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Trackdancer — PMD Tutorial - making 4 way UV slider
Published: 2014-06-24 00:48:09 +0000 UTC; Views: 6276; Favourites: 126; Downloads: 71
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Description
Another posting in my series that uncovers some of the previously hidden features of the PMD Editor ver 0.1.3.9 now that I managed to get a hold of the English language version of that software. This is a fun one though and other than the quirks noted is really easy to use.Related content
Comments: 36
About the mess PMD (and PMX as I'm using PMX Editor) Editor does with the original UV Mapping. The trouble here seems to be that PMD/PMX Editor completely changes the UV coordinates positions instead of just resizing them and moving them up-left to the starting quarter. I cannot figure why this does happen, as PMD/PMX Editor can manage only 4x and 16x table, so all what it should do would be
1) to resize the UV mapping by a ratio of 0.5 (4x morphed texture) or 0.25 (16x morphed texture)
2) move the whole resized UV mapping on the top-left corner, still by -0.5 or -0.75 (1 - 0.25) ratio (PMDE/PMXE already uses relative ratios to "move" the UV mapping while using the sliders so no need of absolute position calcs)
What PMDE/PMXE does, instead, is to completely change/mess the UV mapping, other tahn resizing and moving it on the top-left corner.
If the selected material is something simple like a square/rectangle, it's pretty handy to correct the UV mapping directly using the UV Plugin, but if the morphs affect complex materials needing a very precise UV mapping (lips, in my case) correcting the UV mapping using the UV Plugin can be very very hard, imprecise and annoying.
A fix I've used is this:
1) Save your model with no UV sliders (just for safety)
2) Make your 4x or 16x texture including all the images to be changed when using the UV sliders (note: PMXE also makes PNG images, not only BMPs)
3) Create the UV morph sliders as explained here. You'll find all the new UV morphs in the sliders/expressions list
4) You'll see the fu**ing mess done by PMD/PMX editor on the standard UV mapping....
5) Select from the list ONLY the new created UV sliders, right click and EXPORT THE UV SLIDERS AS A .CSV file
6) Just trash the bugged model (i.e. the model with the bugged UV mapping)
7) Open the original saved model without UV morphs and apply the new complete texture (4x or 16x) to the wanted material
8) Don't panic when you see a mess on the material to be affected by the UV sliders, it's normal as it has still the old UV mapping. Save a new copy of the model.
9) Open Blender and use the Blender mmd tools plugin to import the new copied model
10) Select the model, go to edit mode, select the whole needed material and open a side window in UV Editor mode
11) You'll see the old UV mapping scheme. Select all the vertices in the UV Editor.
12) Press "S" to resize and type 0.5 (in case of 4x) or 0.25 (16x UV sliders) and confirm pressing Enter. You'll see the UV mapping correctly resized.
13) Move the whole UV scheme to the top-left and try to be as more precise as possible to fit the starting texture you want as a default.
14) Once done, export it as a new model and close Blender
15) Open the just exported model in PMX Editor. You'll see the correct mapping on the wanted material, but now you have to recreate the UV sliders
16) Open the Expression/Morphs tab, right click in the sliders list and select IMPORT FROM CSV (select the CSV file where you first saved the morphs)
17) DONE! Your previously created UV morphs are now reloaded on the model
18) Save
Note: for some reason (vasilnatalie maybe has an explanation for this?) the Blender mmd tools plugin refuses to import models having the "all in one" UV slider (yellow type in PMX editor) so if you need to import a model containing this kind of sliders you'd better export them, before, delete them before loading the model in Blender, and re-importing them after you have exported the model from Blender.
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By "all in one" do you mean a Flip morph?
I've had trouble using these not just in Blender, but even in MMD-- it's been a long time, because I never ever use them, but I think they just straight up crashed MMD.
But that doesn't matter, because you can use a group-type morph for the exact same thing. Just use group morphs instead.
Note that there are some other options for the UV morph generator that comes with PMXE, including some that affect how it remaps the affected material. You might want to play with it some. I wouldn't say it mangles your UV mapping, but there are certainly times when you'd rather have more control over how your UV morphs work than it provides, and there's nothing wrong with the manual editing you're describing for that.
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Yes, those. Actually I don't use them too, I'm ok using the other ones, eventually grouped, yes. But if they worked I can imagine only a situation where they could be really useful, that is when you have seamless multicolored textures and you use the flip slider to simulate a gradual change
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You can use a group morph to do that too. (Actually, you can do it without a group morph, just with naked UV morphs. You're not stuck with single axis changes, or even with uniform changes. MMDTools has some good new UV morph tools that ought to make it so you can do much more interesting things with them-- but I haven't had the interest to figure it out.)
A good thing to try out is to create a subtexture and a UV morph that affects addUV. Your subtexture can graduate hue across one axis and saturation across the other. (Possibly, saturation 1->0->1 for tiling purposes.) Default addUV can all be located at a single point. Then you can create a kind of seamless material morph to recolor smoothly. Unfortunately, at the expense of sphere mapping. Value, you can handle just fine with a material morph, and it will stack just fine with a subtex multiply.
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Yes I'm figuring out how to
But thinking to people who doesn't like to mess with calcs and numbers, it was (in theory) a good tool
About the subtextures I'm still confused about them and how they can be used. Did you write any article about it?
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Yup: learnmmd.com/http:/learnmmd.co…
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I have a trouble with this... Like you said UV morph can ruin mapping geometry, that happened to my model. I wanted to make sliders to change shirt texture. After checking UV plugin it look like whole material was just flatted instead of carefully mapped, so it all looks crappy. Is any way to fix that instead of remapping texture from beggining?
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If you can make the altered texture look good without a UV morph, with just a texture swap, you can make it look good with a UV morph. If you can't, then it's not going to look any better in a UV morph. All a four-way is really doing is a texture swap.
If you decide it needs remapping, it might be easier for you to do a decal (with a UV morph, if that's what you want) than to do the entire shirt. When you do a decal, usually you just have to map a single flat-ish surface, so you can get away with a projection-from-view mapping, which you can do right in PMXE. Use transparency in your texture and disable shadowing from the decal in its material settings. For its mesh, just duplicate whatever part of the shirt you need.
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Thanks for reply. Well, it's not just about decals. Sometimes I need to create a full pattern on material, that's why I wanted to have texture slider, but I think it would be easier if I just would duplicate material and play with transparency. More to do but I think it would be easier.
Thanks again
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Yeah, you can essentially do the same thing with material morphs, swapping in various meshes with different textures. Don't even really end up wasting any performance, perfectly transparent materials don't even get sent to the GPU anyways IIRC.
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This system is intended for swapping out simply mapped texture maps. Something like a shirt maybe too much for the program to accommodate.
There may be another approach to what you want to be doing. If anyone knows how to do this, it is this guy: vasilnatalie . Check out his DA gallery or his articles on LearnMMD.com.
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Very useful, thanks. I've used this tutorial to delete the replicated irises parts, previously having all their own textures (I managed the iris change using several show/hide sliders based on transparency settings).
This way I made one texture for all, and now I can apply up to 16 different iris change sliders
Just pay attention when you're not applying this metod to a single, stand alone part. Pay attention if you try to apply this method on specular/mirrored parts having their own UV mapping. Even when the UV mapping seems to be the same for both the parts, it's often just two separate UV mapping overlayed to use the same texture: In my case, I had two irises, with their UV mappingg overlayed in order to use the same image on both irises, so when I've activated the UV morph create tool I expected that PMX Editor had preserved the overlayed setting, just scaling it to match the iris in the left-upper corner of my new textures table; instead PMX Editor has made a new UV projection, splitting the left and right irises on two separate UV maps, completely messing the alignment with the single iris. Nothing of terrific, I've quickly corrected the issue editing the UV mapping in Blender (using MMD Tools plugin), but it could be hard to correct this issue using the PMXE's UV plugin only, expecially for users who are not familiar with UV maps editing.
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Thanks for the comments and your support for the contents in this gallery. Much appreciated.
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THANNKK YOU!
what does the Join box do tho?? im using PMX Editor..so...
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Join Box? No idea, just mess with it and try to figure it out. That's what I usually do. Randomly mashing buttons to see what they break.. hehe
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On learn mmd.com it say you can edit a UV facial manually, but I can't get it to work. learnmmd.com/http:/learnmmd.co… Pretty much after I adjust the texture to be perfect and try to save it, pmx editor says there is no change.....and it doesn't save. Do you have any ideas?
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Ask the folks on Learnmmd.com about issues related to their tutorials, thanks.
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okay............ But the way their tutorial was written was rather poor...... I doubt that they'll be able to explain it in a way that makes sense. But you never know I guess?
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I noticed you use sketchup. I don't have sketchup and instead I model using blender. I also make my 4x4 textures on Photoshop.
I followed your steps and imported the model into PMXeditor, how come when I go to 'UV expression create' -> 'UV Morph create', I don't have the options "Recycle", "Radiation" and "Information" like you do?
Here is a screenshot of my workstation
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You won't see those graphics unless you use the same texture file that I used to illustrate the tutorial.
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Hi, thanks for the excellent tutorial!
Question:
In a .pmx model, there are 5 possible types of UV morphs: UVmorph, UVmorph1, UVmorph2, UVmorph3, UVmorph4. Does anyone know what these types of UVmorph are?
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UVmorph refers to mapping morphs which in general have been implemented.
The other variants do not seem to have coding implemented for them to happen for the moment.
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A pmx model can have more than 1 UV map. Maybe the additional UV morph types are for additional UV maps of that model(?). I found this information about additional UV maps:
"Oh well, almost nobody uses additional UVs anyway. (It only has 3 uses: sub-texture, per-vertex coloring, and effect support. Currently supported effects include Autoluminous and model disintegration effect) Anyways, this value should be between 0 to 4."
(source: permayuyuko.deviantart.com/jou… )
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I understand the concept - just that there doesn't seem to be the coding in MMD at the moment to support the function. It would be just awesome to be able to swap out entire maps just by using a slider.
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Thanks for replying. Maybe a UV1(or 2 or 3 or 4) morph, for example, is just a way of identifying the UV1(or 2 or 3 or 4) UV map as the targeted UV map to be morphed. (Not that one UV map would be swapped for another by a slider.)
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Hmmm, you might have a point there. Wonder how it can be implemented though. Gonna have to look into it.
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Their uses seem to be very limited, but still, there are probably people wasting time, or curious about, what the other types of UV morphs are. So it would still be good to have that cleared up for people.
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Oh my gerd I love you. Be my PMD waifu? This explains so well why the UV maps of some modelers are so freakin accurate.
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Accurate mapping can be a real pain. Used to have to do it a lot for simulation models so I got the hang of it.
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I'm so confused. I thought the PMD editor couldn't work with PMX files or sliders. I thought we had to use that accursed PMX editor (accursed cuz its in Japanese). What did I miss?
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There is an English version of PMX Editor. Its right here -> ibozo.deviantart.com/art/PMDEd…
Sorry for intruding. ^^
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I've seen it before but my antivirus program says it's a virus and deletes it immediately.
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Oh really? My antivirus program doesn't.
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Yeah. I have Avast.
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Me too. That's weird.
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I've always used and only use the PMD Editor so can't really comment on the PMX Editor.
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