Adding your Dieline to 3D Blender Model | ME_3D_005

In this tutorial, we'll take a look at the process followed in Blender 2.79 to import your dieline / template and to assign that image to a "material" which will be used on your 3D model.

The end result will be areas of the dieline image being used to apply a texture to the 3D model.

Please note: This is not designed as a Blender tutorial so will not go through all of the Blender commands and requirements. We will be sticking strictly to the process required for your eventual MegaEdit 3D model.

1. We begin in Blender

We will start within Blender, where we already have our 3D model open

2. Navigate to the UV/Image Editor section

In this section we will upload our dieline or template image.

3. Click the Image menu and Open Image

4. Select your required image

5. The image will now be imported

This will form the basis of our texturing on the 3D model. Our aim in later steps will be to place sections of the 3D models mesh onto this image, in order to replicate the image onto the 3D model itself.

6. Next we will define a material, click the Materials tab and then add a new material

This will instantly assign the new material to our 3D model and you should see it change colour slightly.

7. Next, navigate to the Node Editor

We will use the Node Editor to assign our dieline image as the colour of the newly created material

8. Switch the render mode to Cycles Render

This will give us access to the option we need in the next step

9. Back on the Node Editor screen, navigate to Image Texture and add it to our nodes

10. Click and drag to connect the Colour node of the "Image Texture" to the other available Colour node.

11. Assign your newly uploaded dieline or template image to the Image Texture

12. You will likely now see your dieline or template image being used on the 3D model

This is not a given at this stage, later steps may need to be followed to see this.

What is happening here is that the mesh of the 3D model is being split into separate sections or "islands" and is being placed onto your 2D dieline image.

Next, we will see how to view this.

You will likely now see your dieline or template image being used on the 3D model

13. Navigate back to the UV/Image Editor section

14. Select the 3D viewer and press the Tab key to switch to Edit mode

This will display the 3D model's mesh.

15. You will now also see how this mesh has been distributed onto your 2D dieline image

16. If you cannot see the 2D image being transposed onto the 3D model mesh, then you may not yet have a UV Mapping

Click on the 3D viewer window and hit "U" on your keyboard. This will bring up the UV Mapping menu.

This provides multiple options as to how the mesh is split and placed onto the 2D image. For this example, click Smart UV Project.

If you cannot see the 2D image being transposed onto the 3D model mesh, then you may not yet have a UV Mapping

17. Click here

18. If prompted, you can edit some of these settings to control the initial layout of the UV mapping (So how the mesh is split and placed onto your 2D dieline)

If prompted, you can edit some of these settings to control the initial layout of the UV mapping (So how the mesh is split and placed onto your 2D dieline)

Well done!

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