Most efficient way to UV these blocky shapes?

Toasty Fresh

I'm modeling a Desert Eagle, have done highpolies, have more or less finished the model itself as well as UVs, but wanted to ask this question before I finalise them and go to texturing.

The pistol has these ridges on the side, very blocky. I understand I should add bevels to shapes like these but they are such a small detail on the gun that I don't think it's worth the polies.

Here is the shape I mean:


My current UVs:


When I bake, these will obviously not work correctly unless beveled or I UV them like this:


What would be the best approach to these? Should I just bite the bullet and bevel all these shapes and not care about the extra polies? Or do I UV them in the way I displayed in the above image? It seems far too cluttered and inconvenient to texture in such a fashion.

Or am I completely wrong in everything I'm saying?

Would love to hear some suggestions on this.

Obscura

Well. You should try removing those pieces from the lowpoly and just use them as baked. If they doesnt looks good as baked (but they should), then you can try your second method, where you use splits.

As just baked, they would looks similar as on this:
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=86600&highlight=desert+eagle

I recommend the same thing on that screw :P

Toasty Fresh

I've had a look at it ingame and IMO they stick out too much to just bake into the texture. It would be too obvious for an FPS. Normally I wouldn't mind on things like rails because they are further away on the gun and less noticeable, but on this gun it's quite close to the camera.

Obscura

If you are thinking about using the model in a game engine, I think if you use Handplane, you can use your current uvs.

Toasty Fresh

That's a very neat tool. Wish I had known about this sooner. Will look into it!

ahosking

In this FPS do you really need 347,000 Polys?!

leleuxart

ahosking wrote: »

In this FPS do you really need 347,000 Polys?!

I'm sure he's still doing a low poly and bake; he was just questioning a specific area.

Xenobond

Here's how I'd suggest unwrapping them.
Won't have to waste texture space padding your splits, and the majority of the distortions will be in hard to see/hidden areas.


Plus you're gonna save on verts, big time.

Toasty Fresh

Okay so I went and redid this area, got up to baking and I have seams in this area, I'm fairly sure my smoothing groups are all okay.

Here's what it looks like:


Here's my UVs for this area:


All of those seperate shells have their own smoothing group.

sargentcrunch

n/a