UV layout for next gen. Chars. Does the how matter less?
polycounter lvl 17
I've heard a lot of different takes on UV layout, particularly older gen stuff where everything was hand painted. For example, keeping everything square, even if it means a certain amount of stretching, and keeping everything right side up to make painting easier.
Now I find myself using AO baking much more frequently as a starting point, meaning the main source of my detail is coming from my High poly. It seems to me that the old best practices are somewhat less relevant using this method.
Are there any reason to keep layouts organized and stitched like we used to do them?
Now I find myself using AO baking much more frequently as a starting point, meaning the main source of my detail is coming from my High poly. It seems to me that the old best practices are somewhat less relevant using this method.
Are there any reason to keep layouts organized and stitched like we used to do them?
Replies
I never really agreed with the square everything off method, I do believe in keeping things organized and optimized. At times the optimization doesn't really make for a organized layout. So I'll sometimes rearrange the pieces on easy to work with sheets and then transfer those to the final layout. When I work like that, I hardly rotate the pieces and I almost never scale them. If I do scale them I go down not up.
It's important when transferring layouts to turn off AA and GSS otherwise they can make a blurry mess.
Try drawing a vertical seam on pants when it's a square... nasty zig zag stretchy crap. UV to reduce stretching and seams and you'll do fine. Pack them as close together as you can. Keep the texture resolution consistent for the most part.
Same goes for previous and current gen for characters at least.
1. Minimal obvious seams
2. Ease of painting / texturing
Keeping layouts organised leads to easy access to point 2, but obviously since you tend to start from AO or Crazybump bakes, it becomes slightly less necessary. I think it's still a good idea to try to keep obvious seams down to a minimum, though, if only because it takes time to paint / texture over an obvious seam...
Squaring stuff off is awesome if you have any parts which need straight lines (eg. cylinders, hard surface edges etc), since it just makes it so much easier to texture. If it's an organic shape you shouldn't worry so much.
Sounds like the tech. If your normal-maps are being interpolated correctly with your model's tangent space, you should never see any seams (from a pure highpoly bake) no matter what angle your UVs are at. Obviously if you have sharp angles in your lowpoly then seams maybe become noticeable, but having a mesh UV'd at 45 degrees or perfectly straight should make no difference at all.
Like you're saying MoP, it never hurts to have it layed out in a friendly manner, but I more often find myself erring on the side of higher pixel density since I less often find myself painting directly on the texture, now that PS CS4 and Bodypaint help break out of the standard texture painting mold.
Thanks for the tips guys!