Hi
one thing I have always struggled to understand in any version of iClone is the diffuse UV settings ie tile and offset. In particular tile.
The iClone manual doesn't do a very good job of explaining the functions and I can't find any decent tutorial videos in regards to it.

What I am trying to right now is to add an image or even a video to a car rear vision mirror.
No problems adding the image or video to the prop surface, however I have no idea what I am doing with the tile settings to get the diffuse to appear properly. At the moment it's just streaked lines. When I change the tile settings, the image does change, but I can't tell if it's making it worse or better. I just don't understand what the 'U' and 'V' are supposed to represent. So I've just been randomly sticking different numbers in trying  to find a combination that displays the image properly. But I've spent over an hour on it and no closer.

Is it just a matter of trial & error ? Or is there some sort of method behind it ? At this rate I'll never get the combination right.
If someone understands the process, I would be much appreciative if you could explain it to me

thankyou!
Darren

*edit
been doing a bit more experimenting
I have loaded the video onto a plane and then attached the plane to the prop/mirror.
Seem to be able to effectively scale the video to fit using tile now.
Maybe loading the video to the diffuse channel of the prop isn't such a good idea ?

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The UV mapping for an item  defines how the Diffuse and other maps are spread out over the surface of this item. For a plane this UV mapping is fairly straightforward, but with more complicated objects not so much. There is an option on the Material panel to load the UV map in your editor so that you can see what it looks like. If a prop has multiple surfaces that share a map, it would not be straightforward to have a video on one of the surfaces.

So I usually do what you have done and use a separate plane of the same size of the object I want the video displayed on. It makes things much simpler. You can use an Opacity map to mask out parts in case the object is not a square.

To answer your question about the texture coordinates, let us assume that you have plane with a texture, such that the image completely fills the plane's surface.

U and V are the horizontal (U) and vertical (V) parameters of the mapping.

One pair determines the offset, this allows you to shift the mapping up or down or left and right. The result will be that the image moves accordingly over the plane. Since it is an exact fit, it will rap around and you will see a seam, unless it is is a so-called seamless texture.

The second pair determines the tiling. If the U and V values are both 1, the complete image will only be shown once. For values > 1 the image will be repeated. This is a way to create tiled surfaces for example.

I have simplified this, but I hope it will help your understanding.

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Darren,

Animagic gave a good high-level overview.

One thing about "Offset" that might not be obvious at first, but it always "wraps," even on a plane.  So as you offset it to the right, the image that scrolls off the right edge of the image will start to appear on the left side.

Here is a related post with a couple pictures, which might help a little bit too.  It is brief, but illustrated a non-Plane situation.
https://forum.reallusion.com/FindPost392126.aspx

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iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
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I forgot about my post here until I came across a similar problem last night when trying to apply a texture to a box. Couldn't stop the texture wrapping around the entire box distorting the texture. Couldn't get it even close using UV tiling. Had to attach separate surfaces to the sides of the box and apply the texture directly to each surface instead. Thinking it might be more practical creating an object something like this in Sketchup first, applying the texture and then exporting to iClone

Thanks guys for your very helpful replies.
Hope you have great new year !

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I've never really understood the texturing system in Iclone and no, there isn't much in the way of tutorials and that's probably because the majority of people don't understand it either.
I spent hours originally trying to find how to apply a texture to an individual face, but it just doesn't appear to be an option and yet, it's possible because I've imported models from 3dwarehouse in that state.
Let say I'm creating a door that'll will be opened in a shoot, the wall is brickwork but I want the inner door frame to be wood, the only way I can do that is by creating extra shapes-brushes and resizing them into the doorway....why can't I just apply an individual texture to the face of that brush like I could 20 years ago when I was making maps for computer games.

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liebe Grüße vidi

meet us here

Thanks for your reply. It didn't help at first but, now I'm starting to understand a little. After creating a box in Iclone(from 3d Blocks in props) and then sending the UV map to Photoshop, I see 6 faces made up of a total of 12 polygons.
After filling an individual color into each face and then saving it as PNG and dropping as a diffuse texture onto the box, I now have a box with 6 individually colored faces :)
It's not great but, it's a start.