a texture onto an object’s surface.

Often times you will receive a model that doesn’t have a UV layout prepared and this technique will let you apply textures and move on without having to touch any UV editing tools. We’ll use a cylindrical projection to position a texture onto an object’s surface.

For more information on the reflectance channel seen in this video, check out Patrick Goski’s series The Reflectance Channel.

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Transcript

In this video we're going to learn how to use a cylindrical texture projection to apply our label to this bottle. So our model preset came with a bottle label material, but we're not quite sure what was done with that material. So instead of working with theirs, let's go ahead and create our own label material. To do that go to Create, New PBR Material. This is a new preset that comes with R19 and it's geared towards physically based rendering. So everything will be over here in the Reflectance channel. And what we want is the Default Diffuse. And we'll activate that texture. And in the Footage folder of my project, is the racoon label. So let's add the racoon label. This is Cinema asking me if I want it to rearrange my textures and I don't, so I'm just going to say No. And there is our label material. So I'm going to go over to the Basic tab, rename this label. Now let's apply this to our label. So I'm going to delete the old material tag. So now we just have our label material on there. And you can see, it's not lining up at all. And we zoom in, it's actually a little blurry. So we can get a good look at it. I'm going to go and crank up over here in the Editor tab, the Texture Preview Size. I'm going to make that 2048, and now we get a nice, clear image. And I'm going to back up. And now let's address the alignment of our label. Right now our image is being mapped to this label using their UV map, which is stored right here in this tag. If you click on our texture tag, you can see UV Mapping right here. So we can either adjust the UV map to match our image, or we can adjust our image to match their UV map. But instead of dealing with UVs or editing our image, we're going to use what's called a texture projection to place our label. And before we do that to the wine bottle, let me show you in this other scene. This is our label applied to a cube, a cylinder, and a plane. And on these texture tags in the Projection, I have the cube set to Cubic, the cylinder set to Cylindrical, and the plane is set to Flat. So let's take a look at the plane, and there's two tools we're going to worry about here, the Texture tool and the Axis tool. So let's activate the Texture tool, select the Plane, and make sure that Tag is selected. I want the Scale tool and then select that tag one more time. And since we had the Texture tool active, we're getting this grid. If I turn the Texture tool off, there's no grid. Turn the Texture tool on, we get a grid. And watch what happens when I scale. The length of the U and V is changing. U's left and right, V is up and down. And what we're doing is we're scaling the tiling of this projection. So you can see now we're getting tiled images of our texture. If I turn off Tile that goes away. So without the Axis tool selected, what we're going to do is scale the tiling. If I select the Axis tool, now we're scaling the actual projection as a whole. So you can see that U and V lengths are staying the same. If we come over to the Coordinates, now that scale is being changed. If I select the Move tool, it's moving up and down. So let's take a look at the cylinder. Same deal. If I turn off the Axis tool and scale, it's scaling the tiling, so now we're getting more. If I select the Axis tool and scale, it's scaling the projection, which acts a little bit strange with the cylinder. Then we could actually rotate this, whatever you want to do. And the same deal with the cube. If I select the cube and then the tag, if I turn off the Axis tool and scale, I'm scaling the tiling. Turn it on, I'm scaling up the projection. So we're going to use a cylinder projection because the wine bottle's in a cylinder shape. We could probably get away with using a plane or a flat projection. But because the wine bottle curves a bit, I don't want the image to get distorted. So let's go ahead and use a Cylindrical projection to place our wine bottle label. Let's go ahead and grab our bottle label now and then grab its texture tag and change the projection from UVW to Cylindrical, and now let's activate our Texture tool, and there's that object. That's our projection and the grid is our tile. So I'm going to activate the Axis tool, so now we're editing the projections, Coordinates. I'm going to scale that projection down. I'm going to place it over our label, and I want the edges of the projection to hang off just the top and bottom of the label just a bit, just in case there's any seams at the edges of my textures, that way nobody will see them. And there is a Fit to Object command here. But if we hit it with this projection, it warps our cylinder. So I'm not going to use that for this, but I wanted to show you that function so you'd know it's there. And now what I'm going to do is just turn off Tile. So now we're just dealing with one instance of our texture. Now if I turn off my Axis tool and scale, you're going to see there's the one instance of our texture. And that was just so I can see the edges of the texture. So now, I'm actually going to use the offsets and the lengths to line up the top left corner of my label, because that's where the scaling anchors from. And then I'm just going to scale this into place. And this texture is actually a square, so it's not going to fit this label perfectly. But you can just eyeball it and get it looking good, which I think we've done. So we're going to leave the label like this. I'll deactivate my Texture tool. In just a few steps you can use projections like this to position decals or other branding on your 3D objects. Next, let's take a look at introducing some light into our scene with an HDR image.
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