Hi, What type of unwrapping do I need to be able to export UV file to BeamNG program? Any help greatly appreciated.
I don't understand the question. What do you mean by 'type'? There's no types as far I'm aware, it's the same everywhere. How you unwrap a 3D model depends on how you want it to map to your textures. Unwrapping is needed if you want to apply textures on your 3D model, in order to map one to the other.
Blender doesn't export a separate uv file, .dae files have uv information inside of them, as do all of the file types that blender exports as far as I know.
Thank you for your reply. Blender has several types of UV unwrapping including Smart UV unwrapping and lightmap pack. I am following the BeamNG "Introduction to vehicle creation" and my vehicle does not show a body when I follow the instructions. The tutorial doesn't say which version of Blender or BeamNG is being used and I have tried Blender 2.8 and 2.7 unsuccessfully. --- Post updated --- Thanks for the reply. I am following the BeamNG "Introduction to vehicle creation" and my vehicle does not show a body when I follow the instructions. The tutorial says to export the UV map which I did but it still doesn't work. Do you know of any other tutorials that show me how to create the materials for a vehicle in BeamNG?
Make sure you created and assigned a material to your model in blender, in beamng you should be able to spawn the vehicle then press f11 to go into editor, select your vehicle then go into material editor and modify the material to your liking.
I see your confusion. Those are just different ways to automatically unwrap your 3D model. UV Mapping itself is the process of unwrapping / mapping your 3D model to a texture. The various options Blender provides you are just automated ways to ease the job. The UV Mapping system is still the same, those options just provide you automated results based on different methods. You need to choose what fits better to your textures. ie. Lightmap UV is suited for, as the name suggests, lightmaps. The model is unwrapped in a way it creates a lot of boxes. This is user-friendly to be edited in a photo editing program, but lightmaps are usually baked from a 3D software, not manually painted. This allows it to use more useful space: Smart UV tries to avoid all the small boxes, and rather create 'islands' based on the edge angle. This is usually good if you plan to manually texture something, as it's more usable in a photo editing program. And so on.. These are not specific to any program, they will work anywhere.
Thanks for the replies. I have created the vehicle in blender 2.8 and assigned materials. I exported the .jbeam and .dae files into BeamNG and created a materials.cs file pointing to the node groups and group in the .dae file. The suggestion seems to me to ignore the tutorial and just add materials in the material editor. Is this correct?
