Hi Tom, I'm glad that was on target on didn't create more confusion ;-). I was a bit nervous without visuals to help illustrate my written description. 1) That is a very good question and a frustrating problem when you run in to it. The issue comes from how the geometries are created, their UV mapping, and the texture map's proportions. Looking at my samples above, I see there's distortion. For this case using the New Mesh From Grayscale> Cylinder command, you can do a couple things: • The quickest would be to use the 3D object scale and modify the Z value to control the distortion. Since you're hiding the bulk of the cylinder mesh, and using a right rectangular cylinder scaling the Z value works well to make the mesh and UV mapping square. • You can also open the texture maps and transform scale them to correct for the non-square mesh. This involves at least 2 maps (Diffuse & Opacity) so It's not quite as clean, and it's a bit more iterative since you need to toggle between docss to see the changes. • You can also experiment with changing the image size of the texture maps, so when they map to the cylinder mesh the resulting display is not distorted. • The command to generate the cylinder uses the color values in the starting flat file to define the radii, and this also affects the slope of the resulting polygons. For 8bit RGB documents, using White (255, 255, 255) results in mesh triangles with a slope of ~.5 (27º), mid Gray (128, 128, 128) results in mesh triangles with a slope of ~ 1.2 (51º). To get a slope ~1, use lighter mid Gray (153, 153, 153). Note that results are different with 16bit/32bit RGB documents; the higher range of color in 16bit/32bit can be used for finer resolution in the mesh and isn't normalized for mesh generation across the bit modes. • Lastly, once you've created or found a cylinder model that works, delete the content on the Diffuse and Opacity maps and then export it to the collada format. Now you can open that model as a starting point, without having to build it each time. I have a sample rgb 8bit cylinder model you can look at, but the forums has disallowed attachments. You can grab it from https://acrobat.com/#d=1lo*hYQGTj3nzaE1O-6hFA but it might go dead at some point in the future. 2) Yes, the UV controls aren't really what you want to use for modifying the artwork to fit on the cylinder. What you want to do is go to the diffuse map and modify there. Keep the image size the same, and scale or move the layer artwork so that it lands on the cylinder where you want. The UV controls are better used on tiling texture maps. regards, steve tomaugerdotcom wrote: Right on Steve, that's exactly what I was looking for. If you could just answer two more questions I think I'll be well on my way! 1) when I've tried this technique in the past, the artwork has been scaled / stretched or otherwise distorted disproportionally as it wraps around the cylinder. What steps do you need to take to ensure that the artwork not only maps on, but scales appropriately. 2) Further to that, assuming you can get the proportions right, what do you need to do to change the scale / position of the "label" on the cylinder? The u/v controls are a little kludgy - I was hoping for a drag and drop texture repositioning tool of some sort. Also, when I reduce the scale of something (by increasing the uv scale values, the texture then tiles repeatedly, and I couldn't seem to find any options to turn repetitions off. So what would the process be if you had, say, a really large vector art file for the label and needed to scale it down so it only occupies a portion of the cylinder surface? Again, thanks for the detailed walk-through! Tom
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