Help with UV's

[NB] Mohsen

I want to make my Uv's similar to what Vlad did in his guide here, where he split his item in half or something and saved a lot more space for his textures. CAn someone help me on how to do that? I use blender by the way,

Here is the guide:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=149270397

GhostDetector

Use Mark Seam feature. Ctrl E, then unwrap.

belkun

I use Maya, but it should be fairly similar on Blender. First I delete half of the model (the part that is going to be mirrored), and unwrap just the other main half. After getting everything done, I duplicate the unwrapped half, flip it, select the UVs and move them 1 space to the right so I don't get baking errors and artifacts, merge it with the original half and then just weld the vertices.

cagdasx44

I dont even move them 1 space, I just use only the half when baking.

belkun

cagdasx44 wrote: »

I dont even move them 1 space, I just use only the half when baking.

That can get you errors on the baking stage and also ingame. It's really recommended that you move them 1 space. All Valve models with something mirrored are like that.

cagdasx44

belkun wrote: »

That can get you errors on the baking stage and also ingame. It's really recommended that you move them 1 space. All Valve models with something mirrored are like that.

I know about Valve's models but I havent faced any problems yet. But I wondered how do you move UV's 1 space??

[NB] Mohsen

Um Belkun, Could you maybe find a video to explain what you mean? I can't really understand.

hadidjah

I'm also a Maya user, but as far as I know Maya has no built-in snap like that (I have a few friends who have scripted one, because it's damned useful, but I've never made one myself). I usually just eyeball it once I have the UVs completely done and a UV snapshot exported applied to the model's material (or a full texture, whenever in the workflow feels right for you). I'm guessing Blender has something similar, but in Maya's UV window there's an "Image" dropdown in the menu with "Image Settings -> Options" buried it in, where you can set how many times you want to see the texture tiling in each direction instead of just the one image in the 0-1 space. That's pretty handy if you want some bonus visualization while you're working.

If you have the time and know-how, though, a script makes things much easier and more accurate.

Belkum's unwrapping and baking advice is spot on, but if you want to continue baking halves and ever run into errors hopefully this will help: Once you have your full mesh with mirrored UVs and all the proper normals set up, make a copy and lock your normals before you delete the halves that have overlapped UVs. This stops you from getting those giant obvious seams down the middle of mirrored models with soft normals.

Sorry for any info you already know, hopefully translating this into Blender goes smoothly for you. Good luck!:)

belkun

Here's how I do it on Maya:



To move the UVs one unit on maya you can just use polyEditUV -u 1 -v 0 ; or just use a custom script like I do (Nightshade UV Editor). Not sure how to do that on Blender or any other software, sorry ):

[NB] Mohsen

Thank you sooooo much for the diagram Belkun!!!

I really, really appreciate and thnaks to everyone else

kite212

[NB] Mohsen wrote: »

Um Belkun, Could you maybe find a video to explain what you mean? I can't really understand.

Welcome to the wonderful world of tangents and normals. This goes beyond just the uv's, you need to be considerate when modeling symmetrically as well. This is not just dota, UDK, and other engines will behave the same. Alec Moody rocked this out as it is a super common problem. ALWAYS offset mirrored UV's, you can really f:poly127:k up your tangents!

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM3B6KPoMTY"]Mirroring and reusing texture space - YouTube[/ame]