Using a pre-planned texture sheet?
polycounter lvl 9
I just got done watching a tutorial from my class and our teacher was blocking out the main shape of a house. He briefly mentioned using a pre-made texture sheet and laying the UVs onto that. This is that texture sheet/model.....
Can someone explained to me the process behind using a pre-made texture sheet maybe using this example specifically? I might just be thinking way too much into this because I always thought you'd model, unwrap, then texture. Unless you were using a tiling texture in which case it wouldn't matter. I can understand the ventilation grate in the above example, but how would you lay the UVs over that? Would you just model in a ventilation grate and put those UVs over it? Same thing with the roof tiles. Would you just unwrap the roof and lay the UVs over the roof part of the texture?
Can someone explained to me the process behind using a pre-made texture sheet maybe using this example specifically? I might just be thinking way too much into this because I always thought you'd model, unwrap, then texture. Unless you were using a tiling texture in which case it wouldn't matter. I can understand the ventilation grate in the above example, but how would you lay the UVs over that? Would you just model in a ventilation grate and put those UVs over it? Same thing with the roof tiles. Would you just unwrap the roof and lay the UVs over the roof part of the texture?
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Also both Maya and Max have an option called "preserve UVs" which eneables you to move a vert in 3D space and have the UVs adjust themselves accordingly in the opposite direction in realtime so that the texture doesn't "move" and the vert being moved effectively glides on the texture underneath.
Ok it's super hard to explain with words - just try it, it's powerful
By the way this is a very eye-opening exercise, you will learn great things from it. It's also applicable to non-normalmapped character art to a certain extent - I played with that a lot a few years ago, it gives surprisingly good results when used wisely. We even made some modeling collabs based on that idea here on PC back them - people contributing premade texture sheets for other artists to model unexpected stuff from. Cool stuff
This also makes me wonder why no one ever created a small app to model on a uv view and then shape the planar "mask" into actual 3d models. Could be extremely handy and faster to boot.
Typically I wouldn't make the atlas first. But say you had to create a set of 5 buildings with similar features. The first building is model > UV > start texture atlas. The second building is model > UV to atlas > add unique building features to atlas. And so forth...