First Person Weapon UV's

reedweinstock

so im currently working on the uv's for a fps gun (http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=137331) and i was wondering how much do i scale up the the parts seen in the foreground. The Scope and the bipod will have there own channel. I know the Action, picatinny rail, and the bolt handle should be scaled up anything else and by how much double, triple?

Thanks
Reed

Edit

Ps. are my uv's optimized for the scope or do you guys think they could be better.

EarthQuake

Generally, I like to start by UVing everything to an even texal density. Then, I select the parts that will be reasonably close to the camera, and scale those up 125% or so. From there, select the parts that you will be able to see even closer, such as iron sights if your game has an iron sights zoom function, those areas get scaled up an additional 125-135% or so depending on how close you will get.

Remember that you can scale individual uv islands without scaling up the entire mesh chunk, so for example, a group of polys that face directly at the camera should be a separate uv element that can be scaled up.

Sometimes I will scale down low visibility areas as well, like the end of a buttstock, or the front of the barrel. This depends on animations, if you can view the model in a weapon viewer, etc, though.

Its impossible to say how well your UVs look from this image however, as its just a black and white image. There is no reference to texal density, so, who knows? Try posting a 3d shot of your mesh with a grid texture applied.

Also, its important to understand that you're scaling squared, so 125x125% actually means 1.5x, 150x150% is 2x, and 200x200% is 4x the texal density. So relatively small changes can have a large impact on resolution. When you scale something 200%, you're giving 4 pixels to that area vs 1 pixel for the baseline.

Pedro Amorim

What the gentleman above said.

reedweinstock

I made an update to my uvs
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=137331

Thanks
Reed