Mirror Uv's

JeremiahJensen

Hey guys, I've been looking through a few threads and there is something im having trouble grasping, I've read that its a good idea to mirror uv's to maximize texture resolution but im not sure how i would go about doing so. I could overlap the uv islands but that would cause my normal map to give me errors ( i think ). Then once the uvs are mirrored how does the engine know its a mirrored texture, Is there something in the shader settings?

i understand its probably something very simple and obvious but any advice would be helpful! thanks

Eric Chadwick

Some info here
http://wiki.polycount.com/NormalMap#Mirroring

RezNik

Yeah the wiki will help a lot... thats where I started.
You dont want ovelaping UVs when doing normal maps.
Make sure to offset them by 1 in the uv editor.

How to offset a UV island by 1 in 3ds Max:
-select uv island
-click square button in the bottom left to make Uv coordinates relative type "1" in the "U" box press enter.
-You've just offset the island by 1.... yay

Jabberwockxeno

I have a similar question: Is it possible to literally mirror the UV's for one side of the model and make the corresponding UV's on the opposite side of the models organize themselves to be symmetrical to the selected side?

Eric Chadwick

Well, you can Copy/Paste a selection of UV faces. But that doesn't work all the time, because the triangle creation order has to be identical between the two shells. It's usually best to just copy the mesh itself and mirror that, which automatically carries the UVs along for the ride.

TexTools has a symmetry tool, but that only works within the same shell.
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIid4hfEIdI"]TexTools uv symmetry preview - YouTube[/ame]

JeremiahJensen

thanks heaps guys ! ill read through it all now and try apply it!