How to mirror UV's

Youngy798

Hey everyone, I have this sword model:



I want to UV map the object so that I only have to texture 1 side of it. How would I go about mirroring the UV's?

When I UV map the hand guard, I will only be mapping one of them and just duplicating it in the final model.

If I were to uv map this now, I would end up with 2 sides of sword, I want to make it so that I only have 1 side, but it applies to both faces of the sword, the same for the rest of the pieces.

peanut™

"How would I go about mirroring the UV's?"

You can and you can't, the way you planned this asset there is no edge in the middle, so you technically can't truly mirror it. But you can grossly UV and texture both sides but not as a true mirror.

Youngy798

what about the parts that do have an edge through the middle? Like the hollow cylinder. How would I go about doing this? I saw a tutorial where they moved the UV off to the side with some value but I can't remember how to do it. Both the handle and the hollow cylinder have an edge down the centre, so I should be able to mirror those parts of the UV right?

peanut™

Yes of course, but this is where you need to know what you want. You don't absolutely need to "mirror" this piece.

You could simply "unwrap" it.

peanut™

I can't really go further in here because i should be working but i believe you're using 3dsmax, it's always the same thing. Spend sometime looking at what others are doing with a similar task.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qk1AZ8U8AU8"]GAM 105 UV unwrap simple sword - YouTube[/ame]
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udSvl7X5yyA"]Unwrapping the sword - YouTube[/ame]
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvpVZNcPF8g"]Blender Sword Tutorial - Unwrapping - YouTube[/ame]

Youngy798

The thing is though, I don't want to texture both sides individually, I just wanted the textures to be the same on both sides. I guess I could just texture one side and flip the texture onto the other side in gimp.

peanut™

in this case overlap the verts, and this should be sufficient in itself.

Youngy798

Ok thanks. Wouldn't that cause issues during baking? I am going to be baking a high poly sculpt onto the low poly model, but I was going to unwrap it first.

Moosebish

To mirror UVs, I prefer to delete half of the model, unwrap that half, duplicate it, mirror over the geo, then weld them together.

There are always exceptions to the rules. But thats how I do it for all simple props.

That sword you've modeled is actually able to be mirrored, you would just have to mirror it front and back, not down the middle. I made this quick tutorial of how I would do it:

http://imgur.com/a/qLMWn

Youngy798

Thanks Ill try it out

axxic3

You could collapse the stack to preserve uvs(optional), put an edge loop down the middle, then add another uvunwrap mod, then unwrap both sides and lay them over the top of each other. If you put the edge loop in the middle, the UV clusters should match up with very little fixing. Use snaps in the unwrap window to fix aligning them on top each other. Remember that overlaying jacks up ambient occlusion passes.

AlphaMix

Moosebish wrote: »

To mirror UVs, I prefer to delete half of the model, unwrap that half, duplicate it, mirror over the geo, then weld them together.

There are always exceptions to the rules. But thats how I do it for all simple props.

Same.

Mirroring saves UV space and usually paints faster, but it can be really obvious sometimes when painting details. Might wanna reconsider. Nowadays I only mirror UV's if the mirror seam isn't very visible or if it saves me loads of UV space.