Practice - Baseball bat with a side of nails.

benj666

Hi

So was sat in my girlfriends local university library, and an old baseball bat was on display for some baseball thing.

So i decided to to make a little project out of it.


But i've hit a snag. Although modelling it was fairly straight forward, unwrapping it is giving me troubles.

Obivously any crits on the bat itself is always welcome as I want to it to improve.



The bat split into 3 pieces.


This is how I unwrapped it first time and even started to texture and seemed to be going well but then saw problems later on such as matching wood with the other pieces and seam issues.

So I decided to unwrap all as one, but then I couldnt export the texture correctly as having a custom texture such as 1024 x 512 made it stretched even in photoshop. I tried the several times trying different settings.

Can anyone give me any advice how to unwrap this the correct way?

Thank you in advance

Ben.

jordan.kocon

Hey benj666: Here is a lazy response because I'm at work and cant type too much, but if you havent seen it, you should check out this thread http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=89483&highlight=baseball

benj666

Hi jordan.kocon, thanks for the link, yeah i already seen this before i started, this was also a big inspiration for my project, wont come out as good but practice is practice.

Looking at his bat, i cant figure out how he unwrapped it, seems to be in 2 pieces. But other then that i cant figure it out. He is also using blender, and im using maya (people hate it i know )

Can you give any insight on how he unwrapped his bat?

Thanks

toxic_h2o

What!? who hates Maya!? Ill take a bat to them. haha

Seams will always be an issue (unless you know how to texture use 3dcoat), I think your best bet is to find places for them to hide naturally, example being where the grip and the wood/metal meet but sometimes that cant be helped.

Its always a give or a take with uvs, eventually you start to figure whats the best way to go about creating them for what you need. If you were going for less seams I think a rectangle texture would be your best bet.

Since you said you had a few problems trying to get the uvs to export right, I made a quick tutorial for How I go about creating a rectangle texture in Maya.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/54222387/modeling/misc/rectangle_maya_uv_export.jpg

Hope it helps.

Benton

If you have photoshop cs4 extended, cs5 extended or cs6 you can use it to paint onto your mesh.

Lining up your texture with UV's and seams is a challenge but not impossible.

jordan.kocon

Looking at his, and hopefully I'm not explaining it wrong, but it looks like he did a few things. First is his barbed wire. The barbed wire (or in your case the nails) is a separate piece of floating geometry, and therefore gets its own UV shell. So in your case I would make 2 or 3 nails, and unwrap them, then duplicate the same 2-3 nails all over the bat. This way you only need to texture a couple of nails, and save UV space. Secondly as you can see on his bat, the tip of the bat is bloodier than the base. So you could texture one nail fully covered in blood and duplicate it around the bottom, texture the second nail with half covered in blood and duplicate it around the middle, and create a fairly clean nail and duplicate around the bottom.

Secondly on your UV sheet you could split off the cylinder that will create the grip, the cylinder that will be the wood, and the top/bottom cap.

Hope this makes sense, gimme a few minutes and Ill upload a picture of how I would unwrap it.

Ghostscape

unwrap the bat as one long cylinder and stretch it out into a perfect grid. Then, cut it into chunks, spread them out as needed without rotating them, and scale them together only. This will ensure that you have easy to paint seams.

Your current curvy relaxed unwrap is going to have slightly less distortion than doing it the other way, but you're never going to get the seams to line up right.

Alternatively you could try unwrapping it as one piece and texturing on a higher rez sheet, then baking that down to a lower res cut up sheet, but since you've got those curves in the low rez UVs you're going to run into issues at the sub-pixel level because the pixel flow will change slightly, although that's not a problem with enough texture resolution.

jordan.kocon

Alright this a pretty crappy modeling job, but this is how I would approach unwrapping it. The first image simply shows how the unwrap is broken down, and the second image shows how I would pack the UV's. There is still some space left on the UV's incase you wanted to add something, but depending on the proportions of your bat, it may fill up your space anyways. Let me know if this makes sense.

benj666

Wow guys thank you for all of your help, i Really appreciate it!!! Thank you all so much!!

Ok I tried first with a stretched UV set using toxic_h2o's tutorial. 2048 x 1024.

What does everyone think?


Here is the model.

benj666

the checkered map is soo stretched. Thats just using cylindrical map. I cant seem to get it to not be stretched.

jordan.kocon

I dont often use 2:1 texure sheets, I always get confused with them. Personally I think you should stick to a square texture sheet for this. If you do that and post a picture of your UV's I can help you out if you have more stretching

benj666

HI thanks! Here is the UVs Squared.

jordan.kocon

And with the UV's layed out like this is there still stretching? Post a picture of your model with a checker board texture. If there is stretching, just try pulling the verts left and right, down worry about packing the UV's right now. Get all your pieces unwrapped without and stretching, and then just scale your UV's uniformly to fit into the UV space.

benj666

I tried that too had it all laid outside of the box. Everything looked good interms of checkered map. Then scaled it down and it ended up like that.

benj666

Just lemme know what you think jordan. thanks in advance