How to make good lowpoly UV?

Onmioji

All the software I've seen, and whose tutorials watched, do not give UV quality i want. I look at Blizzard UVs, like this

and then to that i recive



Where must i search?

ZacD

Basically you need to understand why Blizzard UVs look like that. They are very straight and aligned to a grid because the texture resolutions are very low and they wanted the pixels to be aligned with the seams. The seams of both of the hands are done very similar to the 2nd image you posted, the only difference between those two hands is one set of UVs is relaxed (the second one) and the Blizzard hand is mostly lined up by hand.

Onmioji

ZacD, thank you for answer.

I took the model and made software UV unwrap. I dont like it.



So i must transform UV manually?

Deadly Nightshade

There is no easy one-button trick to do this.
You get that kind of UV's because the algorithm that unwraps the UV's aims to reduce stretching and pinching, meaning that it tries to create a uniform texel density across the entire model.

This is usually not what you want when working with low poly and/or hand-painted objects. Instead you should do planar and cubic (6 planar sides) unwraps and then alter (cut/sew) the UVs manually. Camera based projections are also very good, as you can select a bunch of faces, align your camera to face them and then do a camera based projection to get the UVs.

May I ask what software you use? The UV-tools in Maya and Max sucks big time. If you are a Maya user you should download my UV Editor (see signature below) - and if you are a Max user then I strongly recommend TexTools by renderhjs: http://www.renderhjs.net/textools/

ZacD

Yeah from that point you need to do a bit of manual working with the UVs. Follow Nightshade's advice, and also try snapping to grid in the UV editor and setting up the grid to match each pixel on the texture. Roughly rotate big chunks of the UV and use tools to straighten the UVs if you got them.

JedTheKrampus

@Nightshade: That's Blender's UV editor, and it's pretty damn capable.

arcitecht

Yeah the Blender UV editor is robust and easy to work with.

@Onmioji, when you press 'w' in the Uv editor, you'll get a pop up menu with options to 'Align' the UVs on either the X or Y axis. When you select a row of verts you'll be able to use those commands to line them up perfectly straight vertically or horizontally, which would make this kind of workflow much easier. You'll still have to fiddle a bit to reposition everything to fit the texture, but that will get you halfway there.

JedTheKrampus

You can also use the ordinary transformations that you would use in the 3D viewport. So to align some verts along the U or V axis, just type 'sx0<Enter>' or 'sy0<Enter>'. Then you can continue to move the verts wherever you want them. You can also use proportional editing, sculpting tools, and all the rest of your ordinary transformations in the UV editor.

Something else that might help you unwrap these in a more readable way is to unwrap each side of the hand individually. Line up the camera in an orthographic 3d view so that you're looking at one side of the hand. If you need to you can hide part of the mesh if it gets in the way; you may want to just select the hand, invert the selection, then hide the selection. So anyways, get your viewport lined up and select all the polygons on one side of the hand, then Unwrap->Project from View, select the island in the UV editor with the L key, and move it into position and optionally pin it if you wish.

Onmioji

About 14 mins. Bad space optimisation, but closer to goal )

D4V1DC

Looks better.

Sort of on topic but when you create prefect squares like how ^ he is doing isn't there stretching? Can the above prefect squares unwrap also eliminate stretching or will there always be stretching when creating uv's like that?

I never did that so i was wondering besides compacting the uv's nicely what are the benefits to creating uv like that?

Always wanted to know because i like the look but when i tried i had stretching so how are people getting away with that?

Thanks for any help.

cptSwing

There's always a trade-off between stretching and clean uv's, how much you're willing to put up with is likely dependant on your mesh. Straightened UV's have several advantages besides packing better - you'll have no aliasing along jagged uv edges, painting stuff in PS can be easier and cleaner.. also, it soothes my OCD ;-)

Michael Knubben

I can confirm, I also straighten my UV's to soothe cptSwing's OCD.

cptSwing

*zen*