Preparing UV's for export to blender

[constermonster]

Hello, I have just started using octane and my UV's are not showing up on my textures (although the render is insanely fast and very nice looking). I have been searching the internet and these forums but I can't find a guide anywhere that describes exactly what I need to do to prepare an object, its texture, and the UV for export from blender to octane. So far all my work has been done using the blender renderer, and has not involved export to other programs. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[matej]

Octane needs manual UV unwrapped mesh, automatic coordinate assignment (global, cube, etc..) doesn't work. A mesh needs to have an UV coordinate set, that's it.

[constermonster]

thanks for the response, but I don't think that is the problem. I have already unwrapped it in blender, and applied the texture so that, for example, the blender render will show the textures in the right locations. Is there any additional procedure required to ensure the texture image is available for octane to render such as moving my texture images to a specific path, or changing the texture format?

[FooZe]

Hi constermonster,

There are a few things to check to see where the problem might be (and give me some more info so i can hopefully help).
Most or some of these you may have already done so just be patient with me please...
1) check that the textures are loaded ok with the material. In the node inspector the filename should be shown as the materials diffuse. If you have version 2.58c you can also double check the texture preview to confirm it's loaded ok.
2) check the UV's using the deep_channel_kernel, setting the type to texture co-ordinates. One axis is green, the other is red to it should render UV for 0,0 (black) to 1,1 (yellow).
If everything is black then yeah, the UV's definately aren't getting to octane.
3) double check that import image textures is on under File > preferences > OBJ Mesh Import (and related settings).
4) Double check on export from blender that you have Include UV's ticked.

If all these are ok then definately something is going on in blender. I haven't had any trouble with UV's from blender so i can let you know what i do if the above doesn't work.

Cheers
Chris.

[matej]

If you see your texture properly mapped in the viewport and it's enabled for diffuse / specular etc channel, then you will get the texture properly mapped in Octane. The exporter checks for image paths and will fail if it doesnt find the files.

btw, did you use the unofficial Octane exporter or did you just export to .obj yourself?

Post some screens of the setup in Octane and setup in Blender.

[constermonster]

I think I've figured it out - whenever i switch the material type to diffuse from glossy in the octane render the map is visible. I guess it must be something to do with the difference in how much light bounces of the material (too much specular?) - sorry to take your time and thank you for the fast response.

[roeland]

If you try to use bump maps you should also think about the illumination. The default environment is an uniform color. If you just put an object into this environment any bump or normal mapping will be nearly invisible. To make a bump map stand out, add some illumination with emitters or change the environment to something less uniform (daylight environment, or an HDR image map).

--
Roeland