Materials & Texturing - Multi Texture Smooth Seams

Hey, this tutorial will cover how to blend the seams from where one texture begins, and another ends. Most people have had this problem im assuming, especially where the arms connect to the torso. So what do i mean by blending the seam? Here have a look at the most simple example:



Im going to assume you have your model already built. You have the different parts of the mesh split up into different Mat Id's, you got your material (multi sub-object) set up already. I put cylinderical wrapping on each separate body part. Something like this:




So now for the actual tutorial, how can we blend those seams. Actually theres a really simple way, doesnt involve us drawing any mask or anything. All the hard work is really done for us. So lets start:

We are going to have to sort of "split" up our vertices into groups, sorta like we did with polygons and assigned different Mat Id's to them. So Click Utilities > More > Channel Info . Select your mesh and click "CHannel Info". Should look something like this:



All right so now we will split up our vertices into 3 groups like our material: Head, Torso, and the arms. First we would like to create a new group to hold these channels, so on any of the cells in the MAP CHANNEL INFO box, right click and select ADD. Now this 2:map appeared:



One of these groups has 3 subgroups, click SUBCOMP at the top to get this:



Now you see how it has a X,Y,Z component? And notice this vsel near top how its only one component? Basically what we will do is select our mesh, collapse stack, select vertices for arms AND WHILE VERTICES ARE SELECTED, we RIGHT CLICK on VSEL, COPY, RIGHT CLICK on either the X,Y,Z and Paste it in. A box will appear to name it, so call it arms. So lets do it for the arms step by step, then you can do the rest. So You probably have a UVW MAPPING ADD on the stack, collapse it. Select all the arm vertices:



^^ WHile selected, copy the VSEL, and paste into 2:map:X , rename it to ARMS to get :



Collapse the stack, do the same thing for the head, and the main body. Select, copy into 2:Y or 2:z or if you need more room, create a new group, paste, rename and collapse. Once your done were ready to set the material.

Now for the material, change it from STANDARD to a COMPOSITE material. And assign it to the mesh, it should all be grey at first. We will do the arms first, so select MAT 1, Choose STANDARD. Now change this material however you want to create your arms material. The most important part is for the OPACITY MAP, choose VERTEX COLOR.



Now under CHANNEL NAME, Select 2 : arms



Do the same for the head and body.

So at the end of it this is how your Top most composite map sorta looks like and it should render out with nice smooth seams now :







Thats pretty much it, should be straight forward, alot easier than making masks and manually trying to blend it in yourself... Cheers


- Stryker - 2005

wow, I've never see this before! Really cool stryker, thx a lot for sharing!

stryker - i wonder if you could re-upload the pictures

thx