Unwrapping A Couch

Scizz

Any tips or techniques anyone can share about how to unwrap this Sofa?


I did a search and saw a thread that showed kind of what I should do, but unfortunately I went from high poly to low poly and I can't think of an efficient way to get rid of the bumps on the back of the couch.

The High Poly

JamesWild

I'm not sure why you'd want to unwrap the top model. If this is for a game, you want to massively reduce the poly count. Discard anything that doesn't alter the silhouette, your baked normal and AO maps should handle that.

BARDLER

9,000 triangles is a lot for a couch in a game, unless is is some weird special case. Like James said, you could easily cut down the density, which would make unwrapping it a whole lot easier. In any case if you want to unwrap it like that then look for natural seams in the couch where the fabric was stitched. Since you have fairly complicated geometry you are going to need a fair amount of UV islands.

Scizz

I should of made my post more specific. Tips for unwrapping are really great but also, tips to get rid of geometry efficiently without affecting the core silhouette are helpful too. Like, is necessary to get rid of all the diamonds on the back that make the bumps, or should I just smooth them out? deleted them?

Snader

it depends on your budget and use of the object. You can probably get away with flattening the whole shebang into some cylinders and bozes, but if you really feel you want to add more detail: focus on the silhouette. The top side of the arm and back rests are probably where you want to spend some polies.

JamesWild

Look at your model with no lighting, just flat colours. The silhouette.

Anything that is currently taking up vertices that isn't adding anything to that silhouette, needs to go. Every single vertex needs to be stored, read, stored in VRAM, read from VRAM, transformed, in some cases lit, and on and on.

Look in the thread you posted.



Their low poly is JUST silhouette. Everything else is gone.

In your case I'd be deleting most of the cases and edges and bridging them to make a low poly, but there's lots of ways of doing it.