10 March 2003 (Thursday) - Day 17

Time to leave the head alone for a night and get on with texturing the body..

The first thing to do, as usual, is to break the object up into smaller objects; this time 6 areas for the body: The underbelly, forearm, rear leg, tail, Spike and claws.

Before texturing the UV's need laying out and this is a part I skimmed over last time with the head (thanks for the emails)

Texture maps need mapping coordinates, and these can be applied by either UVWmap, or UnwrapUVW modifiers. All 3D programs have the same processes, just named differently.

UVWMap: is the simplest form - it automatically projects the texture onto the object as a plane, sphere, cylinder, box etc.. but this only really gives decent results for primitives. For organic mapping you need to get your hands dirty and edit the maps manually with..

Unwrap UVW: This allows you to edit the UV's individually. To start with, the UV's can be mapped approximately using "flatten mapping". This lays out the polygons in a rough fashion, but needs to be optimised by hand.

 

This part of the process can seem a little tedious to some, but it does have a strangely therapeutic side. Probably just a sign I'm getting old, but it's kinda similar to putting together a jigsaw puzzle (not that I ever found THAT interesting).

The computer can never really intelligently map out UV's (even Right Hemisphere's DeepUV, sorry). So it's a case of locating the stray pieces and fitting them into place. The UV layout can be very confusing to start with, even with your own models. To find stray polys the easiest way by far is just to use "select edges" mode and look for the correlation.

Selecting UV's has the same effect, but is much harder to see.

 

mouse-over: Finding correlated edges

 

Once you've located the correlation between a hole an a missing piece it's just a matter of moving the piece over the hole and moving the relevant UV's. Once they're close enough you can just pop round to each matching pair and "weld" them together.

You can also use target welding for the last part, but I prefer to make sure everything's in place before welding. (there's no time to be saved here really anyway.

Again, it might seem a bit tedious at this point, but believe me it gets much quicker and easier with practice.

 

 

mouse-over: Relocating and welding

 

When you have all the holes filled it's often best just to go round and find the stray noggins around the borders of each shell. Kinda like a jigsaw again; we want the shell borders to be smooth enough to make sense of texturing later.

To separate a piece from one side, just select the adjoining edge and select "break" from the menu. Move the piece and follow the previous steps to weld them in position again.

Finally, make sure all the pieces are contained within 0-1 space (the square with the darker outline). The texture should always fill as much of this 0-1 space as possible. Never mind if the texture isn't actually square; this view doesn't affect distortion, it's just a representation.

 

mouse-over: Losing the Jigsaw effect

 

The real reward to all this is when it comes to generating texture maps. If all has gone well it's simply a matter of selecting "render to texture" and outputting lighting maps for use as reference. Suddenly the wireframe messes you've been working with make sense and it's fun again to paint the colour and bump maps.

An example here is the claw map: I used render to texture with 3 lights -all pastel shaded just so I could tell which direction polys are pointing.

At the end of the day, these images are used as a background layer in photoshop; they're only really useful as reference layers and will be deleted later, but they do make life a helluva lot easier while texturing.

 

 

To anyone that knows all the above already- sorry. (I did promise to answer questions along the way. )

 

 

 

Naked women and stuff next. Oh and beer ... lots of beer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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