[Plugin] FredoTools::ThruPaint - v1.3a - 20 Oct 16

[massimo]

From the very first post of the thread:

Cattura.JPG

[sahol]

Thank you so much!

[bac9-flcl]

Interesting. You seem to understand how UVs work with Sketchup.
Would you have a sample model, with your texture, so that I try and see what is going on.

Thanks
Fredo

Sure, here is a model with that texture, two sample meshes and two examples of stock texture mapping. Switch between the scenes to navigate it.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/v3c52c

[fredo6]

Sure, here is a model with that texture, two sample meshes and two examples of stock texture mapping. Switch between the scenes to navigate it.

I am not sure of what you try to achieve.

You cannot paint the shape in one go, because ThruPaint will try to go around the shape while going up (The first goal was to paint smooth meshes).

So you need to paint each side separately, as illustrated in the video.

ThruPaint - Texture natural 2.gif

Please advise if I missed something

Fredo

[bac9-flcl]

Sure, here is a model with that texture, two sample meshes and two examples of stock texture mapping. Switch between the scenes to navigate it.

I am not sure of what you try to achieve.

You cannot paint the shape in one go, because ThruPaint will try to go around the shape while going up (The first goal was to paint smooth meshes).

So you need to paint each side separately, as illustrated in the video.

ThruPaint - Texture natural 2.gif

Please advise if I missed something
Fredo

Yeah, I'm interested precisely in painting each side separately, obviously. ThruPaint is not producing the mapping similar to depicted on your gif for me, though. Maybe I don't understand something about controls? I'm sequentially clicking on the faces. Should I hold some additional button for Natural UV to come into effect?

[massimo]

I'm sequentially clicking on the faces.

You have to click and drag without releasing the mouse button.

[bac9-flcl]

I'm sequentially clicking on the faces.

You have to click and drag without releasing the mouse button.

Oh, so that's what I had to do. Thanks. It's just that dragging is not usually used with any stock tools (which were designed to work with clicks), so it wasn't something immediately evident.

Okay, follow-up questions then:

1. How should I handle situations where a required sequence of faces can't be observed from one camera angle? What's the intended way of sampling the mapping from a neighboring face to continue the texture mapping where you left off? I.e. what's the equivalent of Alt+LMB click of the stock Paint Bucket tool in your control scheme?

2. Why are clicks on faces sometime triggering a distinct "camera shutter" sound effect (instead of opening the texture mapping editing mode like the tooltip says) and what's it notifying about?

3. Why editing the tile offset on one face within the Natural UV produced sequence of faces triggers the change of tile offsets on every single neighbouring face? It's a very neat feature, but it would be good to know if there is a way to switch back to isolated editing of one face which is sometimes precisely what's needed. For example, after perfectly aligned sequential mapping is already completed, mapping of involved faces is usually only modified to break the repetitive tiling patterns, in which case only isolated faces have to be edited - hence the question on how to activate that mode.

4. Is there a way to affect the initial offset of the texture? I see that hovering the cursor over one edge or another before beginning your swipe rotates the texture to be aligned with it. Is there any way to control the alignment of translation node? Very often, for example, I need the wall texture to be aligned vertically to one of the floor vertices.

And some small feature requests.

1. Can you please add the display of UV tile coordinates to the editing mode? Per-vertex UV coordinates are more or less pointless to show, of course, but sometimes it's extremely important to know whether the texture tile you're applying to the surface comes from between 0U,0V and 1U,1V or some far-off tile between 25U,42V and 26U,43V. One example of that are various texture baking workflows where you won't be able to bake ambient occlusion or normals of your model if your texture coordinates aren't contained within one origin tile. So usually you have to open the editing mode and correct the offset, and for that situation, it would be nice to have some guiding numbers showing where you are instead of having to edit the offset blindly.

2. In relation to that - it's probably a quite simple thing to implement, but it will go a long way to reducing rendering artifacts of texture mapping on large models in low-precision formats. Can you make it so that the texture tile placed onto a face will always be taken from somewhere close to the center of the UV space? It can be achieved by using the closest vertex instead of the origin point of the scene to calculate the offset. Thing is, many mesh formats and GPUs are using floating point formats of low precision to store texture coords, which gives lots of trouble to tiles with coords in hundreds and thousands. For example, iOS devices won't be able to render texture mapping on those faces in a proper manner, showing you torn, noisy fragments of the texture jumping back and forth on the face if it's coords are in the thosands.

3. And again, in relation to that: is it possible to override the default UV tile size SketchUp developers have hardcoded into all materials? It's around 10x10cm and as you can guess, it results in absolutely insane UV coords on any relatively large architectural objects that don't have textured materials to override the value. Which causes both problems with precision I have mentioned above, and some other issues (for example, previewing how textures will look on your mesh is pretty hard with default UV tile size because your fancy texture of e.g. a brick wall will obviously be sized 10x10cm and repeated thousands of times over the surfaces, completely out of scale). A more reasonable value, like 1x1m or 2x2m would do wonders to make default texture mapping more usable. Hopefully it's a value exposed to Ruby API that can just be accessed and changed.

Thanks in advance for any answers and thanks for the wonderful work this plugin is again!

[Pu]

Thanks you Fredo

[nickchun]

Just been taking another look at this great looking tool, but I am having problems colouring edges. It goes though the motions but when I exit the tool(double click), the edges revert back to black. Works fine on everything else, faces, text etc. Am I missing something? Great piece of work though, thank you.

[fredo6]

Just been taking another look at this great looking tool, but I am having problems colouring edges. It goes though the motions but when I exit the tool(double click), the edges revert back to black. Works fine on everything else, faces, text etc. Am I missing something? Great piece of work though, thank you.

It's probably related to your Style setting fro edges (default, by material, axis).
Thurpaint enable the 'Edge by Material' mode during the coloring but siwtch back to your current mode when exiting.
So you edge probably received the color by your are not in the proper style to see them.

Fredo

[nickchun]

Great. I will take a look at it. Thanks for the quick reply and great plugin.

[Edson]

hi fredo,

I am having similar problems to nickchun (immediately above). I have found out about switching to Edge by Material but I cannot grasp how to choose a color and apply to edges. thrupaint seems to be stuck with the face color.

what it is the workflow to chose a color and apply it to an edge? thanks.

[fredo6]

hi fredo,

I am having similar problems to nickchun (immediately above). I have found out about switching to Edge by Material but I cannot grasp how to choose a color and apply to edges. thrupaint seems to be stuck with the face color.

what it is the workflow to chose a color and apply it to an edge? thanks.

You need to disable the Face button in the palette. Then you will only paint edges.

Fredo

[Edson]

hi fredo,

I am having similar problems to nickchun (immediately above). I have found out about switching to Edge by Material but I cannot grasp how to choose a color and apply to edges. thrupaint seems to be stuck with the face color.

what it is the workflow to chose a color and apply it to an edge? thanks.

You need to disable the Face button in the palette. Then you will only paint edges.

Fredo

fredo,

this is not my point. I do have the Face button disabled.

my problem is not being able to paint the edges with the color/texture I wish to. if you look at the screen capture below you will see that ThruPaint is stuck with the material I applied to the faces, and I can only paint the edges with that texture. how can choose and apply another color/texture to the edges? in the video I see you chosing a color and applying it to edges.

Screenshot 2014-05-24 14.13.18.png

[Krisidious]

If we have messed up the UVs on a curved peice of geometry, how can we reset all of the geometry to be identical? When I hit reset it doesn't seem to make all UV's the same.

[scndchexin]

hao to download？？

[TIG]

hao to download？？

From the SCF PluginStore ?
Get Fredo's Lib too...

[DesertRaven]

Hi Fredo6, I am doing some roads in Sketchup and I came upon your plugin "thruPaint" amongst others to get the job done. Btw, ThruPaint rocks, easy to use amazing results, as intended, in no time.

I also used "curvyloft" to get the ramp shape.

Screenshot 2015-05-14 09.05.57.png

Only thing at the end of the day I ran into a weird issue exporting the finished textured roadway.

The road texture was broken up into many pieces as you can see in my export folder.

Screenshot 2015-05-14 09.07.29.png

Is this a general sketchup quirk? I was assuming the plug in would only align the UW's accordingly and not chop up the texture image? ?

Am I missing something ? Anybody else ever had this issue?

Kind regards, Olav

[thomthom]

Is this a general sketchup quirk? I was assuming the plug in would only align the UW's accordingly and not chop up the texture image? ?

Am I missing something ? Anybody else ever had this issue?

Kind regards, Olav

This depend on the exporter. SketchUp support UVQ - as oppose to just UV. The Q value is used for perspective mapping. Not all applications or file format support this.
To preserve the visual appearance some exporters will then generate new textures for faces with perspective mapping.

[DesertRaven]

Is this a general sketchup quirk? I was assuming the plug in would only align the UW's accordingly and not chop up the texture image? ?

Am I missing something ? Anybody else ever had this issue?

Kind regards, Olav

This depend on the exporter. SketchUp support UVQ - as oppose to just UV. The Q value is used for perspective mapping. Not all applications or file format support this.
To preserve the visual appearance some exporters will then generate new textures for faces with perspective mapping.

So basically, there is no solution?

I'd like to have only one texture so that I can import this into Unity and apply other maps, derived from the bitmap used, like normal maps displacement maps etc...

[thomthom]

Not sure what format you are exporting to, but one can at the expense of some visual deviation convert UVQ to UV. Depending on the mesh the visual difference might not be that noticeable.

[DesertRaven]

Not sure what format you are exporting to, but one can at the expense of some visual deviation convert UVQ to UV. Depending on the mesh the visual difference might not be that noticeable.

FBX, and yes, it's a quad mesh.

[DesertRaven]

Dead end?

[fredo6]

Is this a general sketchup quirk? I was assuming the plug in would only align the UW's accordingly and not chop up the texture image? ?

That's bascally what ThurPaint is doing. To obtain the result with a quadmesh, it does change the U, V and Q values, as you need the perspective distortion to render the quads properly.

As thomthom said, this may cause a problem in the exporter.

I have no solution for that, sorry.

Fredo

[AcesHigh]

Dead end?

why don´t you try 3DS, OBJ, DAE or other format before giving up? Maybe other formats won´t have the same problem.

alternativelly, you are exporting FROM Sketchup. I know there are some programs that can open Sketchup files and then you can save them as something else. I never used those programs nor I know if the end result would be different, but maybe you should try (IF there is a trial version) SimLab exporter plugin or SimLab Composer... it seems SimLab Composer can work with several formats including Sketchup. So MAYBE you can open your sketchup file in SimLab Composer and export as FBX and the result MIGHT be different...

[sreejithjayaram93]

How do you use thru paint to texture a plain flat circular path?? I Keep getting an error in the quadmesh UV mode ... Ive attached the screen shot for the same..

Thanks in advance...

[hsrhdrehre5654654]

Hi, im really happy about this tool, but i have a slighty problem.

Is there any way to disable the "auto join" feature???? i mean, when im painting, everything is great, but when two paths join, the texture scale/direction gets messed up and the whole thing looks really bad. SO i need to paint from scratch in those zones and continue painting. Curious thing is, before thrupaint treats the painted zone, everything looks great, but as i said, when you release the mouse button to join two paths, everything mess up. If i couuld just deactivate that "feature"... it will be perfect. Other wise, there are always seams and different parts in the painted texture

[rv1974]

Dead end?

Take sketchuv of Whaat and do 'triangulate'. 3ds will be exported with one texture.

[fredo6]

Hi, im really happy about this tool, but i have a slighty problem.

Is there any way to disable the "auto join" feature???? i mean, when im painting, everything is great, but when two paths join, the texture scale/direction gets messed up and the whole thing looks really bad. SO i need to paint from scratch in those zones and continue painting. Curious thing is, before thrupaint treats the painted zone, everything looks great, but as i said, when you release the mouse button to join two patchs, everything mess up. If i couuld just deactivate that feature... it will be perfect. Other wise, there are always seams and different parts in the painted texture

Do you have an example. I am not sure to understand what is the "auto-join" feature and the junctions of 2 paths.

Fredo

[hsrhdrehre5654654]

Hi, im really happy about this tool, but i have a slighty problem.

Is there any way to disable the "auto join" feature???? i mean, when im painting, everything is great, but when two paths join, the texture scale/direction gets messed up and the whole thing looks really bad. SO i need to paint from scratch in those zones and continue painting. Curious thing is, before thrupaint treats the painted zone, everything looks great, but as i said, when you release the mouse button to join two patchs, everything mess up. If i couuld just deactivate that feature... it will be perfect. Other wise, there are always seams and different parts in the painted texture

Do you have an example. I am not sure to understand what is the "auto-join" feature and the junctions of 2 paths.

Fredo

The problem i probably dont know how to explain better in english. When you are painting, the way thrupaint works is you make a selection of the zone you want to paint (holding themouse while you paint) and when you release the mouse, thrupaint "tries" to correct the texture scale/position in some faces. This produces terrible results in some faces affected by the painted zone, and the whole thing is useless.

I dunno how to explain it better, i will try to post a screenshot later.

Its not something weird, im pretty sure everyone is having this problem. At least, im having in using it on complex meshes modelled with artisan. My guess is, in a low-polygon model, you dont get to notice it, but when you paint extensive zones happens very often.