Creating a triangle?
This is by far the most interesting forum I've seen on this site! Very friendly too. AA made me LOL with the comment about the video telling her to look for Haitians. I've been using DAZ Studio for over a year now and I still feel like there is about 90% of it I don't understand! It sure is fun though.
I was wondering. Is there a way to turn a plane into a triangle? I need a triangle, and it is harder to find than one might think. I found some OBJ shapes on sharecg (including a 3d triangle) but when I add a surface to it, it just shows the color, it doesn't show the texture. I added the jpg to the bump, to the "normal map", to anything I could find on the surfaces tab but it just shows a flat color. It's obvious I don't understand surfaces, but I do know if I create a plane and add my surface, it shows perfectly. However, a plane is not a triangle.
Anybody have any thoughts for the old newbie on how I can create a triangle and add a surface to it?
Thank you much!
Comments
Has the Obj been UV mapped? Textures won't showup unless it has.
If you are going to use a triangle, it will need to be UV Mapped, a square texture will not look right on it anyway. You should apply any texture JPG image to the Diffuse channel in the Surfaces tab.
Are the ones from ShareCG UV Mapped? If so, you will need to create a template from the OBJ file using UV Mapper (free) or similar, then take the template into Photoshop or Gimp, and paint the texture onto the template. Save it as a JPEG, then apply that to the Diffuse channel.
Hexagon is also free at the moment, and you could easily make a triangle there, and UV Map it as well, and send it straight into DS4P.
EDIT:
Too slow, wilmap got there first :)
Thank you both JimmyC and wilmap for your fast responses! How do I tell if the Obj has been UV Mapped? Or I guess, what does that mean? I do have Hexagon but I don't know how to use it yet. :(
In DS4P, load the OBJ, then select it in the scene tab and the surfaces tab, and choose UV View from the Camera dropdown menu (where it usually says Perspective View).
That should show you the UV Map if there is one.
I once managed a triangle by creating a cylinder with only three sides. I don't have access to my Studio computer so cannot test whether this still works in 4.5, nor what happens with diffuse and other maps.
Thank you everyone so much for the help! I've learned more in the last 24 hours than I thought my old brain had the capacity to hold. I was able to find that the obj files did NOT have UV maps, but i was able to create them in UVMapper, save them, import them into DAZ and voila! I was able to add my texture to my triangle. I didn't think of trying the cylinder but that is a good idea too, I will try that. I poked around in Hexagon and I sure wish I knew what I was doing with that because it would be really cool to build things. That is going to take time. If I wander off into learning Hexagon I'll never get my scene finished in DAZ. It's all fun though! Thanks again!
Well done with UV Mapper, some people never get that far, it will all fall into place as you keep working at it.