Modeling a Law Office
Step 09
Material and Texture
A model created in Blender needs at least one Material and one Texture.
A material defines the optical properties of an object: its color and whether it is
dull or shiny, reflective or transparent. A texture defines the appearance of the
material: whether it is smooth or bumpy or wrinkled. In Blender, textures influence
materials in various ways, including altering their color. So, textures have to be
attached to materials to affect the model’s surface. You cannot apply a texture to
a model that has not first had a material applied to it.
Blender is set up to create an image of your model that will be seen through a
camera with the lighting applied within the Blender program. The process for
viewing the final product is called “rendering”. But we are going to export our
models to Trainz where it will be seen under lighting conditions generated by the
Trainz program. So rendering, cameras, lighting are all superfluous to using Blende
to make Trainz assets. Indeed, you might as well delete the camera and light to
clean up your scene when modeling. That isn’t to say that we are not interested in
how light plays off the surface of our models, only that it is different in Trainz from
than that descripted for images viewed in Blender itself. This also means that
lighting, cameras and rendering described on Blender’s reference material, e.g.,
manuals, tutorials, etc., do not apply to using Blender to make Trainz assets. So,
I’ll discuss material and texture from the Trainz point of view.
Trainz Material Types
Trainz has it’s own 7 Material Types (see website):
• m.notex
• m.onetex
• m.reflect
• m.gloss
• m.tbumptex
• m.tbumpgloss
• m.tbumppenv
It is important that when materials are created in Blender for a Trainz assets that
the name has one of these endings, e.g., name.m.onetex.
Blender’s Texture Types
When you create a texture in Blender, you will see a Popup Menu listing a whole lot
of different types of texture. The Image or Movie texture type is used for making
Trainz assets.
For the Law Office, I am going to keep things simple. We are going to apply one
material to give the model a flat (diffuse) appearance (i.e., no shine, reflection or
transparency) and one texture, an Image or Movie texture, so that we can import
the lawofficetexture.tga file we created.
Material
• Open Blender, if it is not already open, switch to Object Mode and select
(A-KEY) the model.
• In the Properties Editor Header, LMB click on the Materials Icon
(a gray sphere).
• In the gray box with the word “Material” in it, change the name to
“Material.m.onetex”.
Note:
A material was present when we opened the Material Pane because
the model was constructed from the Default Cube, which has a
material assigned by default. For
all other Primitives and, indeed
for additionally added cubes, a new material must be generated.
That’s it. We have our material assigned and names.
Texture
• In the Properties Editor Header, LMB click on the Texture Icon
(a checkered square).
Note: You can leave the texture as “Tex” or rename to whatever you like.
• LMB click on the Type and from the Popup Menu select Image or Movie.
• In the Image Pane LMB click on New and select your texture file
(e.g., lawofficetexture.tga) from the folder containing it and your
Blender files.
Time to save your file.
• Press Save as (SHIFT + CMD + S-KEY).
• Press the NUMPAD-PLUS-KEY to increment the file number by 1 to
LawOffice06.blend.
(If you accidentally press the key twice, you can incrementally subtract
from the file number by pressing the NUMPAD-MINUS-KEY.)
• Press (LMB) Save as Blender File.
Now we are ready to UV unwrap (UV map) our model to the texture file.
