Unlinking Data Links - Part Deux

Question Modeling

I’m a little baffled at how Texture Painting one board affects other boards.

I have made the boards separate by applying mirror modifiers and separating the boards through Edit mode.

I have made the single user in Object & Data & Material, so as far as I can tell there should be no Links for the painting to applied to other boards. I checked and any other changes I make don’t affect the other boards, like they normally would for Linked Object, only the Texture Painting keeps a Link between the boards

I’ve tried the Texture Paint Options menu the Occlude and Backface Culling, turning these off/on affect the other side of the board but still affects the other boards the same way.

There is a Link switch in the Materials Tab (Omar pointed out) where you have 2 options to Link, either Object or Data. I didn’t click on either as I want to Unlink and I’m not sure what this Link button does exactly. Does it permanently Link the material to whatever Object or Data it is applied to? How can you tell if the material is Linked? I did a shift L and checked what may be Linked to the board by Material and no other board was displayed as being Linked. So I’m not sure about this Link button in te Materials tab.

So, I’ve tried to run a process of elimination here but there still seems to be a Texture Paint link between the boards that I would like to disable so I can paint each board individually (I need the practice, hehe). I know having the link can be a time saving benefit for future other work but for now I’d like to know how to control the Linking as it’s not making sense unless there are other Links that one has to go deeper into other hierarchies.

IDK, lol, but I’ve gotten stuck with this and maybe will have to start over the painting part and just work with it as it’s working. Haven’t found a workaround yet. I’m sure it’s a simple solution, it usually is but just have to isolate the operation or the method of steps to work it out and I’m missing a piece of the puzzle.

Any help would be appreciated,

Thanks

I just did a Shift L to check the other Links and the 2 Library Links has everything Linked together. Could there be the Link in the Library that keeps the Texture Painting Linked? I don't want to mess with thie Library at this time, I can get into a real mess I would imagine.

  • Martin Bergwerf replied

    Hi Brad brad-nbo ,

    Could it have something to do with your UVs?

    If (some of) your planks' UVs are overlapping in the UV Map, they receive the same paint strokes 'simultaneously'...

    1 love
  • Brad Wheeler(brad-nbo) replied

    Hi Martin,

    Yep, it dawned on me after what you said and I checked and there are UV directly on top of one another, aaahhh. I pulled one off but there are verts connected and pull on each other.

    How do I separate them? Wow, good call! I would never have thought they would be stacked on top of one another.

    Thanks


  • Martin Bergwerf replied

    Can you post a link to your .blend file?

  • Brad Wheeler(brad-nbo) replied

    Hi Martin,

    I believe e I fixed it. Just had to go one at a time and move them out. Eventually the one that was vertex linked came out without problem. I also did a merge by distance which di eliminate quiet a few verts but didn't initially have an effect on the grabby one. But I managed to move the stack out  and rescaled and repacked. A lot smaller than the previous packing, lol. 

    Okay, so that makes sense where identical pieces will be stacked figuring they will have identical materials added so we need to be mindful and separate these UVs. 

    Is there a way or setting to tell it not to stack identical UVs or is that something we do manually? 'Thanks a bunch! I included the new UV packing for reference. I may have similar issues down the road (like the metal rims look like they may be an issue but for what I'm doing, stacking them would be ok) but now know why it's happening. So I didn't need to separate, apply modifiers or unlink anything then?


  • Martin Bergwerf replied

    I think, that if you Unwrap again, after Making Single User here:

    Unlink-problem.png

    You should be fine.

    1 love
  • Brad Wheeler(brad-nbo) replied

    Hi Martin,

    yeah that was done first thing  but it had no effect, I did that before making single user and was thinking isn't that the same thing.

    The texture painting issue looks to be wholly from the stacked UVs. I wonder if I had to do any unlinking, applying modifiers and it would have worked by separating them off the UV stacking? It may be something I'll try to repeat later just to see how things work.

    Thanks again

  • Omar Domenech replied

    If you want to make boards unique in the texture painting phase, you can have a new texture for each two boards. I say two because it looks like you can fit at least two in the UV space. That way you have a lot more texture resolution also. You will have plenty of image files yes, but you're practicing and maybe it'll be worth it.

  • Martin Bergwerf replied

    Oh man, I can't remember how I did this, but this whole scene was made with only 5 wooden planks, that were Linked, (Rotated and Scaled individually) and yet each was hand-painted uniquely:

    https://cgcookie.com/projects/nelson-s-blood

    ...I don't remember having any problems doing that...I'm pretty sure I used only 1 Image Texture for all the planks...I'll do a search of my hard drives and see if I still have the .blend file...