Texture Tool and Texture Mapping

[Spooks]

Hello, I want to discuss DR's texture tool and the way Radiant handles texture mapping in this topic. The texture tool is a window (Ctrl+Alt+T) where you can fine tune how a given texture gets mapped on a brush's face.

 

I have noticed that, oftentimes when selecting multiple sides of a brush, the unwrapped UV islands are placed way too far from each other. Not something you'd care about during regular mapping, but I think this is a problem in theory, which can become a problem in practice when exporting models from DR. This is actually my impetus for starting this thread, as I imported a DR model in Blender only to find its UV map being all over the place.

 

 

Here is an example of what I consider problematic. You can see that the face I've selected, behind the Surface Inspector, is already in the negative quadrant of the UV coord grid. Yet the surface inspector shows both horiz. and vert. shift to be at 0. Moreover, if I start changing those values with the arrow keys, the shifts will go up to 255 and then wrap back to zero, while the UV map will continue to scroll through the UV grid infinitely, instead of looping back to where it was.

 

Couple this with the arcane way in which the Paste Shader commands work, and you have situations where two brush faces might look aligned in 3D but have their UV maps be thousands of units apart in 2D.

 

Is there an explanation for why this works the way it does? Any way to make it better? Obviously, I'm not asking for DR to magically clamp all UV maps to the 0-1 UV space or unwrap brushes' sides like a modelling app would. It does, however, seem weird why there'd no apparent anchor for mapping faces to the UV space and they keep straying from the origin constantly.

[peter_spy]

I tried importing several models into max (doors, AI, loot etc.), all their UVs are within 0-1 space or slightly bigger. Don't know Blender controls, but you should be able to select faces on the mesh and jump to them in the UV editor (zoom to selected, zoom to extents, something like that). Btw. I think that's more up to modeler how to place these, and DR is not to blame here. Nor it should be demanded to be a unwrapping tool. If you're proficient with your modeling app, it's fast and easy to use something like UVW Map modifier for tiling textures. This one uses simple box, cylinder, or sphere projections, without the UV editor. You don't have to use Unwrap UVW and UV editor all the time (again, I'm using max terminology, option names for Blender can be different).