Electric Image Animation System 7 Tutorials
Texturing / Importing Texture Images pt. 1
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Subtitles of the Movie (Electric Image Animation System 7 / Texturing / Importing Texture Images pt. 1)
Whether you're using images or a shaders you assign a material the same way. Let's double-click this plane and, as expected we get its Info Window. To the left is a ball on a checkerboard. That's the button for the Material Window. Let's click that and a new window with tabs opens. This Material Window has controls for every aspect of your model's appearance: Bumpiness, Transparency, Reflections, and others. They're all controlled in these tabs and we'll look at each one of them. In the upper left of the Material Window is the Material Preview. This will always be in the form of a sphere no matter what kind of shape or model you have. Also, this Preview does not show the textures themselves, it just gives you an idea of what the basic properties and their values look like. To properly see the textures then the model would have to be told to display its texture in the Display tab, as we have already seen in a previous lesson. You add a Texture by importing it into one of the tab attributes. Diffuse is the best way to start because the Diffuse attribute gives you the base control over the surface of the model. You can assign a color to the model by clicking on the Color Swatch here. Let's change the plane to red, and you'll see the Material Window and the World Views all update. But now let's add an Image Texture to it. Below you see an empty list called Diffuse Maps. Click the Add button and we'll find a picture from the open dialog, here. The image is added to this list. Let's go back to the plane's Info Window and turn on Display Texture. Now we can see our image applied to the plane. It looks distorted because EI is stretching the image to fit across this rectangular plane. Back in the Material Window let's double-click the image from the list. A new Window appears with Mapping Controls. Mapping refers to how and where the image is applied to the model's surface. Click on the Projection tab and let's look at the Scale fields. I know my image is square and I can see by these Scale values that Animator is indeed stretching the image. The X-value is too high, which is why we have a distorted image. Let's make the X-value the same as the Y. And now in the Camera Window we can see the correct proportions, but we see more than one. Back in the Projection tab at the top we have Tiling choices. We see that the image is currently tiled by Mirroring it. Remember, you won't see the tile at all if the image is scaled as large, or larger than the model's largest dimension, in this case, the X size. But now that our image is smaller along the X we see it repeat across the model and it repeats by mirroring the image to the left and to the right. Click on the Tiling options and you'll see that we can also set the image to not tile like this, and now we see the colored surface of our plane where the image does not cover it. Change it to Hold, and Animator holds the edges of the image and stretches them across the model. Repeat simply duplicates the image across the surface like wallpaper, and Mirror is what we started with.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Electric Image Animation System 7 |
| Author: | Scott Simmons |
| SKU: | 33996 |
| ISBN: | 1-935320-45-9 |
| Release Date: | 2009-06-01 |
| Duration: | 8 hrs / 102 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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