Mirroring elements (Giants Editor to Blender and back)

[cedricthecat]

I'm working on personalising mod for my own use (Volvo F16), and noticed that the vehicle was missing a decal on the front right "wing" between the grille and door. I thought I'd accidentally deleted it but when I looked in the original files, it was missing there too.

My plan to create this was to export the existing decal (which also include the full stripe atop the grille) chop it to size in blender, mirror it, re-import it, and finally associate the graphics with it.

However... (there's always however!). When I re-import it, it looks fine, the mirroring has worked but in the attributes pane, under "scale", the XYZ elements are all showing -1. If I change these to 1, then the element flips back to it's original non-mirrored state! There's also no way to make the scale -1 again.

I'm guessing I'm doing something wrong, and would appreciate if someone could tell me what!

[Tiredasagiraffe]

It sounds like you haven't applied the rotations after mirroring the object in Blender.

Select your object> Ctrl A> Apply Rotation and Scale

And then re-export. Hopefully that should fix it

[cedricthecat]

Thank you - that did it!

I've only been using Blender for a few days, so very much on the steep part of my learning curve!

[cedricthecat]

Frustratingly, but predictably, I'm not quite there yet!

Managed to get the decal to wrap around in the correct direct, but when I apply the Albedo map, Gloss map and Normal map, it applies to the wrong face of the item, which means it effectively vanishes when viewed on the vehicle... I'm sure there's a way round this, but not found it yet

[Tiredasagiraffe]

It's possible that mirroring of the object has flipped the direction of the normals (the plane on which your texture is displayed) in Blender.

To check this select the object in edit mode and activate Face orientation – Drop down menu in top right with two interlocking circles.
If the face of your object are red the normals are facing the wrong direction, they should be blue.

To fix go to Mesh> Normals> Flip or Recalculate Outside.

[cedricthecat]

^^ Wow! Thanks for that - I'd have never, ever been able to work that out!

I had a few goes getting it right (and losing then re-finding the menu options as I moved from Object Mode to Edit Mode and back) but eventually it has worked.

TBH, the element is only a really tiny detail BUT it was driving me nuts and I'm sure that with the new knowledge that you have given me, I'll find a future use for this