today I thought I'd try something different.
Like as in, something I have no idea how to do, but saw someone else do on
reddit and thought "that looks cool and easy, let's do a quick episode on it"
It's a good job I'm planning these 10 videos ahead and making them before I release them
is all I can say to that, because 2 days later I'm finally getting
round to actually reporting on my failures, I mean results. Let's do it.
So it turns out putting a texture on somehting is hard. I actually already knew that from way
back when I used to mess about with 3d studio max. The making of a 3d model is way easier
than making a convincing texture. And this of course is why when you look at old games you
have such hilariously unconvincing textures in them too, I guess. It's very easy to end up in
uncanny valley and especially with wood because wood is...well...hard to fake.
I started out trying to follow this tutorial but unless you're competent at blender,
and I am the exact opposite, I literally just installed it and it is mind bogglingly complex
and I don't just mean hard to learn, I mean it's a huge thing with way too many options
and I have to wonder does ANYONE know how all of this works, is it even possible?
Anyway I failed abysmally so I tried another tutorial which I will link below
along with the reddit link above - I had limited success but the problem
with complicated software you just don't know how to use is that even the slightest change in
how the menus work or your model or whatever and you're out of your depth straight away.
I think the main issue with "texturing" 3d models for 3d printing is that you're not texturing them
in a way that you would for an image, it's actually displacementing the surface rather
than applying an image to it, I know you kind of do both if you're doing serious rendering but the
point I'm making is that a nice image texture you find off the internet is going to generally not
give you the right results when you're using it as essentially a
depth map. And I can't find any of those either, it must be a thing but I'm lost.
Anyway this is what we ended up with, hardly inspiring.
Even though these are supposed to be short videos I didn't feel like that was a good place to stop
so I poked around a bit and found out you can do some so called texturing in meshmixer,
using the sculpt menu. Results were...disturbing if I'm honest. This function is actually really
useful if you want to make asteroids or moons but for anything else, again...I'm out of my league.
But there is a real option for us normal people who don't have qualifications in 3d
graphics luckily. Depending what you watch you may have seen or heard of ideamaker,
and I feel like I'm being almost insultingly brief at this point but I want to keep it
short - I have to cover this in more detail in future because from the short time I've used
this slicer - yes it's a whole slicer and it even supports octoprint - I really liked it.
You can add textures to an stl in ideamaker so easily that you don't really need me to
tell you how. There's literally a texture button. Options are a lot more limited than blender but
really it's a quick and easy method and for most things it will do the trick, and the best bit
is that there's an online texture library that you can easily browse and pull things in from.
Also I noticed that many textures just end up looking like printer faults, seems ironic to
spend hours solving a banding issue or whatever to then try to do it on purpose. Oh well.
I still didn't get any kind of wood texture that I wanted, these results were a bit weird,
but honestly I kind of gave up and started doing some other things, who wants wood anyway?
So that's where I'm going to stop today - as I said I will cover this slicer hopefully soon and
properly with a full week or so of research and planning as usual because I think it deserves
more attention, but honestly if you have time check it out anyway, it's very simple to use.
As for future videos on blender...hahahah pass.
See you tomorrow!