Hiding / getting rid of UV seams

hamzaaa

Hey guys,

I am currently starting to UV my model (thread: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=107702) and I am quite unexperienced when it comes to UV unwrap. One of the biggest question mark is how do you guys go over hiding your seams or even getting rid of your seams when texturing? Also what tools do you use and do you know any good tutorials? Would help me a lot to get into theory before starting to go on

Thanks in advance!

JamesWild

-Pad your UVs.
-Doing all your texturing using a system like polypaint is hugely advantageous; if the last step in your pipeline is to bake, the baker (as long as the model is set up properly for this) will do a good as possible job of the seams.
-Put them in rarely seen, low detail areas when possible so the seam is even less obvious.

EDIT: I recently did a bit of a study on this specifically. This is a 1024x1024 texture. The texture was done in a single bake, touched up here and there, and then padded with my GIMP filter.



See the seams?

How about now?

hamzaaa

Thanks for your answer james. I am not sure if I understood you correctly, sorry I am a noob
I am not talking about normal map seams. I don't have any problems there but diffuse texture seams. In my example I got most of my parts of the model mirrored which leaves some obvious seams down the middle. The normal map doesn't show any seams but the seams will show up later when the diffuse is applied won't they?
Have a look at the following picture, I marked the seams in red which I think are problematic.



If I understood it right, seams won't be a problem for baked textures, but the diffuse I will do in photoshop so seams may occur. How will I hide these for the diffuse texture?

JamesWild

I've not done a whole lot of direct-to-UV texture art (I don't think I've ever done any 'art', lol) but at least from what I've seen of other people doing it, LOTS of careful trial and error.

You might want to move that front-side seam forwards to the proper edge and eliminate the blue edge here, which should unwrap like this:



Putting the edges where a seam might be expected and so on can reduce the amount of visible seams you have to fix.