Unwrapping advice

samnwck

So I was just curious on the best way to unwrap this rock asset that I'll be using to make a cliff faces out of. Now I know usually when you have stuff ending in hard edges you generally want those to broken up onto different UV islands, however for something like this there is so many hard edges I feel like that would leave seams everywhere. So could anyone shed some light on what would be the best way to do this? I feel 2 UV islands is the way I would like to go, maybe three, I'm trying to avoid a shitstorm of seams. Would my bakes still turn out fine if I did that?

Eric Chadwick

This is the highpoly sculpt right? When you make the lowpoly, there will be some crevices between the major forms... you can put the uv seams in the hollows, along natural seams. That way when the texture LODs (mips) in the distance, the seams will be less noticeable.

samnwck

Yeah this is the high poly, so 2 UV islands will suffice then for baking even with all of the hard edges? I won't need to break it up into a bunch of small pieces or do mean just use those crevices to lay this out with a whole bunch of seams?

Eric Chadwick

I usually use as few seams as possible. Relax the islands. Then I add more cuts as needed to fix distorting areas, and relax again.

You'll get a better feeling for it with time and experience.

samnwck

Thanks a lot for the advice, I've been modeling for a while but only recently have I actually been trying to push more to get my models UV'd and textured and get them in engine so a lot of this crap is still unstable ground. Thanks for the help though!

Eric Chadwick

We have a nice summary of baking info here on the wiki, I put this together last summer. Might help you.
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Texture_Baking