I'm attempting to replace my current use of Infraworks with Blender, and I've almost reached the output I want but I'm struggling with what is really the final hurdle.
To keep it simple, I have a large terrain mesh in blender, which I have successfully UV-unwrapped and textured with my image. So in Blender, everything looks great.
The problem starts because I want to export the mesh+image to FBX so I can use it as a reference in various Navisworks scenes. I have actually done this - but there is an issue: because the FBX is one large mesh attached to one large image, Navis destroys the texture quality. I can change settings to make it look much better - but I don't have the power to change every user's settings - so this isn't an option.
I need my FBX export to work in the same way that Infraworks handles it. Infraworks (at export) tiles both the mesh and the image (say into a 10x10 grid). This way, each FBX texture is much smaller, and so Navisworks doesn't feel like it has to destroy the resolution.
I have a script that I found to cut my mesh into grids:
import bpy, bmesh
from bpy import context
from mathutils import Vector
# bounding box helper methods
def bbox(ob):
return (Vector(b) for b in ob.bound_box)
def bbox_center(ob):
return sum(bbox(ob), Vector()) / 8
def bbox_axes(ob):
bb = list(bbox(ob))
return tuple(bb[i] for i in (0, 4, 3, 1))
def slice(bm, start, end, segments):
if segments == 1:
return
def geom(bm):
return bm.verts[:] + bm.edges[:] + bm.faces[:]
planes = [start.lerp(end, f / segments) for f in range(1, segments)]
#p0 = start
plane_no = (end - start).normalized()
while(planes):
p0 = planes.pop(0)
ret = bmesh.ops.bisect_plane(bm,
geom=geom(bm),
plane_co=p0,
plane_no=plane_no)
bmesh.ops.split_edges(bm,
edges=[e for e in ret['geom_cut']
if isinstance(e, bmesh.types.BMEdge)])
bm = bmesh.new()
ob = context.object
me = ob.data
bm.from_mesh(me)
o, x, y, z = bbox_axes(ob)
x_segments = 10
y_segments = 10
z_segments = 1
slice(bm, o, x, x_segments)
slice(bm, o, y, y_segments)
slice(bm, o, z, z_segments)
bm.to_mesh(me)
bpy.ops.object.mode_set(mode='EDIT')
bpy.ops.mesh.separate(type='LOOSE')
bpy.ops.object.mode_set()
This works great. But each mesh part is still UV'd to the larger image. I've played around with pre-tiling my image prior to bringing it into Blender - but manually UV-wrapping 100 meshes with 100 images is going to take too long to make it worthwhile.
I've also looked into baking - which seems like it's way more difficult than it ought to be in base Blender. The issue I have here is that for my bake to work, I have to bake to an image with the same resolution as my original (as far as I understand) - which results in 100 images of large size.
I hope that maybe there is some setting in the Bake which I've not found from my googling - or maybe a slightly different approach that people who use Blender regularly might be able to point me towards. Thanks