Dividing a Mesh for Texturing

Folks -

I’m looking for the general approach for how to take a mesh, and selectively apply material properties. The specifics right now is that I have a bottle modelled that I want to both apply a material (say a diffuse color node) and apply a texture map of a label. I’m good with alpha masking the label, but don’t know the best way to separate out the portion of the mesh to only apply the UV mapped texture to.

Currently, I have selected that part of the mesh and have <P> Separate Selection. Seems too brute force…

I’d appreciate any guidance.

Dave

im actually doing something simular for a project that im working on now: http://gyazo.com/2f289d43ef4c40c27f4014760ead3bd4

what i did was just open photoshop, type inn “something must spoon”, use a transparent background, and save it as a PNG.
make sure that the textures have the same size if you want to use this metod.


the upper texture is the text, while the lower one is the cardboard texture.

Select faces you think your label will fit on, Menu - Select - Select Boundary Loop and W - Mark Seam. Unwrap selected faces and arrange on your label texture.
Sometimes you would need additional edge loops to hold Subsurf from stretching texture.
In general - you need UV maps to place textures; no need to tear apart meshes if these are not separate parts.


Aww… Too late to the game - as always.
Anyway, if you additionally want the label to appear white on the backside (instead of seeing an inverted version of the frontside), you can add another mix shader driven by the Geometry > Backfacing property:


Or mix the white of the back with the label color to create a subtle “shine through” effect…

Got it. I experimented with a cube. Thanks to all for the replies.

Ripping apart the meshes to accomplish this was leaving a visible seam in the render that I couldn’t live with…

IkariShinji - The approach to eliminating label “bleed-through” is excellent. I will use it when necessary and appropriate.

So, for the portion of the mesh which I didn’t mark and UV unwrap, can I apply a different material?

Behind the scenes whole mesh gets unwrapped. If you look carefully it’s hidden in one dot bottom left in UV space. You could apply different materials to other faces, no restrictions for that. Another UV unwrap by adding new UV coordinate set and different such label is possible too.

All set. Thanks.