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8. Correcting texture mapping

I am happy with my mesh now. So now I need to put some texture on and adjust the texture mapping.
When you pull and move the vertices around, you move the texture too. So if you make the dress longer, the texture will become 'streched'. That is what we need to fix.
Now I assign a texture to the mesh. I use my special squared texture mapping bmp, but I could also use a b200 bitmap. But the squares makes it SO much easier to do a good texture mapping! *get squared bmp* (right-click and save.)
I click the Materials tab in the toolbox. If you don't have a big screen like me you will need to have the keyframer thing at the buttom of the screen turned off (Window ->Show keyframer should be unchecked) - you won't need it anyway.
Now click the New button and a grey sphere will appear. You can rename the texture if you like, otherwise it will just be Material01.
Click the long <none> button to browse for a texture. I choose my own bxxxfafit_sqared.bmp. When you see that texture on the sphere (yes, it looks VERY weird) you can assign it to the mesh.
Select the entire mesh (edit -> select all) and click the assign button... nothing happens. That is because your preview window is most likely set not to show the texture. Right-click on the preview window and choose Textured.
Now it looks like this:


If the squares are nice and about the same size the texture won't be streched in weird ways. When you look at the preview you can see the squares are messed up 3 places: the top of the sleeves, the buttom of the skirt and the legs. We will try to fix this. We will have to make a new bmp later to fit the new mesh, but it will be worth the extra hazzle to get a good texture mapping first.
Ok, still keeping the entire mesh selected choose Window -> texture coordinate editor from the menu. A window will pop up. If you adjust it slightly you will be able to see the preview window at the same time, this will be very helpful.
The 'select' button is for selecting vertices and the move, rotate and scale button will do just that with the selected vertices. (Note: you are working in 2d, deciding how the texture will be put on the mesh. When you move the vertices around you are not changing the shape of the mesh, but the way the texture is assigned)
The box with the drop down menu is for selecting which group to work with (so far we only have one) the next one is used when texture mapping new shapes - don't touch it at this point. The same goes for the Remap button. The scale button at the button is for zooming in - type in a number, say 1.4 and press Scale. You can drag the texture around with ctrl+mouse drag. Keep the 'redraw' button checked, that will allow you to see the changes you make instantly on the 3d preview.
Ok, lets do it... We start with fixing the skirt.
I zoom in (scale to 1.8 in this case) I need to be able to see all the skirt vertices at the same time. I also zoom in on the skirt on the preview window.


I now select the bottom vertices of the skirt in the texture coordinate editor window- the same vertices I moved to change the skirt in the main windows.
I click Move and pull them down, looking at the preview window.


The squares starts looking better... just before I pull the selected vertices past the next vertices of the legs I stop to pick them up (select button, hold down shift while dragging/clicking).


Then I move the whole thing down some more... I select the next leg vetices when I get close as well and pull down just a tiny bit more... then I think it's there


The lower part of the legs still looks weird - not because of anything we did, that's how maxis texture mapped this mesh. But let's fix it anyway ;)
Move your zoom in both windows to focus on the legs. Grab the knee vertices and pull them upwards till the front of the legs looks good.


that's it!
Now, onto the sleeves.
The texture gets too streched on the sleeves where we adjusted them. I can see on the texture coordinate editor that there's plenty of room on the bitmap to expand the texture mapping a bit on that part, so let's do it.
I select the sleeve vertices 2 by 2 (one vertex from both left and right sleeve at the same time) and move them to make a bigger sleeve. (Note: when selecting some of the vertices you will notice TWO vertices becomes selected. That is because the same vertex is present more places in the texture mapping, so if you adjust one place, the other must follow)
Select a pair of left sleeve and right sleeve vertices, move them around a bit so you can see in the preview window what part of the mesh they're on. (NOTE! the texture coordinate editor has a very limited undo memory, so be sure to do lots of backups). Then move them while looking in the preview window, make the squares look better.


I left out some of the steps on this illustration, but you get the general idea. You will notice that the texture mapping now looks more like the actual mesh. As a general rule you can try to make the texture mapping wide where the mesh is wide and so on - just keep checking those squares ;)
The mesh now looks like this:


A lot better than before :)

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