Unwrapping a mostly symmetrical low poly character

Delzhand

What's the best use of texture space for a low poly character who's outfit is entirely symmetrical except for a belt that's at an angle? The belt doesn't have it's own geometry (which would trivialize the problem). Usually in the past I'd paint half the texture in photoshop, mirror it, then draw the odd object over the top of it, but that doesn't take advantage of any sort of uv mirroring, so I wanted to see if there are other options.

Swizzle

It'd help to see some screenshots of said model, preferably with wireframes turned on.

Delzhand

I guess this could be generalized for any asymmetrical details on an otherwise symmetrical model. One idea I had was to have two textures and apply the belt as a decal with a shader in the game engine, but then we're talking about a second texture with the same UVs and a lot of empty space.

Eric Chadwick

Mirror most of the model, then UV this area as its own unique shell.

Mark Dygert

Yep, make unique what you need and mirror everything else.

Delzhand

Cool. It's actually a belt with a shoulder strap, but I've got some pixel-bleed where the arms connect, so maybe isolating the torso from the legs and arms is a good idea anyway.

Mark Dygert

You might want to think about adding cuts for the belt/straps as geometry so you can unwrap it separately to a flat, straight strip.

Jason Young

If you're not adding any sort of detail or shading, you could also mirror it front to back rather than side to side in this case.

Adding cuts as Mark said, will also work well if you can use additional tris. You can also mirror everything except the torso. What's the tri count and texture budget?

Olli.

I spy with my little eye, an n-gon on your elbow

that arm is never going to animate properly if you dont fix that.

edit: upon further inspection you seem to have a lot of ngons.. mostly in thigh/knee/elbow areas

Mark Dygert

I agree about the joints.
http://wiki.polycount.com/LimbTopology


Also if it's going to be a lot of large flat colors, you can condense a lot of polys down to just a few pixels of solid color, provided the scale relation between the UV shells isn't important for something else. That could free up enough space for a few unique bits.


I would cut the belt in so you can straighten the UV's and you aren't trying to deal with diagonal aliased lines.

Delzhand

There aren't any n-gons, it looks like they were just 1 pixel lines that blinked out of existence when I scaled it down in photoshop. That's a fantastic link, though - thanks! The tris look just like that first example, but it's good to know how to weight them when I get to that.

Right now it's 450 tris (including head and hair with are both separate objects) - I don't have a budget necessarily, except that the body is going to be used for a lot of different characters, so I need a single UV layout that I can re-use.

Which, now that I think about it, means maybe I shouldn't mirror at all, because if any one character has asymmetrical parts, they'd require a separate geometry.

Actually, it looks like most of the character designs are pretty symmetrical with the exception of the hair (which is fine), and some belts/armor pieces, which could easily be separate geometry. The scabbard is going to be separate anyway. The camera's going to be pulled out so far that any momentary clipping won't be too noticeable.

Thanks for the advice, guys!

Mark Dygert

Yea you could add them as hovering geomety too, just make sure that the verts line up so you can copy/paste skin weights easily and avoid clipping.