Modeling a vase in Daz Hexagon 2.5 - Part III

Painting the vase

Once we are using a modeling tool, we can paint a texture for the sculptie. The Hexagon have tools that allow you to paint in texture directly on the model.

But, there is a problem. The texture don't fit exactly in the sculptie. First I rotated 90º the texture, before upload. On SL, I changed the parameters on texture tab to fit it as a possible, but without success. So, this will take some more hours of try and discover, to understand what is wrong in painting textures. Or a trip to bugs tracker of Daz.

1 - Click on the blue point at left, to open the Material tab (if it is not visible).


2 - If your object don't have an material, click on New. I always put a color in textures, to better view.
3 - Choose Texture 512x512 in the Texture drop-down.


4 - You can hide the Material tab.
5 - Click on UV & Paint tab, then select the Paint tool.
6 - In Texture option at the Paint properties, you can select a color (small square at top) or a texture (square at bottom). Use the bottom square. Click on it to bring it to front, then click again to open the Textures menu. Choose one texture.


7 - Then start painting. Paint all the sides of the vase. This is not a fabulous paint tool, like the ones from Photoshop, but can help us to define the points where we want to paint, and wich color and texture. Refine in textures need to be made with better software.


8 - When you save your model, Hexagon will automaticaly save a PNG file for the texture, with the same name of the model file.
9 - Inside the vase paint black or dark grey. Select the top square, then click again to choose a color.
Tip: click on Validate at the properties tab of the Paint tool, to release the object, or you cannot span or rotate the views. This not happens all the time, but I have this problem.
10 - The image below shows the texture. It's not good at this time, but we can ajust it later.


11 - Sometimes wee need the UV mapping for helping at painting. In the most cases, the UV mapping is a good representation of the faces in a 2D plane. With that, we can use a software for editing image to prepare the texture. To get the UV mapping for the vase, right click in name of one the views and chose UV view.


12 - Yes, it's not good, but we cannot change the UV mapping for SL objects, or the sculptie will not work. In the UV view there is a camera icon, this export the uv mapping to an image file.
13 - To get the views again, click on Four views button (bottom of screen), in the UV view, click in the name of view and chose another view.
14 - Want to put more details? Continue painting. With white color, Paint tool with size of 2, 100% of opacity and hardness, I paint a line in the middle of the vase. This is only a mark that I will use later, to put another type of decoration.


15 -On Second Life, upload the texture, edit your object, and in Textures tab, select the new texture for the vase.