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Participating Frequently
October 30, 2017
Answered

OBJ won't allow artwork

  • October 30, 2017
  • 3 replies
  • 1117 views

Good afternoon awesome adobe creatives and other amazing fellow creatives! I work for a cup manufacturer company and when I expressed how awesome it would be for Dimensions would be for us, my management decided to put me in charge of figuring out all the ins and outs of the program for us to created accurate renderings of all our lines of cups. We do in mold labeling which allows photo quality images to be placed on cups and this program will help greatly when we are trying to capture new clients.

I had our engineering department send me a 3D file over but they didn't know what a OBJ file was and said they can't export directly from their own software but they did supply me a STL file that I was then able to open in PS and export as a OBJ file. This allowed me to view our cup in Adobe DN. BUT, I am unable to add decals to the object. I can add materials but not art. I saw on a previous question that there were something about UVs that are needed in order to place decals onto the object. How do we go about adding UVs to OBJ files or is that something that needed to be done on our STL files first before converting?

Thank you again for everyone's help.

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer JeanetteMathews

UVs are basically a coordinate system that translates the 3D model into a flat 2D layout so that a flat image can be placed onto it.  It's how 3D models know which part of the image goes where on the model.  Most applications have some way of creating basic UVs, but it takes a bit of work to get the best UVs possible.  The quality of your UVs directly relates to how the images look (is there stretching and distortion, are there seams in the model, etc.).

At this time Adobe doesn't have any UVing capabilities in our tools, but we are looking at adding some auto-UVs and some manual-UV control to Dimension in a future release.  I don't have a timeline on that right now, so in the mean time you would need to set this up in a more advanced 3D software (Maya, 3ds Max, etc.) . Every software is different, so personally I'd recommend looking up a tutorial based on what software you have access to.

Blender is a nice free option if you don't have a package already.

3 replies

Participating Frequently
November 2, 2017

Is this why I get the "Something went wrong during graphic placement. The decal will be removed." window when I try to place a graphic to my imported 3D obj model?

davids92517695
Participant
November 2, 2017

correct. I just got it to work on a custom item but I had to expand the UV mesh using blender. once I did that, everything is golden and glorious

Participant
February 5, 2018

Hi, would you mind explaining how you went about expanding the UV mesh in Blender?

Thank you

JeanetteMathews
Adobe Employee
JeanetteMathewsCorrect answer
Adobe Employee
October 30, 2017

UVs are basically a coordinate system that translates the 3D model into a flat 2D layout so that a flat image can be placed onto it.  It's how 3D models know which part of the image goes where on the model.  Most applications have some way of creating basic UVs, but it takes a bit of work to get the best UVs possible.  The quality of your UVs directly relates to how the images look (is there stretching and distortion, are there seams in the model, etc.).

At this time Adobe doesn't have any UVing capabilities in our tools, but we are looking at adding some auto-UVs and some manual-UV control to Dimension in a future release.  I don't have a timeline on that right now, so in the mean time you would need to set this up in a more advanced 3D software (Maya, 3ds Max, etc.) . Every software is different, so personally I'd recommend looking up a tutorial based on what software you have access to.

Blender is a nice free option if you don't have a package already.

Participating Frequently
October 30, 2017

Ah!! well that makes since. I saw UV generator on PS but it didn't seem to do anything. I'll see if my engineers know anything about that and maybe they can add it onto my existing files they gave me. Thank you for the help

Participant
October 30, 2017

Do you have a copy of Maya? If so, I can explain to you how to quickly UV your mesh!