OBJ won't allow artwork

[davids6913317]

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.

[Winddogg]

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

[JeanetteMathews · Accepted solution]

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.

[davids6913317]

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

[robotico]

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]

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

[Camomilla]

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

Thank you

[Ussnorway]

a model that starts life as an old school STL file will tend to be out of bounds when made into a wavefront | Obj file... fixing that in Blender or Photoshop is sometimes just a matter minutes or all day, it just depends on the model and we would need a copy to test before you get an honest answer

[JeanetteMathews]

Possibly! That error is caused by a few things under the hood we're working on improving.  It could be a UV issue, it could be an issue with the actual geometry like overlapping faces.  Some techno stuff but we're working on improving that.