[Tut] Simple XSI Texturing Tutorial

[RepComm]

Hey guys, I plan on re-writting this and adding a video soon, for now, the spoiler images are down from me trying to organize my google site and youtube. Sorry about that..

Hey there, texturing/'uv mapping' a 3d model can be a tedious task when beginning 3d artwork.
Helpful Wiki topic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UV_mapping
Don't expect to do this one time and be a master, just practice and don't be afraid to experiment.
----
Assuming you already:
-Have XSI7.5 (it's free) installed properly
-Knowing a bit geometry will help you.

[spoiler=Click this if you have no experience what so ever]
Terms:
Triangle : A model whose parts are made up of 3 points, 3 lines, and one face.
Quad/Quadrangle : A model whose parts are made up of 4 points, 4 lines, and one face.
- The angles of a quadrangle must be collinear, or else it's just two triangles.
Model : A group of triangles and/or quads, a model can have it's own material and a few other properties like animation and weights.
--
XYZ is 3d position (Y being up and down, x being forward and backward, and z being left and right).
UV is a 2d position (U being Vertical, and V being horizontal).

A UV map is a map of the entire model or part projected over an image, and when done correctly, wraps the image onto the 3d model, giving it a texture. Moving a UV triangle over the image will make the image move over the 3d model's triangle that it represents.

This allows for images on the 3d model exactly how the modeller wishes them to be.
[/spoiler]
---- Creating Some Geometry to play with!
Create a "Cube" model;
[spoiler=Create A Cube][/spoiler]
---- Apply a texture projection to the cube
Now hit 8 on your keyboard (8 = Scene Explorer, you will use this a lot)
You will see "cube" with a geometry icon next to it;
[spoiler=Scene Explorer][/spoiler]
Make sure that is selected, and go under Model - > Property - > Texture_Projection and hit Unique UVs (polymsh)

---- Scarey UV Editor
You have now just created a UV projection based on the 3d model (or selection of faces).
So open up the "UV Editor" (hot key is Alt + 7). You can now see 6 faces/quads individually placed on this weird color texture. This is where you will spend all your time when texturing, so click buttons and find out what they do! Yes, it looks scarey, but it's actually really easy once you do it a few times.

To move points and faces around, select them with your mouse and hold down V to translate them.
Here's a useful topic explaining some UV Editor tools
That's all great RC, but I don't want my model to be all weird colored like this.. How do I change this horrid image out?
---- Messing about with Materials and applying Textures to them
Go ahead and kill that UV editor window, and open up the Material Manager (hot key Ctrl + 7).
Ooh, scarey bunch of buttons again.. That's fine, we only need a few of 'em.

Click on Create - > Phong, you've just created an "Phong" material type, I don't know much about it, but I do know it works great for every model format I've ever used. This material is called "Phong_Preset," You may wish to rename this to something more relevant, lets rename it "cube_texture" for now (right click - rename).

Now double click the Material, and a popup appears, I call this popup the material editor. So go under "Diffuse" bounding box in the Material Editor, and click the little plugin icon on the same line is "Color" under Enable Diffuse option (which should always be check marked btw). [spoiler][/spoiler]Select "image" in the menu list that appears, now under image bounding box, click New - > New From File. [spoiler][/spoiler]

A file browser has appeared, it's usually set to the XSI directory somewhere, just browse to my pictures or something where you have an image you can use for this example (doesn't really matter what image format for now, but once you start working with SWBF models, you can only use *.PIC or *.TGA formats). You can kill that window.

You have created a material, named it, and applied some image texture to it. Great, now you need to drag that material onto the model (either drag it onto the "cube" geometry in the Explorer, or onto the model in the 3d world). I will make a video on multi-textures per model later.
---- Final junk
Great, you're model is UV mapped, and has a texture applied to it. You should see that texture appear on the model if you did this stuff right.

When you start modelling and UV mapping (moving points in 3d world, as well as moving around the texture on UV Editor), XSI will save your progress so you can CTRL Z (undo changes), but this can slow down XSI and make it lag. If you are sure you don't need to undo something, you can "FREEZE" it in the Explorer.

[spoiler][/spoiler]
You always want to freeze/save your progress after doing a large task, or finishing a model (you can do this to animating, modelling, UV editing, and transforming).
[spoiler=Exporting to MSH battlefront model file]
At this point, you can export your model, so create a Primitive Null Model - > Primitive - > Null, open up the Explorer ( 8 on keyboard ), rename it to "DummyRoot" or "root" and drag "cube" under it. Now click on ZETools (in the main menu area next to file), and click the Export button, make sure your Null is selected, browse to where you want to save the file at (same directory as your texture), and hit Export button[/spoiler]

[spoiler=Notes on texture files]Only acceptable formats are TGA (no RLE compression), and PIC.
Only acceptable texture dimensions are sqaured numbers such as 256, 512, 1024 etc
When you resize a texture to fit these dimensions, it doesn't screw up the projection, and the model will look the same as it did before, so don't worry about resizing stuff if need be, just do it.[/spoiler]

I hope this was a helpful tutorial, I may make changes to it when I can find something simpler to say, or remove irrelevant information.